If you know me you know I am one crafty motherfucker. Not an artist but artistic. So various artsy/craftsy school projects my kids have to do really appeal to me.
Want to send an electric current through a potato? Ask Dad
Want to cut and paste and make things pretty? Ask Mom
Sure I can shock a potato too but why when the Hubs is around......
Anyway.....2nd grader Monkey in the Middle (MM) had to make a poster this weekend. Each week a kid in his class gets to make a poster called "All About Me". It gets hung up in the class and the kid tells the class all about themselves.
Sounds pretty easy right? Sure whatever. The hard part is - How much help do I offer the kid? I want him to complete the project correctly. I want it to be legible, informative, and plain ole good. But I don't want to do it myself, nor do I want it to look like as though I did. I want it to be fun but also a teaching moment. This parenting shit ain't easy.
I have a not so fond memory of making a family tree in 4th or 5th grade. I wanted to do it one way, my mother wanted it to be done another way. My idea was an actual colorful tree with hand drawn doodles of my ancestors (I mentioned I'm not an artist right?) and sure a few names and dates. Eye roll, whatever. My mother thought it should be more like a flow chart, no color or fun and neat as a pin. Now to give her a little credit I do not remember the rubic of this project so maybe what she wanted me to do was also what the teacher wanted. All I remember is using a ruler to make perfect rectangles and using my neatest writing. Of course my writing was horrible so I had to do much of it over again and I didn't understand why I needed the ruler when I could free hand a freakin' rectangle. I mean it is not a square with 4 equal sides. So long story short, I was reduced to tears by the end of this project. But I was so proud of how it turned out it is still up in my attic today. And as a parent now I realize that my mother was teaching me how to do things the right way and all by myself.
All by myself was a lesson we both had to learn together a few years earlier. I was in Second grade. I needed to make a poster about school safety, or winter safety. I cannot remember, I only remember making a little sign that said "No Snowball throwing" Also, it was a contest.
My mother like me is very artistic but she is also an artist. Coloring with her was always amazing. She doesn't just color a dress red she colors it plaid. Her Fashion Plates designs could put Dolce and Gabbana to shame. I was a major wanna be and I still am.
So back to Second Grade. I had a great idea for the poster and wanted to execute it with a little help from my mom. However what happened was she pretty much took over. We had a blast making the poster and when it was done it was amazing. There was a hand drawn school. A cute girl in winter gear. The was a plant in a window for gosh sakes. (This just hit me, why was there a plant in winter? Maybe it was fake?) But there was no way in hell I had made that thing myself. Even so I took it to school and low and behold my poster won first place. Of course it did, next to stick figures and coloring outside the lines this poster was like a God Damn Monet. Was I happy to win? Not really. Couldn't these teachers tell I didn't make that poster myself? I mean my art teacher had seen my other work did she think I woke up one morning and got hit in the head with the Van Gogh stick? It really wasn't fair to the kids who did all the work themselves. Lesson learned by child and parent
So 20ish years later I'm cranking out my own little artists. Back to MM and his poster. Thank goodness for the computer. We used it to find family photographs of him doing all the things he likes, swimming, climbing trees, playing guitar. We found and printed pictures of his favorite food and book and movie etc. He was the idea man, I found examples and he picked the best ones. And I typed up all the captions. Yes- typed. MM has dyslexia so his hand writing is not only atrocious it would be hell on us both for him to sit and write all those captions. I made the executive dission to type them. I also made the executive decision to type them myself because even though his typing skills are superior to his handwriting I still didn't have all day. I have 3 kids and shit to do yo. MM has plenty of years to type stuff for school.
Next comes the cutting up of said pictures and captions. For the most part MM did all this himself. Yes I had to remind him to slow down a little with the scissors . His favorite food is a double cheeseburger and the picture looked like a shark took a bite when MM was done with the scissors but fine. I used my paper cutter to cut some of the captions. I said it was to speed things up but really it was because the thought of every piece of paper glued to the page being uneven and wonky gives me shivers (see mom I get what you were doing with the ruler all those years ago) And, I will admit it, I am very bad at cutting things free hand as perfectly straight as I think they should be. I rely on my paper cutter a lot. (Dear Fiskars, I could do ads for you, call me)
Everything was printed, typed and cut out. All that was left to do is glue. For the most part MM did all the gluing himself. However I cannot seem to communicate to him the importance of putting glue on the edges of paper not just the middle. I could have made him go back and add more glue but I was running out of patience and Little Man was on his 3rd cartoon so after MM leaves the room, I go over the edges myself. Team Work.
As a parent I have learned that age is important when gauging how much assistance to give a kid. My Preschooler brings home art all the time. He made an umbrella for the letter U. I know the only thing he did was rub a little blue crayon on that thing. The teacher did most of it. He is three and could care less about crayons or umbrellas. He wants to drive race cars and pee on trees.
My 5th grader must do all work himself. Recently he had to make a one man band type instrument. He asked me to buy him a bag of dried beans but that was it. He made it all by himself. Let me tell you, he did what he was supposed to do but man was that thing ugly. Kid would it kill you to paint it or add some stickers or something? The instrument was very creative but so utilitarian and my mind needs shiny and pretty.
I am a coach for a creative thinking competition called Odyssey of the Mind. The main rule of OM is adult hands off, kids must do everything themselves. Boy oh Boy is it harder then you would think. Sometimes the prefect idea or solution seems so obvious to me but the team of kids must figure it out themselves. Ugggg mind racking. Frequently I have to walk away as not to speak up and break the outside assistance rule. An adult my show the child how to do something but what the adult does cannot be a part of the competition. For example you can show a kid how to sew a button but you cannot sew it onto their costume. Or you can show a kid how to use a hand saw but you cannot saw a prop in their play. OM has taught me so much about my own kids. They have amazing minds and ideas and given a chance and a little guidance they really can Do It Themselves. Just hurry up though would ya, I got shit to do.
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