<p>Agree dogwood. My DIL is teaching middle school at a private day school. Even though most if not all of her students could easily afford materials, etc for projects, she decided that all projects done by her classes would be done as "class projects" in class. But she often is buying the materials out of her own pocket. As newlyweds, and just beginning to start their "financial" life together, my son is not too happy about subsidizing her classroom.</p>
<p>Dogwood:</p>
<p>I agree with you - many teachers invest considerable extra time and their own money in classroom materials and they're to be commended (and it would be nice if they could be reimbursed). I don't lump them all together. On the other hand, there's a fair share of teachers who do require unreasonable resources and time of their students and parents as can be attested to by all of the responses on this thread.</p>
<p>I am just catching up on this thread and</p>
<ol>
<li><p>I don't think I've ever seen a subject on cc with such unanimity. I know that one poster spoke positively of the projects and more power to her. But the consensus is amazing.</p></li>
<li><p>csshsm wins in all divisions, imho. Most stupefying list of projects ever (post #57) and then the ultimate payoff in the group self-rating issue (#83). Lose-lose indeed.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>2a. The genealogy ones, though, garland and GFG and others, are also beyond the beyond. Now the kid has to have a family that is nicely balanced so both sides of the tree fit the teacher's preconception?!!?! 40 lashes.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Like many others, our mantra through many years was "when you get to college you won't have any more of these artsy-*artsy projects." Or busy work. Group projects maybe.</p></li>
<li><p>Our entry in the busy-work category and the only time I ever did DS' homework largely for him. Studying population density in a late middle school class; assignment was to replicate the map on page xx of the text which color coded population densities throughout the U.S. This map had about 9 colors on it, coding population density in amoeba-like shapes down to sizes about 1/16" by 1/3". Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of little shapes to be drawn and colored. After he'd spent about an hour on it and was about 1/4 done, I stayed up until midnight coloring. Coloring! This task involved nothing but copying a map from a text book.</p></li>
<li><p>This thread has hit a nerve! I nominate it for "sticky" status so that anyone suffering through a project - and let's face it, someone is right now as we speak - can have a permanent place to vent.</p></li>
<li><p>That, or Sinners Alley. They stomp on projects over there.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Been away for a bit and just now reading this thread. You've all done my griping for me. Someone's comment about making a video brought back some painful memories - making togas and props, writing a script, trying to edit! Worst of all, cancelling a get-together with friends because it wasn't done. It was an "extra" assignment only for those in the class who wore the "gifted and talented" label!</p>
<p>I really do hate projects, especially time wasting ones. However....</p>
<p>Projects were a family activity when our kids were young, and we <strong><em>enjoyed them</em></strong>! We're an artistic family, and H is an engineer, so projects at our house can go overboard. Brainstorming around the dinner table, scavenging in the recycle bin, etc. For instance, S built a castle in 2nd grade. We washed pebbles that he built a wall with (with clay). We burned matchsticks for him to build the walls with. We had stacks of library books, and we all knew the proper names of every part of a castle. It was really fun. I'm sure the teacher knew it was a family project. The construction paper and Dixie cup castles got equally good grades. The point was to learn all about castles, and we all did.</p>
<p>However, I still step in if I don't see any educational redeeming value. For one reason, I don't like seeing my kids' academics suffer because they're too busy gluing feathers onto the wings of their Icarus wings or whatever. D - who is a HS senior - had to make a poster this week with pictures of daily activities - getting up, brushing teeth, catching school bus.... No words on the poster. Then she was to explain it to the class using her Spanish vocabulary. The poster was absolutely not necessary. She could have spoken quite well without the visual. (Or one poster for the whole class to use, since they all have the same vocab!) Fortunately, my two grade school nieces thought it was a lot of fun to look through magazines for pictures. I don't think my D's education suffered because she didn't do it herself.</p>
