Beautiful yet meaningless homework.

What a beautiful piece of craftsmanship.  Our family crest carved into a solid piece of mahogany; obviously Dremel’d, sanded, oiled and varnished — clearly created with pride and care.

At first, I was going to congratulate my brother and his family on what I figured must’ve been a family adventure to some far-flung foreign locale where they had to have picked-up this wooden chevron from a broken-English-speaking townsperson selling wares to foreigners.

But before I could take it all in and figure out where this piece of family pride was from, my sister-in-law plucked it off the bookshelf where it had been set prominently and pointed it out.  “Isn’t this a great school project?” Yeah, it’s nice.  But whose project?! “Kid1′s project; his year-end family history project for social studies.”  Wow.  Yeah, very nice.  [Meanwhile, Kid1 is 12!] “But he got an ‘I’ for it.”  [That's an 'I' for incomplete.] “That stupid teacher said he didn’t put much effort into it.”  Oh, how’d the teacher explain that?  “I dunno.  There was obviously a lot of effort put into this.”  Yeah, sure looks like it.  “Go eat!”

Whew!  Saved by the hunger.  I was ordered to “Go eat!” — my brother and his wife were hosting a small get-together.  The food and family camaraderie during dinner made up for that conversation between my sister-in-law and I of teacher put-downs and consternation at a son’s possible failure to advance to the next grade for lack of a satisfactory social studies grade.

Dinner was great.  Smalltalk ensued during dessert as the kids found their respective ways to visual splendor a la iPod Touch and Nintendo Wii and the adults fattened up on bread pudding and lattes.  We’re not the dietetic clan, that’s for sure.

Anyway, the conversation rolled around back to the school project.  I didn’t know where to begin or interject, so I let Kid1′s parents do all the talking — you know, the doting parents; my brother and his wife.  Besides, they were quite proud to speak about it anyway.  It turns out:  When the project instructions came home, my brother was told that he should commandeer the instructions from Kid1, head out to the neighbourhood hardware store and figure out a project to create that reflected the intent of the subject matter.  And that’s how the wooden motif came to be.  “Interesting,” I thought to myself.

More like “deceitful!” is what I should’ve said aloud.  This parental deceit intervention was to help bolster Kid1′s already-mediocre grade in social studies.  But really, it’s a wonder the kid wasn’t flunked outright and parents called on the carpet for clearly abetting this fraud on homework.  By the way, Kid1 didn’t flunk.  The ‘I’ happened awhile back and he’s since advanced with the rest of his class (but that’s for another blog post).

I guess I have two beefs; 1) My brother and his wife meant well but clearly were not helping their child both in developing his skills, but also in helping his educators understand at what capacity or willingness to learn this child floats in; and 2) Are these teachers for real? I may not have gotten the entire story, but somehow, shouldn’t an educator have a responsibility to call a spade a spade and send a note home that says, “The kid gets an ‘A’ if you can prove he did this with little adult intervention; otherwise, he must redo it on his own!”?

I mean, seriously!  A finely-carved relief of a family crest, made out of mahogany — it’s a hardwood, by the way — is obviously not the work of a pre-pubescent 12-year old.  And the teacher’s an ass for not saying it was obvious in its fraud.  Don’t me started (more than I am already) on the parents being asses for trying to ‘fix’ this social studies grade mess.

And here sits the kid, from what I can tell, complacent in proving his worth.  I cringe because he’s probably learning all the wrong things from two sets of enablers.

Oy vey!

I was inspired to share the story because of a @Lavagal I know whose parenting worries bleed out into her blog sometimes.

This woodcarving tromperie happened several grades back, though.  Kid1′s doing better now; he’s come into his own and is a responsible and astute kid.  The great kid he is is proven in that I don’t think this mess caused any lasting harm to him.  I’m told his school projects sometimes look like crap, but the grades he gets for them now are real.  And his parents have nothing but praise and only an overseeing eye for him.

Thankfully, their Dremel was donated to charity, too.