Parenting Without A License

I…I mean SHE…had better get an A on this.

Posted by Kimberly on November 14th, 2007 — Posted in Diva Girl, Kipple, No Pudding Until You Finish Your Meat, NaBloPoMo

There are few homework assignments that inspire as much excitement in kids as The Collage. After all, what’s not to love about ripping up magazines and then gluing the resulting scraps of paper to something? That’s not homework; around here, that’s a rainy Saturday afternoon! So it’s no wonder that Diva Girl bounced off the bus this afternoon, filled with enthusiasm for her project.

At first, it seemed like a pretty straightforward affair: Create a monochromatic collage. I was even charmed by the colour Diva Girl had chosen to work with: Orange. Sure, it probably wasn’t the most common or popular colour palette in the magazines lying around the house, but I was sure we’d come up with enough pictures to fill the 8.5X11 piece of cardboard she’d been given.

Then came the catch. There’s always a catch. The pictures in the collage needed to represent “natural sources and stuff.” So, given her colour scheme, Diva Girl was essentially planning an homage to orange juice. Possibly with a nod to the carrot, and maybe even the pumpkin, if I happened to have any fall magazines lying around. Not that she realized that, of course. Wrapped up in the excitement that comes from actually being allowed to rip up the magazines, she attacked the project with abandon. Given that most of her supply were out of date fashion magazines (heaven forbid she sacrifice her beloved Chickadees to the project), she was actually doing pretty well. If you ignored that pesky “natural source and stuff” stipulation, that is.

Somehow I don’t think jumpsuits and swoopy capeythingies really fit the teacher’s definition of “natural source.” Although I suppose you could make the argument that cotton and wool would reasonably fall into that category. Which I actually did when it came to a pair of panties with a giant orange flower on the front. Flowers are epitome of nature, after all. And the leather purse totally falls into the category of “and stuff,” right? Using my rather loose definition of the assignment criteria–aided and abetted by my fourth grader’s fuzzy memory and failure to bring home an instruction sheet–we finally ended up with a fairly respectable pile of orange bits to glue to her sheet.
This is where the assignment got tough for me. I could see all of the pieces we’d assembled, how in helping her look for pictures I’d carefully guided her to a mix of different hues and textures within her required colour and how, with a little effort I could create a distinctive and visually stimulating masterpiece from these bits of glossy paper. It’s so easy to hover over a project like this. To, despite your best intentions, focus on the end product and take over the entire process in order to make sure it ends up being “perfect.”
So, maybe Diva Girl’s collage does look a bit better than it would have had I not been the one wielding the glue stick, but I don’t think it looks too much better. For the most part I managed to restrain myself and stick to sticking things where she told me to. And in doing so, I got a rather pleasant surprise: While the gluestick mastery required to meet her vision definitely was definitely beyond Diva Girl’s skill, she did, in fact, have a vision. I’d been expecting random bits of paper glued all over the page, and instead was presented with a fairly sophisticated collage along with a lecture about focal points and the importance of overlapping. Given her obvious understanding of the concepts in play and how frustrating I was finding it to stick those little bits down exactly right, I feel absolutely no remorse over doing this part for her. I just wasn’t up for that kind of meltdown tonight and if the price of avoiding it was gluey fingers and the stifling of my own creative vision, it was one I was willing to pay, especially since I got to learn something important in the process: My kid really doesn’t need me to get that “A” for her; she can manage it just fine all on her own.