<p>We have already added this to our list of questions when investigating schools:
1. If I am a student at this school, will I have to
(a) dress in a costume, (b) design a t-shirt, (c) make a poster, (d) build a board game, (e) make a salt and flour map?</p>
<p>If the answer is yes to any of them, we look elsewhere.</p>
<p>binx - I just read your comments and I can't stop smiling. Somehow my own children never did a salt and flour map (never had one assigned), but boy, was I the queen of the salt and flour maps in elementary school! Thanks for taking me down memory lane. Now where is my box of food coloring anyway?</p>
<p>Was it me who spoke up for projects? Believe me we've had far more yucky ones that good ones! But the good ones showed me that projects can be good learning experiences.</p>
<p>No, mathmom, you are off the hook. It was kjofkw. And s/he spoke up quite well. But it is amazing to me that there was only one (or very very few if I missed any) in the Yea camp. The Nay camp is full to overflowing.</p>
<p>UCLA Dad's post....</p>
<p>I'm convinced of this. A synopsis:</p>
<ul>
<li>Teachers have no idea how long it takes to complete the project</li>
</ul>
<hr>
<p>Sooo true... my kids have a teacher who assigns projects routinely and insults everyone's intelligence by always including the words: "you can knock this out in no time." I'd like to knock her out with a rolled up project.</p>
<ul>
<li>Teachers have no idea that parents are making night-time runs to the craft store for poster board, etc. and that parents and kids have to figure out how to get together after-hours</li>
</ul>
<p>They also have no idea that so many of their "projects" are just silly busy work that makes them look like morons for assigning them.</p>
<ul>
<li>Teachers know that the group project will 'pump-up' the grades of the low-performers allowing the teacher an out to not fail the kids who should be failed</li>
</ul>
<p>Then why don't they assign those projects as "extra credit" so those low performers can plump up their grades and the other kids can be left alone!</p>
<ul>
<li>There must have been a decade or two where teachers were taught to teach the 'touchy-feely artsy way' since it's so pervasive</li>
</ul>
<p>No surprise since the whole ed process has been so dumbed down. </p>
<ul>
<li>Teachers who have had their own kids have to do group artsy projects are less inclined to require the projects in their own classes because they've seen the light</li>
</ul>
<p>Sooooo true.... that is why the best high/middle school teachers are ones who have or have had kids in high school themselves. </p>
<ul>
<li>Grading of group projects are easier for the teacher</li>
</ul>
<p>Of course!!! </p>
<ul>
<li>Too many teachers can't distinguish between the project the kids did versus the parents and will reward those who had their parents do the project</li>
</ul>
<p>Frankly, I don't think that most teachers who assign projects mind that the parents "help out" to make a better looking project for them to display in their classrooms. </p>
<p>Another pet peeve about projects (group or individual) -- teachers who assign them while also assigning daily homework!!! These teachers claim that kids have 2 -3 weeks to do the project but the kids are being assigned other homework from the same teachers every night!!! (Again, these are almost always teachers who have never had teens in their homes)</p>
<p>At my nephews' K-8 school, the kids are required to do a science fair project EVERY year. That principal should be hung from the nearest tree. (She's a 50+ year old womaen, never married, no kids -- what a surprise!)</p>
<p>Garland: "Well, we only have a few generations of info on that side, and, the ones we had had very small families (grandfather was an only child, and he himself had no cousins), so D had very few names. If she could've used my Mom's family, she could've gone back 13 generations, but the teacher nixed it. So she make a very nice poster of a tree, with all that she had done very artistically (she's the one of my two who does have drawing talent.)<br>
but the teacher gave her a low grade. His comment:'' You did your part, but your family didn't."</p>
<p>Not only does this story illustrate how stupid the rubrics were for this assignment (and how stupid the teacher was), I can't help but laugh a bit as I think.... was she also suggesting that your husband's family hadn't "done their part" by producing enuf descendants? I imagine that she was suggesting that your family hadn't helped enuf to identify everyone, but it also suggests that she was criticizing your h's family's fertility! </p>
