Lately, our family has been working on "the project."
The project has had many first names.
It has been called the geography project, the French project, the science project. I have tended to refer to each by the same name, the "#$%&*! project."
These projects were assignments that the kids brought home from school. Like most school projects, these were designed to teach the kids how to research a topic, how to organize findings and how to present their conclusions in a clear, concise style.
But the real purpose of school projects is, I think, to keep the parents out of the teachers' hair. Parents who have lots of free time are likely to dream up pet theories on "how the child learns." But parents who are busy helping "the child" track down the gross national product of Mauritania don't have much time to make supper, let alone come up with theories of learning.
Teachers know this. Sometimes they assign class projects as a reaction to pushy parents. Sometimes they assign projects as a pre-emptive action, just in case.
Over the years, my attitude toward the school project has changed. At first, I was an enthusiast. Sometime back when our older son brought a project home from school, I was a gleeful project coordinator. I sat down with the kid. I talked with him about his endeavor. I figured out ways to make his project big and exciting.
This gung-ho approach ended shortly after one project had me spending my evenings standing on the muddy banks of the Jones Falls, watching my kid pull buckets of brown water from a smelly section of the stream. Now, when a kid comes home with word of a school project, I hide in the basement.
The other night, for instance, I narrowly avoided becoming entangled in the flag of Mauritania. It was being assembled, crescent moon and all, right there on the kitchen table as part of a geography project. Rather than volunteer to help, I claimed I heard a strange noise in the furnace. It was a noise that had to be attended to, right away. I hurried into the basement and shut the door on Mauritania.
A few nights later, I walked into the kitchen and ran into the French project. It consisted of making the favorite Cameroonian dessert, little balls of millet and honey. The Cameroonians reportedly ate the dessert, then spoke French. Or vice versa. Rather than dealing with Cameroonian culture and French verbs, I ran upstairs and tried to fix a door with a broken hinge.
Try as I might, I couldn't duck the fourth-grade science project. The household was under siege from multiple projects. I had to help with one. The primary purpose of this science project was the primary purpose of all elementary school science projects. Namely to say, "Hey, I've done a science project." The secondary purpose was to fill balloons with our old friend carbon dioxide.
Immediately after I got on board this project, I decided that wine bottles would figure heavily in the research. The fourth-grader and I went over the plan. Yeast and sugar would be mixed in the bottom of the bottle, and they would create carbon dioxide gas. The gas would then travel up the bottle and inflate a balloon attached to the lip of the bottle. We would then tell how much carbon dioxide was being made by measuring the size of balloon.
It seemed to me that a wine bottle was the ideal vessel for this research. Its lip would easily hold a balloon. This plan would work only if the wine bottle had been emptied. Mixing the yeast and sugar was the kid's job. Emptying the wine bottle was mine.
It took several days, but the project was completed. One day this week, two wine bottles and balloons, along with the appropriate display boards, were packed up and sent to school. That night, the science projects and the fledgling scientists were put on display at the school. Parents were encouraged to attend.
I got there late, but as I hurried through the hall I saw an impressive array of projects reporting how grass grows, how airplanes fly and how boys, the ones in one sample anyway, have cleaner hands than girls.
At the end of the evening, the kids felt proud. "This science thing was fun," one of them announced. The parents, on the other hand, looked relieved, another project was over. Maybe it was my imagination, but later that night after the young scientists were put to bed, I heard the sound of project coordinators uncorking wine bottles.