Saturday, 04 February 2012

• Blame It On Sputnik, Part I

  It's science fair season, and this year both my ten-year-old and my twelve-year-old will be hauling home the familiar folded cardboard display and asking Jeff to spray paint it red.  The girls' school is serious about their science fair: no aimless "mold" or "snail" projects for my girls, as my lucky mother enjoyed when I did science fair in eighth and ninth grades.  Instead, students from about fifth grade on up have to choose their subject with care. A handout guides them through: What is the guiding question? There must only be one. What is the hypothesis? And by sixth grade, what are the variables, and how will you control for them?  And there must be a procedure and steps outlined. Your ideas about the family dog and your social experiments will probably be turned down.  

  One year, after school, I pulled up to the front of the building unsuspecting, and there was Danielle, hunched up on the stone bench. She had been crying. What was wrong? Her project proposal had been rejected. She had wanted to swab the school bathroom sinks for germs, and she had talked it up and planned it out, but it was not to be.

  On the one hand, I understood that a little girl who couldn't yet keep track of her pencil would have trouble managing the details of such a project, and it also made sense that she was encouraged to pick something else because another student already hatched the idea of swabbing the drinking fountains. We wouldn't want too many swabbers loose in the hallways. But on the other hand, I thought, Man, she's in the sixth grade. Should it be this hard for an eleven-year-old to get the nod for her science fair project? Were they looking for design and execution worthy of a science journal?   I had already been overwhelmed at the question about controlling for the variables, worried that her science was over my head. Now we'd have to go through it again.

  That year, she got over her disappointment and chose a project her teacher helped her find on the Internet--something about melting points of snow and ice under certain conditions. Her teacher worked with her, and ended up taking some dear pictures of Danielle with the top three quarters of her face staring over the edge of a table into a glass measuring cup that she was stirring. Not science journal material, and dull topic to me, but solid for a sixth grade science project, and Danielle was happy with it.

  And I was happy that it hadn't been like the previous year's, where her baking soda and vinegar needs had been enormous, and there had been a lot of activity in the bathtub. I didn't mind her using the white vinegar so much, because that comes by the gallon, but the rice vinegar and the apple cider vinegar, doled out in ounces . . . I was more sorry to see that go. I was, however, pleased to see her pace herself beautifully, so that by the time it was due, she was ready: display board, Excel charts, written components, and clever title (Fizz, I think it was). Yes, the teacher evaluated it and found some of it wanting. But Danielle had carried it out by herself, except that I had typed items she dictated to me. Oh, yes, and Jeff applied the red spray paint.

  Fizz, though, was a breeze compared to the insect project. This wasn't even for science fair. This was a biology project dreamed up by a popular teacher probably years before my children set foot in the school.  The insects were to be done during the summer between the fourth and fifth grades. I used to see the cases of them pinned and labeled and displayed for parental admiration in different places in the school during Open House. I would study them indifferently, thinking of them as a product of "the big kids," not making a connection to my daughter and our summer.

  It was the summer of dead bugs. My daughter got over the initial enthusiam and worked on it in fits and starts throughout the pleasant months. Indoors, the girls' loft bedroom was not so pleasant. One would think that a budding naturalist would keep the collected specimens in one safe place, out of the reach of curious pets and not where one might trod on a creature with a stinger in the dark. But Danielle is not a budding naturalist, and she wanted little to do with her project. So I think there was at least one close call with our large lab wanting to indulge his adventurous palate, or maybe it was our little cat. It seems like there was a lifeless yellow jacket on the floor for awhile. And if I remember right, there were bugs here and there throughout the room. There were already many different species she was supposed to have. Maybe she looked forward to the extra layer of challenge when she would need to hunt down the bugs again, this time in her room.

  The project due date came upon us fast, once the school year started. Danielle had to find all her dead insects, pin them to styrofoam in a manner specifically outlined in the teacher's handout, and label them. So I had to buy styrofoam, help her identify the creatures, and type labels. The night before the project due-date was a mother-daughter bonding experience I would rather not have had. Danielle was tired to the bone, and not open to maternal input.

  I felt that she needed the input. Earlier in the evening, she had been working on the display, and Annika called me up excited. "You should see what Danielle did with her bugs, Mom!" Oh, good. This was going to turn out better than expected. What I saw amazed me. She had taken the four strips of styrofoam and made a kind of rickety rectangle attached with pins. I liked that idea. You could do something original, with bugs separated by species and little realistic habitats made for them. But she didn't have this in mind at all. Instead, every bug was skewered into the narrow strip on top. This was not going to be her most glamorous moment in her school career.

  Later I made the mistake of seeing the other bug projects in her class. Nice. Beyond nice. Some of them looked like they had been done by graphic designers. I've noticed a great many young kids who are already good artists. But some of these were beyond them. One that stood out was drawn like a pretty little house, an attractive setting for neat rows of insects. Prominent for its own reasons was the 3-D one, whose insects had languished in our loft for weeks, whose pins bristled at jaunty angles, and whose rectangular frame had taken a beating while being transported to the school. 

  One year I walked through the science fair displays. I got the impression that children in this valley are going to graduate knowing how to set up and carry out a decent experiment, whether they want to or not.  My bold proclamation of MOLD on my science fair board and the six-month snail journal in my past did not measure up to the systematic and tidily presented rows of work occupying the school gym.   I noticed that some of the most eye-catching experiments answered practical questions, things I would really want to know. Like, what brand of microwave popcorn leaves the least unpopped kernels? I hoped that the girls would conceive of such projects, with straightforward questions to answer, yet a magnet to onlookers who would cease to be merely polite parents showing up, who really wanted to know the result.

  Turns out, this year both of their projects are practical. Annika's is a bit easier to execute than Danielle's, as it involves only five classmates and does not complicate matters by taking weeks of lunch hours to test sixty-odd Kindergartners for certain manual dexterity. I'm actually curious about the outcomes. I will tell you all about it next time. Who knows--the Kindergarten one could end up in the next issue of Science, as long as the editors are fine with the subjects being bribed with lifesavers.

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