AN A-PLUS PAIN
School projects still fill Kate with dread
Who invented school projects? Was it the same person who came up with cover-sealing exercise books and lengthy prizegivings? These are the bugbears of every parent with a schoolaged child.
When we moved recently, the bulk of what went into the rubbish bin were the school projects. Years and years of arts, crafts, glue, glitter, stickers, magazine cut-outs – most of which are done painstakingly at the kitchen table, involving the whole household. They usually also involve full-scale meltdowns when the border or font isn’t right or the glue doesn’t stick.
They also cost too much. All that A3 card or poster board, plus all those bits and pieces you’re supposed to have lying around home – heads-up, most of us don’t have ice-block sticks, glitter and coloured wool lying around – costs a small fortune.
As any parent knows, a trip to the stationery shop to buy “stuff I desperately need for my project or I’ll be in so much trouble”, turns out to also include pens they “urgently” need, a back-up glue stick, erasers and more pencils. Once you have all the items, they spread all over the house like a virus, ensuring no surface can be used for anything else for the duration of the project’s life. Then the project develops a mind of its own and becomes an extra member of the family that needs tiptoeing around, stressing about and contributing to. Any family member slightly in the vicinity of a school project gets drawn into it, like an evil vortex you can’t escape.
Do schools realise when they assess projects that they are marking an entire family? That homemade volcano or sandwich board of geographical locations is a reflection of an entire clan’s efforts? Even if they didn’t physically get involved, they have been emotionally scarred by it.
No-one is happier to see the back of the school project than the family themselves. But even that is a task, delicately transporting it to school, navigating it through rain, roads, gates and into classrooms without damaging it or without bits falling off – it’s almost like carrying a newborn.
We’re always so happy to see the back of it, but that’s short-lived. Before long, there’s an invitation to the classroom or a parent-teacher interview where you’re asked to view said project again – like you’ve never seen it. You want to scream, “Not this fricken thing again!” But you politely nod as you do through four-hour prizegivings and say, “Amazing”.
The project is on the classroom wall for all of about half a term. Then, to the abject horror of all family members still getting glitter out of their carpet, it’s sent back home. It has now become so precious and labour-intensive that no-one has the heart to throw it out. Until you move house. That is the time when ruthlessness rules and those stress-heavy school projects go straight into the bin.