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I have been busy this summer taking classes to keep my teaching certification current.  On the first day of my Science and Health Curriculum and Instruction course, the teacher asked us to share our memories from our grade school science class.   What came to mind almost immediately was my 6^th grade Science Fair project.

            It was a fiasco.   

            For many parents, the words, “Science Fair” is their worst nightmare, as they brainstorm (supposedly with their child!) about what experiment to conduct at home.  Of course the project should involve the scientific method: ask a question, do the research, construct a hypothesis, conduct an experiment, analyze the data and draw conclusions, and finally, communicate the results at an evening gathering of all the other parents and their children. 

            Other parents can’t wait to dive into some experiment like which laundry detergent works best?  Do plants grow better with music playing?  How do you make a light bulb glow using a lemon?  Or, can Coke really remove rust off of metal and dissolve a tooth?  They tinker with their experiment and spend hours putting together an incredible tri-fold cardboard exhibit with their child’s name proudly displayed.  Then they wait patiently to see what grade “their child” earned!

            Well, that wasn’t the case at my home during the winter of 1974.  I was the youngest of three children and my parents had an active social and winter sports life. 

I was on my own.  To be fair, I probably never even told them I had a project to do.

            So, on my own, I came up with tracking the night sky through a homemade “Star Gazer”.  Picture, if you will, a small wooden handle made from two narrow pieces of wood screwed together at a 90º angle.  At their juncture was installed a piece of plexi-glass about 8 inches square.  I was supposed to go out each night, point my Star Gazer at a particular spot in the sky and trace the stars with a crayon onto the plexi-glass.  And then, I was supposed to record the movement of the stars as the weeks progressed. 

            Okay, so it sounded like a great idea, except that I never actually went outside every night to track the stars’ movement. 

Before I knew it, Science Fair Day arrived and I had nothing!  I took my dorky handmade Star Gazer to school along with some trumped up information about the stars and how they moved across the sky over the last few weeks.  I dreaded communicating my results with the rest of the class.

            We went in alphabetical order that day to share the results of our experiments.  I don’t recall the first two or three presentations.  Perhaps they weren’t that good.  Or, more likely they were trumped by my best friend who happened to be right before me in the alphabet.  Try to picture this in your mind -- little blonde-headed me sitting with my stupid pieces-of-wood-and-plexi-glass-with-crayon-circles-drawn-on Star Gazer.  Now imagine the cutest 12-year-old girl with a brown curly pixie haircut who stepped up to the front of the room with a real, oozing cow’s heart!  Not only that, but she dissected the thing right there in class with instruments that looked like they came right out of Marcus Welby, M.D. 

One of her older brothers was a medical student at the time, so her family talked about how the body worked over dinner most nights.  Plus, her parents demanded academic excellence and kept close tabs on homework, school projects, etc making her plan way ahead.  Nothing was allowed to be done last minute.  They also made sure she did them – independently!

            I was mortified.  Not with her, but with my shortcomings.  I was thrilled to see the cow’s heart and how she deftly sliced through the tissue and opened each chamber as she took us on a tour of the heart, but I knew that my lack of effort was now paying me back big time.  I couldn’t go back and redo the experiment but I sure could go forward and try harder in the future.

            Did something like this ever happen to you? 

Has it happened to one of your own children?  How did you handle it? 

As a teacher, I can’t tell you how important it is for you as a parent to be involved in your child’s schoolwork.  I will also caution you to make sure that the bulk of the work is the child’s.

Some lessons need to be learned the hard way. 

Margaret Andersen is the mother of three teenagers and is a middle school teacher somewhere in the Midwest.  She is a regular ShareWIK.com columnist. For more Margaret Anderson articles, click here. 

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