<p>When you hear stories like this one (and others posted here), I am always amazed how teachers get sooo upset when parents complain about how dumb some of them are.</p>
<p>Ah, the family tree project.</p>
<p>I had a social studies teacher in middle school who assigned us this, forcing us to go back three generations on each side, and include all brothers/sisters/uncles/cousins. Simple, right? At least compared to some of the other craziness described here...</p>
<p>BUT. My mom's father was a widower once, divorced from his second wife, then divorced a second time but remarried the same person. She has a half-brother and 5 siblings who aren't blood related. Each of these siblings is now married with at least 2-3 children, and some of those have kids of their own. My dad has 6 siblings, as did his father, and there's some adoption and divorce involved there too. What a nightmare.</p>
<p>My eventual solution? Make the whole thing up. I used the same names, but didn't give anyone more than 2 children, and didn't involve any of the divorces and such.</p>
<p>Some of this stuff can get so ridiculous. I could go on, but it'd just be rehashing what's been said here with further examples.</p>
<p>I did have a project in 6th grade that, to my usual super-anti-craftsy self, would've been a nightmare; we had to make a puppet for history class of a famous historical figure, do a presentation, all that jazz (except an actual, normal, reasonable paper). I had a ball making a marionette of Queen Liliuokalani (the Hawaiian queen right before Hawaii was annexed; can't believe I still remember the spellling), and basically wrote a ghost story for it instead of a Powerpoint. Can't say I learned much, but in that one case it was fun. Most of the subsequent stuff of a similar nature has been painful.</p>
<p>EDIT: Oops, I just realized this was in the Parent's Forum. To clarify, I'm still a high school student. Hope nobody minds.</p>
<p>Alright, I admit to having made up an obscure Victorian poet, his unfortunate life (which involved accidentally burning several members of his family to a crisp), and his spectacularly bad poem (explaining, perhaps, why he was so obscure), for a middle school project. This set the tone for my (somewhat negative) attitude toward my children's many, many, many unspeakably stupid and wrong-headed projects which involved hours and hours and hours of cutting out tiny pieces of felt and making sad-looking Egyptian artifacts out of fimo. "What is the point of this?" I would scream at around midnight when they were still coloring in the Nile River and sending my husband on runs to the all-night pharmacy to buy more silver glitter and posterboard. As far as I'm concerned, what little educational value these projects contain could easily be extracted from, say, the first page of an age-appropriate book on the topic. Or from watching a cartoon in which Mr. Peabody the time traveling dog (or was Mr. Peabody his master?) finds himself in the period in question. Or from eating a carrot. The amount of sleep and time our family has lost while spraypainting styrofoam balls so they could represent the solar system/molecules/dna that it turned out were supposed to be made of garbanzo beans/dried peas/mini-marshmallows is horrifying. Not to mention the panic engendered by children announcing just before breakfast that they have to go to school that day dressed as a Ukranian. In retrospect, I don't understand why we parents didn't revolt -- or were there actually a bunch of mothers out there having fun making perfect scale models of Native American dwellings suitable for display at the Museum of Natural History to be turned in by their seven year olds?</p>
<p>Oh, my goodness. What a thread this is! I am a tiny voice in the wilderness here. I always liked projects in school and my D liked them too. We are both crafty and artistic. I would help her find materials or take her to the craft store, but it was never too excessive. (But I only had one child to worry about too.) We still talk about some of the projects. I never had to do any of the work, except perhaps help her find photographs in magazines sometimes.</p>
<p>She dressed as Cleopatra once for a presentation and made her costume herself out of sheets. She made a wonderful immigrant girl's diary and made a leather cover for it herself. I kept that it was so well done. </p>
<p>I do think the project-mania is due to a large extent because teachers do not want to grade papers. Many students can't write papers, but theoretically they can all do more hands-on projects. </p>
<p>My D did hate any sort of group project. Luckily she had very few of those.</p>
