Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
The authorities have decided that hauling around sacks of flour will teach middle schoolers not to get pregnant. My daughter and I think it's a half-baked idea.
Jun 25, 2002 | It was another Dear Parents letter, and I rolled my eyes when my oldest daughter, a seventh grader, handed it to me.
FLOUR BAG BABY, it began. My daughter rolled her eyes much more dramatically than I did and folded her arms. "This is the dumbest assignment ever. I can't believe we have to do this."
I read (with errors intact): "Your student is participating in the Family Life section of Science. Part of this section includes a major project called the 'Baby Project.' Materials: One five-pound bag of flour. Please wrap the bag in plastic so that the flower doesn't leak onto the ground. You may wrap the flour with masking tape, but only making tape. Do not use packing tape, duck tape, or electrical tape."
Remembering kids walking past my house last year carrying flour bags, I shrugged, resigned. Then I read further and realized that the assignment included no actual science, and required me, the parent, to do everything to "assist your child to experience a real-life situation." We buy the flour, wrap it in plastic with them, dig out the old baby clothes (assuming we saved them), buy disposable diapers and a baby bottle (even though most of us are probably way done with those purchases). Then, we have to initial the daily log, indicating that we've shown them how to give this baby two sponge baths (swiping with a rag), three feedings and three diaper changes. And I loved this part: "Crying -- The baby will cry four times a day. Parents, this is when you get to have some fun. It is your privilege to randomly tell your student that the baby is crying and needs to be rocked (minimum of 20 minutes). Do your student a favor and pick both convenient and inconvenient times."
Have some fun? Waking her up in the middle of the night? Been there, done that, when she was a baby herself. A favor? How could this project teach any student that babies take way more care and nurturing than a middle-schooler can give when the parents were doing all the work, just as they would if their own children had children? Being realistic would have helped. Being more scientific would have helped. I looked at the daily log -- at the end of the week, the student would have a chart with a bunch of initials.
My daughter sighed. "You're supposed to make me sit there for 20 minutes at night, I guess. But we have tests this week. Math."
I got down the bag of flour, wondering how, when California students already lag so far behind other students (let's not bring up other nations), we use up weeks and weeks on anti-drug lessons, sexually transmitted disease facts and flour bag babies. My daughter knows more about heroin and cocaine and gonorrhea than I ever did.
My seventh-grade year, at a junior high a mile from here, we did actual experiments with test tubes, dissected frogs, grew a vegetable plot and kept logs on various methods of watering and fertilization and pests. We tested seeds, we went on field trips to the desert. And before it's assumed this was a "better" school, mine was the "underprivileged" junior high everyone was afraid of, with bars on the windows and an at-risk population. Yes, two eighth-graders got pregnant. But surely two more could get pregnant this year in my daughter's school, which is actually middle-income.
As "underprivileged" kids then, we needed science. Where is the science in this project? How about genetic markers and traits, how they're passed on? That would be fascinating to this class of many racial groups, including mixed-race kids like my own. The formation of the baby in the womb, followed by how the real care of a baby would include the umbilical cord falling off, the soft spot on a baby's head pulsing and vulnerable, the evolutionary reason a baby smiles: These might be actually useful and scientific, along with sociological.
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