I assigned Oscar a science project. It is his first multi-step, multi-week assignment ever. He has three weeks to make a poster and present a report. He picked the topic "Electrical Transformers." (His idea. I told him he had to do something about electric circuits, since that's the unit study we've been doing for the last few weeks.)
I don't have much experience to go on with this except the projects I got assigned in elementary school. So I told Mark, "You pretend to be the parent and I'll pretend to be the teacher, okay? I assign the project, he takes it 'home' and you help him with it. Or at least nag him about working on it from time to time."
I'm sitting at the computer listening to them in the next room. Mark is trying to help him come up with an outline, which was my assignment to him for the day. They are talking about how telegraphs work. Telegraphs were not on the lesson plan.
"Hon?" called Mark from the other room.
"Yeah?"
"How goal-directed are you with this report thing? I mean, do we have to, you know, complete the assignment you gave him? Or is it okay if we just, you know, learn things?"
Negotiations ensued. Would you like to know how it turned out?
Some of Mark's old speaker parts from the attic are on the schoolroom table, hooked up to the Snap Circuits toy. All the kids are standing around watching the AA batteries in the Snap Circuits make the middle of Mark's speaker go up and down. "You just have to trust me on this," Mark is saying, "but when I push this I can only turn it on and off about once a second. If I could push this a thousand times a second, you'd hear it hum."
"But what's it for?"
"You can play music on it!" Pause. "You just have to trust me." Pause. "No, no. We're done pushing the buttons, Mary Jane."
They are not working on the outline.
"Now we're going to make a graph of the voltage. Um, has Mama talked to you about negative numbers?"
Hmph. My third grade teacher would never have stood for this.
"Uh, Dad? Is this like a transformer?"
"No, not really. Pay attention…"
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