Cat's Tales

by Catherine Moy

Feb 2, 2005

Part of growing up is learning how to handle loss with dignity. This is hard for a parent to do. Kids usually are better at it. My 12-year-old daughter, Zen, is much more grown up than I when it comes to failure. Maybe it’s because kids know they are learning, but parents feel like they can’t benefit from losing. So it becomes our mission in life to make sure our children aren’t hurt from loss.

Sometimes we cross the line, though. It’s one thing to guide a child through trials and tribulations and quite another to morph into the No. 1 person in charge of a child’s project or interfere in a soccer play by kicking dirt on a referee.

Take a look at children’s projects at an open house and you’ll see that a certain mission project looks more like Frank Lloyd Wright designed it than the average third-grader. I’ve been known to glue goats onto a model of San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo Mission, or tweak a graphic for an experiment on soapy bubbles.

I thought I was helping; I really believed it. Then something happened that popped the bubble that I called my brain.

Zen wanted to join a team at Holy Spirit competing in a future city competition that aims to teach middle-schoolers about working together to engineer a city. Children had to write an essay about why they should be on the team. Zen made the team.

Staring in October, the three kids on her team met during lunch times, after school and during vacation to work on their project. Their teacher advised them to ensure they followed the guidelines, but didn’t diddle with the project.

We parents stayed out of it, too. I never saw their schematics, not once did I edit an essay, and I didn’t glue one goat to the model. In fact, I never saw the project until the day of the Northern California Regional Future City Competition, which was held Jan. 22 at Fort Mason in San Francisco.

The first thing I noticed about the various city models was that most schools must have hired Frank Lloyd Wright’s disciples to design them. No matter how many goats I glued, how many elevators I wired, I never could have helped my kid’s model look as slick as these.

The Holy Spirit students looked stunned when they compared theirs to the others. We told them this was their first year and it was a learning experience. The children moved forward, explaining their projects to judges. A big part of their score depended on their responses.

Following a grilling from more than a dozen judges who were engineers, the top five projects were honored. Only the No. 1 project would move on to the national competition in Washington. Holy Spirit didn’t make the top five.

During the afternoon awards ceremony, the judges handed out several other prestigious awards. We were overjoyed when we heard our eighth-graders, Caitlin Humphreys, Victoria Paulson, Devin Wieser and Daniel Morgan, win a Best of Class award. Just as our hearts returned to regular rhythms, our seventh-graders, Thomas Keown, Mandi Moy and Jacob Perata, won the award for Most Expressive City.

Science teacher Syndi Piel and I screamed as our hearts once again picked up pace. It was, indeed, a learning experience - for all of us. And that is the story about how my goat-gluing days ended.