Camp Creek Press

I was wondering if maybe I should talk about a different project ... because as much as I lecture other people (literally lecturing! behind a lectern!) that projects work no matter where the starting point, the whole comics thing seemed to be pushing it.

I always get asked if I would allow a project on anything, like ... guns? video games? And my answer is NO, I wouldn't start projects on just anything. (It's not so much "allowing" as it is "deciding to begin".)

Possible project topics are like street cars (in San Francisco) (in 1963) -- there's a new one coming along every hour or so. They are like those little plastic ducks at the fair, bopping along their little canal. (Hello? Could I think of a metaphor from the current decade?) You can pass on the ones that don't look good to you and wait for the next one. It will be along soon enough.

I tell teachers not to choose project topics that they don't find interesting themselves. How can you facilitate a group of students for months on end if you think the topic is boring? They have an unlimited well of interests; be sure to pick one you also find interesting.

And for heaven's sake, pick something that you don't already know everything about! You may feel more confident, but confidence is boring. Better to pick something you always wished you had time to learn about, because guess what, now you do.

(A big part of facilitating students rather than "teaching" them is that you are helping them find the answers to their questions -- not answering their questions for them. So, really, your knowledge is beside the point and can actually work against you. It's easier not to blunder in with the answer if you don't have it in the first place.)

Now that I'm homeschooling and have only two students instead of 20 to think about, I don't worry about whether I am particularly interested. My kids are old enough (8 and 11) to do their projects with minimal input from me. It's very different from working with a multi-age class (of 20 kids age 5 through 9) or a large preschool class.

(Finding a topic I don't already know everything about is easy, as long as we stay away from Star Wars and the works of Jane Austen.)

In a classroom, you will only do one project at a time, because all your work (your "facilitating") will be focused on this topic and the myriad directions it will shoot off to -- you'll only be able to handle one project at a time. The children will explode in different directions like a handful of marbles dropped on a linoleum floor, and soon you'll have umpteen different mini-projects. Luckily, they'll all be related, and the kids will learn from each other as fast as they learn on their own. It's magical.

At home, I do one or two projects at a time with each boy. I find two projects on very different subjects tend to cover all the subject areas even better than one, and I'm not overtaxed in helping the boys find materials and get what they need because, after all, there are only two of them and they can only work at a certain pace. In a classroom of 20, working alone or in small groups, with diverse interests and focusing on different things and needing different things constantly, you can quickly be overwhelmed.

So, what is a project anyway, and how is it different from regular learning? A project is an in-depth study. You are going to stick with an idea, a topic, for a good long time. You are going to marinate yourself in it. Anyone who thinks small children don't have a decent span of attention should see a group of 3- and 4-year-olds dig their claws into a project topic. They will happily study the same topic for a full year, then come back to school the following fall with big grins asking to resume the same topic.

It's we, the grown-ups, who have lost our ability to stick with a subject longer than five minutes. Kids have short attention spans? Hello, haven't you met a two-year-old who wants the same exact book read (in the same exact way) every night for a year? Kids don't have short attention spans. Actually, it's just the opposite. They have the ability to immerse themselves in something until you think your ears will bleed listening to the exhaustive differences between types of dinosaurs, or Thomas the Tank Engine characters, or Dora the Explorer stories. We're the ones who are ready to move on, not them.

Learning through projects means stopping the moving forward and taking out your shovel to dig deep instead. No more shallow glazing over things, we're going to stop right here for awhile and see where we get.

I was thinking maybe I should talk about a different project ... but I was wrong. Again. Why do I doubt the process? Already, the project has ... well, I'll save it for the next post.