<p>Actually, within reason, my D also enjoyed some of her projects (yes, she is very artistics & crafty). Mom pays for inexpensive materials for her to make things out of & the kids do the rest. My S was a wiz at origami & whenever possible, he'd incorporate it into his project. My D has a good eye for color & we have a very good paper trimmer & dry adhesive (like for scrapbooking), so projects are not quite as much grief as they might otherwise have been.</p>
<p>Of course, if the kids would start them earlier, it would be much easier on the family, but when was that a priority? I've never understood the value of HS kids coloring maps & such, but it still happens.</p>
<p>I can certainly understand why you'd end up making up a simplified family tree & suspect your family may not have been alone in doing so. My husband's parents had 13 & 10 sibblings respectively; I don't even know all their names, so I suspect we'd have to have scaled/pruned the family tree as well.</p>
<p>Maybe we wouldn't be so down on projects if we really understood the purpose. Since we still have barely heard from any project-assigning teachers in this thread, I'll play devils-advocate for a moment. </p>
<p>krbanks says she "Cant believe I still remember how to spell Queen Lilly's name." I suspect the reason she remembers is because she spent so much time on a project about her. Projects really enforce what you're learning, more so than just spending 5 minutes reading a page in a book. </p>
<p>But I didn't major in education; some of you out there did, and I wonder what they taught you in college about the purpose of projects. (I'm going to asume they didn't teach you that all children's fathers have asthetically pleasing family trees, or all houses have chimneys - geesh). </p>
<p>That being said, I think the real solution is to give kids several choices, always including something non-artsy, so that they can chose what suits their learning style. Also to not let artistic ability affect the grade - save that for art class.</p>
<p>"That being said, I think the real solution is to give kids several choices, always including something non-artsy, so that they can chose what suits their learning style."</p>
<p>This is one thing that most of our teachers were very good about. Typically for English, there would be a good dozen choices ranging from acting out a scene, making an advertisement, writing a different ending or a next chapter, making someting out of Fimo, having a character write a postcard to another character to making a comic strip.</p>
<p>One teacher in high school did exactly what mathmom suggests - ironically, it was a math teacher. :) Our school celebrates "Pi day" -- March 14th (3.14). The students were allowed (optional) to produce creative project of their choice for extra credit. On Pi Day, they had a mini coffee house, where kids recited their pi poetry, produced their pi artwork, etc. My S - who is a musician - wrote a Trio in Pi for himself and two classmates. (Horn, clarinet, and oboe.) He based his entire composition on using intervals as presented by the digits of pi. It was fabulous, and he had a great time doing it, and his teacher got to see what he was REALLY good at.</p>
<p>CCSurfer,
ROFLMAO to your post. Everyone else in my house came running when they heard me laughing so hard. BTW, Sherman and Mr. Peabody!</p>
<p>CCSurfer: Did you make up the imaginary pyromanic Victorian poet yourself in middle school or did you hand that off to one of your kids? I think you could probably expand that post into a publishable piece or perhaps a commentary on NPR. Funny...</p>
<p>Bookiemom -- I confess to having made up the Victorian poet during my own middle school experience, which I'm sure was even less fun for my teachers than it was for me. My own children, on the other hand, have consistently refused to cheat in any way, ever, which is why they were up in the wee hours coloring in the Nile when I begged them to go to sleep and let me do it for them. (My husband and I did prop up the roof of the Northwest Indian popsicle stick log house with big globs of play-doh after it collapsed one night, but our daughter had passed out at the dining room table by then, and never knew. And DH and I have such primitive artistic abilities that our efforts could easily masquerade as the work of a second grader.) Anyway, glad you and momof3sons find it amusing. I guess it is, in retrospect, but it is hard to laugh while you are tying a bunch of old scarves and draping pop-it bead necklaces onto your hysterical kid while the carpool is honking and you're trying to convince said kid that that's how Ukranians look.</p>
<p>No kidding, CCSurfer, just a few more posts and you have the very funny draft of a publishable piece. Anyone who thinks of inventing a pyromaniac poet in middle school definitely has the imagination to be a writer!</p>