The Egg Project

What a fourth grade science fair taught me about the most important thing we are failing to teach

My son was in fourth grade when he decided to put eggs in different sodas to see what happened to the shells. He filmed them every day. He made a slideshow. He talked through his findings. He did the whole thing himself.

We had just moved to California from Michigan. I did not think twice about letting him work independently. In Michigan, that was just what you did. You helped your kid understand the assignment, and then you let him do it

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We walked into that science fair, and I understood immediately that we had missed something. The projects around us were extraordinary. Elaborate. Professional. The kind of work that takes a parent with an engineering degree and a free weekend to produce. My son’s egg project sat next to them, looking exactly like what it was. The work of a fourth grader who did his own project.

He felt defeated. I felt terrible. And then I thought about it for a long time and decided we had done the right thing.

He learned something that day. He learned that his work was his own. He learned that effort matters and presentation matters and that next time he would think bigger. He learned what it felt like to stand next to someone else’s best and want to do better. Those are not small lessons. Those are the lessons that follow a person into every room they walk into for the rest of their life.

The kids with the professional projects learned something, too. They learned that when the work gets hard, someone will step in. They learned that the finished product matters more than the process. They learned that their parent’s ability is a resource they can draw on when their own runs out.

That is not a lesson. That is a liability.

I have been teaching Spanish for thirty years. Every year I assign a children’s book project. Students write and illustrate a book in Spanish using the vocabulary we have covered. Every year, a handful of books come back too good. The sentences are too complex. The grammar is too clean. The vocabulary goes well beyond what we have studied.

Those books do not show me what the student can do. They show me what the parent can do. The student learned nothing. They did not practice the vocabulary. They did not struggle with the grammar. They did not sit with something hard and figure it out. They handed the assignment to someone else and got a grade for it.

The parent thought they were helping. They were not helping. They were stealing the learning.

Here is what I have watched happen to kids who were never allowed to struggle. They get to high school and hit something genuinely hard for the first time, and they fall apart. Not because they are not smart. Because nobody ever let them practice being stuck. Nobody ever let them sit with something that did not work and figure out what to do next. The wall was always removed before they reached it.

And then one day it isn’t. And they have no idea what to do.

Resilience is not a personality trait. It is a skill. It is built by hitting the wall and figuring out what comes next. It is built by doing the egg project yourself, even when the kid next to you has a volcano that actually erupts. It is built by getting the grade you earned and deciding you want to do better next time.

We cannot build it for them. We can only get out of the way and let them build it themselves.

My son is a Marine Sergeant now. He calibrates instruments that keep military aircraft flying at 30,000 feet. He did not get there because everything came easily. He got there because we let him figure out what to do when it didn’t.

He did the egg project himself. I am still glad we let him.

Until next time,

Jen