Mind your P's and Q's

School projects. Urg.

Last month, the Kindergarten class had a special project to do in celebration of their 100th day of school. Each child was to collect 100 objects and display them in a creative way.

Colin flunked. Well, ok he didn't flunk, because they don't actually give real grades in Kindergarten, but he was told to do the project over.

You see, Colin drew a large graph with 100 spaces and filled in each space with the letter Q. ("Why Q?" I asked. "Because they are unusual" said Colin.) They only thing I did was procure a piece of poster paper and get him a ruler. He did the rest himself.

I don't need to tell you that, on the morning the project was due, the Kindergarten pod was filled with projects that looked like they were done by Martha Stewart in conjunction with a professional architect. Buttons, sea shells, Legos, pennies, and beads were arranged in beautiful patterns. Some spelled out the child's name or formed pictures. They had been turned into coasters, necklaces, and 3-D models. Many involved paper mache.

Colin's project, done all by himself and his own idea, was unacceptable... because he didn't COLLECT anything. That's right, folks. That which you create yourself is not good enough in the suburbs. Apparently the point of the project is not to ensure the child knows what 100 of something looks like, it's to encourage them to grow up to collect.

I decided not to make him re-do the project on the grounds that it was unabashed materialism. Either that, or I'm just lazy.

But I do know that he learned what he needed to learn. Today a paper came home from school in which he wrote about his project. "For the 100th day of school I collected Qs and I turned my collection into a Q graph."

I'm not worried a bit.