When I was a kid, I did the same take-home school project at least eight different times.
I don’t really remember the point of the school project, I just remember that it involved making an oatmeal-like substance out of flour and water, pouring that substance onto a piece of construction paper and pretending that the substance represented some sort of land mass.
Sometimes, to jazz the project up, the teacher would tell us to use food coloring to signify mountains, or water, or dead people.
My dad was in the military, so we moved around a lot, but no matter what school I went to, or how old I was, sometime during the school year I would draw the oatmeal-like substance school project. Because I was a moron, I would usually wait until the night before the project was due to tell my mom that I needed to make an oatmeal-like substance out of flour and water.
“And do we have any food coloring?” I would ask my mom.
“@!#$#!” my mom would say.
Actually my mom wouldn’t say “@!#$#!.” She was always pretty good at not saying bad words around her children. Usually my mom would say “Judas Priest,” which is what Catholics used to say when they really wanted to say “@!#$#!.”
My mom also used to say “Oh for crying in a crutch bucket!” I never really understood what my mom meant when she said “for crying in a crutch bucket.” I just knew when she said it, she wasn’t happy.
I would make oatmeal-like substance land masses for geography classes, for history classes, for art classes and, oddly enough, for gym classes.
Ha. I joke about the gym class. For gym class we took the oatmeal-like substance and used it to make dodge balls.
The problem was that, no matter how hard I tried, my oatmeal-like substance land mass always wound up looking like something our cat threw up. And no matter how hard I worked on the project, I always got the same grade : C minus.
One year, I decided to cut out the middle man, so instead of making the oatmeal-like substance for my land mass, I had our cat throw up on a piece of construction paper.
I got a C minus.
So last week, when our 11-year-old daughter, Emma, came home from school and told us she had to make an earthquake-proof house for science class, I was ready.
“All you need is some flour, water and a little food coloring,” I said to Emma.
“MOOOOOOOMMM!” Emma said to my wife.
My wife and Emma quickly determined that Emma’s earthquake-proof house required something more elaborate than flour and water.
“Right, I’ll go get one of the cats,” I said.
My wife and Emma told me to go “watch football or whatever it is you do around here.”
What my wife and Emma decided is that Emma should build her earthquake-proof house out of Lincoln Logs. Using something called Liquid Nails, my wife helped Emma put together her earthquake-proof home. It took my wife and Emma two nights to finish the house. When they were done, Emma had a house that would withstand up to 40 seconds of vigorous shaking.
Thursday morning I helped Emma carry her Lincoln Log, Liquid Nailed, earthquake-proof house to our car. Emma sat in the front seat carefully holding the house on her lap. Emma told me that her teacher would pick the best earthquake-proof house. She told me, though, that she wasn’t interested in having the best earthquake-proof house. Emma said she just wanted to get an A on her project.
I don’t know about that. I just hope she doesn’t get a C minus.
Address correspondence to Mike Pound, c/o The Joplin Globe, P.O. Box 7, Joplin, MO 64802, or via e-mail at mpound@joplinglobe.com.
