When Little Big Boss came home from Kindergarten aflutter one February day three years ago with her very first Science Fair packet, I was genuinely excited, too, for approximately 92 seconds. She was learning the scientific method at 5 years old! She would get to develop a hypothesis! There would be an experiment! Yay. Maybe she and her little brother (That Dude) were not fated to inherit my allergy to science. Maybe starting early would light a fire in them that I had no hope of sparking on my own.
I promised myself as we looked over LBB’s packet together that I would strive to hide my substantial indifference to science. No need for her or That Dude to know that I slipped through my primary and secondary education doing a grand total of one Science Fair project in the course of 13 years. No need for them to find out that the only class I ever dozed off in my entire academic career was a college physics lecture. Twice. (Who could have predicted that a course called “The Physics of Light” would involve spending so much time in the dark? Probably anyone who had any actual interest in or rudimentary knowledge about science. But not me.)
In spite of my lackluster credentials, LBB and I were going to storm the elementary school Science Fair. For sure. We brainstormed our way into a project on assessing people’s ability to taste the difference between a traditional brownie moistened with oil & eggs and a healthier version moistened with puréed black beans. (My apologies to Team Anti-Moist for having now used that word three times in two sentences.) Bake off! This might even be fun!
Never mind that a Kindergartner truly had no business doing a project that required her to formulate a survey, recruit tasters, compile survey results, and, oh yeah, bake brownies. To her absolute credit, she dove into the baking portion of proceedings with gusto and was even quite deft at convincing passers-by to step into our garage for the taste test. (Super Science Mom failed to calculate that people walking, running, and biking around the neighborhood might not want to eat brownies, even free ones.) Little Big Boss was rising to the challenge. I was feeling good and even slightly scientific. We had data!
Then, the weekend before the project was due–AKA Board Weekend–LBB fell hard to what I assessed to be a classic case of SFF (Science Fair flu). A subsequent trip to the doctor pinned it as strep throat, but on Board Weekend, this mama was stone cold convinced it was SFF. We set up shop in our office/guest room to assemble the board. She lay malingering on the sleeper sofa as I typed and printed, cut and glued, developed all manner of bar graphs and pie charts in Excel. She drifted in and out of sleep, lifting her head pitifully from time to time to check weakly on “our” progress, sometimes offering me a bone of encouragement: “We’re doing great, Mommy.” Indeed. Indeed, “we” were. I moped my lonely way to the finish line, all my dark thoughts about Science Fair confirmed. I vowed “never again.”
But a year passed and the sting subsided. Science Fair is perhaps something like labor; a certain time-induced amnesia convinces us to go through it again. A stirring hope that the pain and effort will be worth the outcome. Now I had experience. Now I knew to keep it simple. Now I was hip to the dangers of SFF. And now I had not just one project to shepherd, but two. With That Dude in Kindergarten and LBB in first grade, I had stepped up to the SF Big Leagues. My new approach: step down the level of ambition; step back my level of involvement.
I had them hand write all sections of their display boards–including headings, charts, and tables–and do all their own cutting and glueing. I was proud of their hard work and felt fantastic about their submissions. They looked like–and truly were–Science Fair projects befitting a Kindergartner and first grader. The feedback on each: “Good project; would be even better if you typed up the display.” (Super Science Mom blows it again.)
Back to the drawing board (well, display board). We regrouped for the next year, shamed into returning to typed display boards, to the children’s delight. They knew Mama’s impatience with their 4 wpm typing speeds would mean more work for me and less for them. Still, that year featured no whiff of SFF, and, in hindsight, was probably as close to an SF win as this household will ever come. (By “win” I mean that each child turned in a completed project, no one was injured, and I did not contract laryngitis from all the screaming. I do not mean that anyone actually won or placed in the Science Fair itself. That is not the competition in which we are participating.)
And then there was this year. I have concluded that the “Fair” is some cruel misnomer (possibly a typo for “Fail”?). The process–for us at least–is neither balanced nor carnival-like. Not “fair” in any sense. It is a test of endurance, a battle of wills, an epic struggle. LBB did another baking project this year, largely without incident. But That Dude–that dude, that dude, That Dude. Board Weekend arrived, unhappily coinciding with his half-day First Communion retreat one day and an extra long baseball practice the other. When we at last had a window Sunday afternoon to work on his display, he was stricken out of nowhere with a severe bout of SFF. He’s yelling. I’m yelling. Nothing’s getting done.
The child who never rests–the child who barely sleeps, in fact–was suddenly very, very tired. So tired that he took a two hour nap. Two hours. But I was wise to the hustle and refused to finish for him. Luckily the project wasn’t due until mid-week, so I cornered him Monday evening, determined he would finish. My brilliant strategy to make him do the work without it taking forever: having him use the speech-to-text function to write up the remaining sections.
Pretty smart, I thought. Super Science Mom will triumph, I thought. Until–that is–“because it has salt in it” came out as “because he’s an a__hole, idiot.” That Dude, being the advanced reader that he is (yay!), catches on before I can delete it. A full 10 minutes of can’t-unsee-it hysteria ensues. He’s on the floor. I’m on the floor. He is beyond delighted at the glorious inappropriateness of it. Tears are rolling down my cheeks. I am done in.
No strategy will prevail. No amount of experience is going to make any difference. We are NEVER going to storm the Science Fair. We are just going to try to survive the Science Fair and accept that every year will continue to be SF hell. Science Fair, I surrender.
Brownie Stew 