Postermania grabs hold of schools

This time of year I always wish I had stock in poster board and gluesticks. My two elementary school students and my high school senior are all racing the clock to finish posters, projects and presentations.

After years of helping kids create dioramas, panoramas and kidney-bean maps of Alabama, I have to wonder — do children learn much from these endless school projects?

In their zeal for hands-on learning — a zeal shared by many parents — schools have adopted what Education Week once described as the “Crayola Curriculum.” Kids are now coloring and making trifold posters even in math and chemistry classes. Parents hoard shoe boxes for dioramas. The back-to-school shopping list now includes sheaths of white poster board and Styrofoam balls for the inevitable solar system project.

My household of four kids has been through just about every iteration of school project, from the classic paper mache volcano to a tasty armadillo carved out of chocolate cake. (Notice my theme: projects that double as class snack, another growth industry and a topic for a later date.)

I never felt these projects fostered deeper learning, least of all in elementary school. A teacher once told me that projects in the early grades didn’t necessarily increase learning, but provided parents and kids with a shared experience. I told her it was a lot more rewarding and relaxing to go on a family walk than to build a pyramid out of Saltines.

One of my worst memories was a fort that my oldest daughter and I created out of gingerbread, a messy late-night adventure that finally yielded a shaky but standing structure.

But ever the perfectionist, I couldn’t resist adding one last dollop of icing to shore up the sides, and as I did so the edible edifice simply collapsed. In the end, I was forced to grab a glue gun to repair the damage and post a “DO NOT EAT” sign on the project.

Many parents, especially crafty types who always have construction paper, felt fabric and feathers at the ready, no doubt consider these projects great fun for their kids. I don’t disagree. I’m just not sure they learn much math by creating a glitzy poster showing how they would spend a million dollars, an annual fifth grade project in my local elementary school. My son decided he would buy a Lear jet with his money to fly his friends to the beach; he ended up overspending his budget.

The projects don’t subside or necessarily get more sophisticated in high school. A similar “what would you do with a lot of money” project showed up in my teen’s high school health class. During an open house, the instructors explained to parents that students were listing what could be done with the billions of dollars in savings to the government if people quit smoking. The kids’ responses read like the banalities offered up in beauty pageants — build new schools, cure diseases and stop world poverty.

At the time, a more relevant exercise for 15-year-olds would have been to monitor and study the debate going on in Georgia over a statewide smoking ban. Gov. Sonny Perdue was threatening to veto a proposed new law forbidding smoking in most public buildings in Georgia, including restaurants. And while Perdue did reluctantly sign the ban, he complained that government should not mandate what people eat or drink or “how much exercise they get or whether we engage in dangerous activities, from skydiving to smoking.”

That provocative statement alone could have framed a lively class discussion, without the teacher championing either side.

As challenging as school projects tend to be, they become even more frustrating when they’re group efforts. My observation of group projects in action is that one or two responsibile students do the work while the others sprawl in chairs and chat among themselves. A friend of mine, known for her easygoing nature and full fridge, ended up hosting most of the group project meetings for her two daughters, and invariably was running out at 9 p.m. to Michael’s to buy the $40 worth of crafts the group needed.

My kids disagree with me on school projects, asking what I would rather see them do. I have a few suggestions: read more books, write more papers, do more math.