Operation project

ASHA NEHEMIAH

When mothers who draw six-figure salaries are inexplicably reduced to drawing crayon figures of hairy caterpillars, the symptoms are unmistakable. When fathers who design cryogenic engines are downgraded to constructing bullock-cart models from empty ice-cream cups - the diagnosis is obvious. Project fever has gripped the family.

Project fever is so outrageously contagious that when one member of the household is issued with a project, the entire family begins displaying symptoms. With more schools opting for modern techniques of learning through project work, the tasks issued to children are cleverly designed to foster creativity, a spirit of enquiry and self-sufficiency. Make your own camera. Dig your own compost pit. Generate your own electricity. Bake your own bread. Grow your own bread-mould.

Hardly surprising then that the largest single cause for high blood-pressure in parents today is those five little words: "I've been given a project." For this is the magic mantra that converts the average, well-ordered household into something that resembles those medieval paintings of hell - replete with fire, thunder and tortured shrieks.

Curtains accidentally catch fire during a physics project with candle and cardboard. Thunderbolts seem to shake the household when enraged parents holler: "Who's been working on my carved rosewood table and sawn one leg off." and "I had a flat tyre on the way to work and found someone had removed the tool kit from my car." Tortured shrieks rent the air when a budding scientist intently devising a solar-powered lime-squeezer is struck by the most unscientific phenomenon - lime juice in the eye.

The aftermath of the project is equally nerve-wracking. One survivor of a holiday holocaust, - when both her school-going children were issued with projects began tidying their rooms when school reopened. What she discovered under their beds was enough to permanently destroy her faith in the innocence of childhood. For beneath lay: her husband's spare spectacles (minus the lenses), the mangled remains of something that suspiciously resembled her alarm clock, the tool kit from the car and one plastic basin filled with malodorous, still-frothing stuff that turned out to be an abandoned effort at making papier mache.

Parents, of course, never learn from experience, and some stalwarts remain willing accomplices who make it their life's project to help with the school project. One such enthusiast spent several days and a small fortune buying everything on her son's project shopping list: tea, detergent, biscuits, olive oil, tinned fish (though the family was vegetarian). "What is your project about?" she enquired as an afterthought. "It's on food packaging," replied the son, displaying nothing but righteous bewilderment when the infuriated mother asked why he hadn't just used the empty packets available at home .

All this goes to prove one of the eternal paradoxes of life. While project work makes learning child's play for children, the whole process is extremely strenuous, arduous and gruelling work for the parent.

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