Taking the third option
After reading Stone Fox in third grade, our teacher presented the class with three options for a final project. The focus of the project, definitely dictated by the State of Ohio and its standardized testing that would occur later in the year, was the classic man vs. nature conflict.
Or maybe it was Hatchet in sixth grade? It definitely happened for Into the Wild as a sophomore in high school. Why the hell this conflict was labeled as so important will forever be beyond me. This may be top of mind because I just finished reading The Great Alone by Kristen Hannah, a book about homesteading in Alaska in which the central conflict evolved to be woman vs. nature, how very 2023!
Literary devices aside, a bunch of nine year-olds could do one of the following; write an alternate ending to the book, give a speech about a personal man vs. nature conflict, or display their knowledge in the form of a pre-approved “special project.” Looking back, I’m guessing the whole pre-approval thing was to rule out anything too off-topic, like an interpretive dance or a LEGO rendering of the town in which the book took place. This was the first time I had been presented with the idea of a special project, and trying to land on a concept for one paralyzed me. I ended up writing the alternate ending, which served as a sort of silent apology to my entire class for spoiling the original ending for them.
Mrs. Watson read Stone Fox out loud to us every day after recess and was excellent at delivering the cliffhangers with suspense. During indoor recess the afternoon before we were due to finish the book, I grabbed Mrs. Watson’s copy of Stone Fox off her desk, scanned the first few paragraphs of the final chapter, and learned that one of the main characters died.
I could have played it cool, acting heartbroken with the rest of the class just 40 minutes later, but my bookish/narc instincts took over. I told a few friends about (spoiler!) Searchlight’s death. Word spread quickly during recess and by the time we were back at our desks for read-aloud, almost everyone in the class knew the ending…because of me. I got a pretty stern, “Not cool, Lucy,” from Mrs. Watson before she opened the book and delivered what I imagine was a cool, calm, and collected reading of the final chapter in direct opposition to my frantic snooping and spoiling. So yeah, I owed the class an alternate ending, maybe one where Searchlight didn’t die and instead made a friend named Lucy who was super apologetic.
The opportunities for special projects kept presenting themselves throughout school, and I became more confident in taking them on. This confidence is majorly owed to my dad, who always encouraged my sisters and I to get creative with our work. When I was seven and still too young to be trusted with Exacto knives and spray mount, my dad “helped” me create a 3-ft long piñata of a blue whale. Clearly not the work of a first grader, but enjoyed by all, the teacher ended up keeping the whale for classroom decor for years to come.
Years down the road in a middle school social studies class, the Ancient Greece unit was coming to an end. Before the definitely Grecian tradition of a field trip to the bowling alley, where groups of students competed against their rival city-states for high scores (Hello, Corinth!), there was a final project to complete. Yet again, we had a few options, including writing an essay about Hellenic contributions to literature (I’m sure veiled under the man vs. society conflict), drafting a new form of government Ancient Greeks could implement (as if Democracy weren’t already spoken for), or choosing our own special project. My dad and I brought out the Exacto knives and spray mount yet again, this time to create a replica of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. A tricky feat, considering the only photo evidence we had for this wonder of the ancient world came from a textbook authored in 2004. Two weeks and countless sheets of foam core later, I brought in a three-foot beige tower, looking worn with the help of textured spray paint and overflowing with fake flowers, leaves, and vines from JOANN fabrics. Crinkled blue cellophane ran down one side of the “gardens" and pooled at the base to show off the sparkling waters of Babylon. Though the homemade model wasn’t exactly a demonstration of the information I had retained during the 6-week unit, it was a hell of a lot more fun than Team Corinth’s slaughter at the blowing alley a week later.
The older I got, the harder it was to convince teachers, and then professors, to let me out of an essay with a special project. A Psych 100 lab was apparently “non-negotiable,” killing my pitch for what I promised to be an in-depth compilation of clips from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and their symbolic counterparts in Alice in Wonderland. The Spanish department was a little friendlier, letting me write an essay about the art in Mexican picture books showing hidden signs of colonialism. But at 11 pm the night before it’s due, even a fun 15-page essay is still an essay. The furthest I got in grad school with special projects turned into my friend Lynnette and I ending up with the entire product line of a Spanish skincare brand called Homonaturals in exchange for translating their entire Spanish website into English. That last example might sound like a great opportunity, but the comped cosmetics weren’t even part of the original deal, and in the end we just ended up making more work for ourselves than necessary.
I’ve been able to sneak a few special projects in here and there since all of my schooling ended. When tasked with teaching the meaning of tapas (the Sanskrit one, not the Spanish one), to my cohorts in our yoga teacher training, I used s’mores for an analogy. Talking about it probably would have been enough, but in an effort to impress, I definitely brought out all of the ingredients needed for s’mores, complete with Sterno canned heat to actually toast the marshmallows. This newsletter is a bit of a special project for me as well — granted, there is no assignment involved, but I suppose I’ve done the most since I can remember, so why stop now?