Last Days for Kindle Contest/Tightrope Tuesday: The Horror of "The Science Fair"

Tomorrow is my twelve year old son's science fair.

"Science Fair" seems too inadequate a term. They ought to call it "An attempt to make parents' heads explode."

Something to that effect.

Maybe your twelve year old son or daughter is able to nagivate through the "official" science fair instruction packet, conduct an experiment over a period of something like twelve weeks and then write a complicated research paper as well as make up a presentation board all by him or herself.
My twelve year old cannot.
I could barely figure it all out.

Let's get real: We parents are the ones who must supervise, and do all the grudge work - like buy the dumb board.
Yes, I said dumb.
I am personifying a piece of cardboard. I can do that because I'm a writer, not a scientist.
Thank God.

I hate science. It's so precise. So formal. So cold.
I like room for error. I like uncertainty. I like inconclusive evidence.
This is what we writers thrive on.

That's why I shouldn't be anywhere near a science project.

But Casey had no partner, so I vowed to help him conduct his testing. His subject was: "Can People Spot Fake Smiles?" My opinion is that we should try not to. Feelings get hurt enough. Ignorance is bliss.

It was a fun experiment. Casey tested his friends with a BBC internet quiz consisting of twenty people smiling.

The horror came when we set out to present the findings.

The research paper guidelines infuriated me. They wanted a table of contents. How pompous can you get? This is a paper done by a twelve year old!

They wanted acknowledgments.
Is this a submission for the Nobel Prize? No, it's a twelve year old's science project.

You get the picture...

I just can't stand people taking themselves so seriously. It's everything that's wrong with this world.

Lighten up, Francis.

I must repeat: These are twelve year olds doing the work!!!
So, after many angry moments (mine, not his), we got the research paper all together.

Then there was the presentation board.
We went to get it in Michael's. I had a 50% off coupon! Of course, it was out of stock. "They better have it somewhere, or someone's going down," I told my son.
That person would probably be me - because of a stress attack.

Fortunately, we found one in Staple's. Full price, but at least it was in our possession. Phew!
The came the realization of how large it was. "How will we fill this up?" I asked my older son. After all, it was a simple experiment, summed up with one graph (Thank the lord for createagraph.com, or wherever Casey used on the web - a graph was magically created when we entered our data!)
Michael advised, "Make everything really big."

We made the words 72 font (that's the max) and I was ready to print out.
Guess what?
PAPER JAM!!!
I couldn't get it out. I freaked out on the printer. "Why? Why have you done this to me?" I wailed. (More personification.)
It didn't answer.
Must be a scientific printer
Then I hit it.
That didn't help.

I went to Staples. Looking back, it wasn't the most tragic thing in the world, but at ten to nine last night it sure felt catastrophic.
It's like that straw that broke the camel's back saying...

The work is done now. But the memory will always remain.
The horror of "The Science Fair" will live forever in infamy in my mind.
There'd better not be a math olympics, or someone's going down...
Definitely, me.
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