In the state of Florida where my son and I live, students in grades fourth through sixth are required to complete a science fair project. My son is in fifth grade this year, so he just finished his second project. After last year, I wasn’t a fan of the task. In fact, I was truly dreading it this year.
Given the amount of work involved, I think it’s unrealistic to expect that any 9- to 11-year-old could handle the science fair project independently. After our experience last year, I walked away thinking it was as much, if not more, my responsibility than my son’s.
Throughout the entire process, I felt conflicted. I wonder if any of the other students are actually completing the steps without a lot of involvement from parents — and if the teachers are aware that’s likely what’s happening.
Our project didn’t start off on a great foot
I suggested several experiments for my son to choose from this year because he couldn’t decide what to do. He has a growing interest in music, so we settled on seeing whether plants grew better when they listened to certain kinds of music. All of his plants died before we could finish the project, and I was stressed out, to say the least.
When my husband saw how upset I was, he suggested lying about the test results. For about a week, I seriously considered it. I had already spent so much money on the plants, and to say I was over the project entirely would be an understatement. Nagging my son to play music for his plants every night after a long day of school and work was not relaxing. I didn’t want to have to buy new plants and start the whole process over again.
But as I thought about fabricating the results to my son’s science experiment, I wondered what I’d be teaching him. Quitting when things go wrong, skirting around actually doing the work, and outright lying were not the lessons I wanted him to learn. I began to see that the attitude I had taken toward the whole project from the beginning had been wrong.
Instead of taking the easy way out, I took the opportunity to bond with him
While I still think the science fair projects create more work for the parents than the students, I decided to change my attitude. I also began to wonder if the true point of the assignment was to get the parents more involved. Even if that isn’t the case, I chose to take the task as an opportunity to bond with my son while I still can.
I realized that I could set an example for him in how to manage one’s time and turn in work that is honorable. Instead of helping him lie about results to work around failure, I helped my son start over again. In the end, we both had a project to be proud of and one that was clearly a team effort. He was able to draw the conclusion that plants do, in fact, grow better with music, based on actual evidence we gathered from a properly completed experiment.
I’m still glad that next year will be the last time we have to complete a science fair project. But from having completed two together so far, I know that the best thing I can do is model a positive attitude. There are going to be lots of unpleasant tasks in life that he will have to tackle, but doing his best not to hate every moment of his to-do’s and even find the silver lining in them are two lessons I’m hoping he will learn from the experience.
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