The letter from my daughter’s first grade teacher said: “We will be celebrating St. Patrick’s Day with a special project. Each student will be asked to build a ‘Leprechaun Trap!’”
A Leprechaun Trap! Hot diggidy dog!
It’s supposed to encourage her imagination and ability to write about a sequence of steps. But I don’t know why it kept talking about her. I GET TO BUILD A LEPRECHAUN TRAP!!! WOOHOO!
As you can see, I’m a bit excited. Oh, the possibilities.
“We could incorporate your toy that shines a rainbow onto the wall, luring the Leprechaun in by making him think there’s a pot of gold. Genius, huh?
“Uh, no,” my daughter said. “That wouldn’t work. Leprechauns know better.”
Ouch! Shot down by a 7-year-old. But I won’t be deterred. I’ll sit at the desk for a while, sketching endless ideas on dozens of sheets of paper. I’ll drink coffee until all hours of the night. I’ll try to come up with something incredible and sure to work.
“How about this: The steam turbine powers a giant industrial fan which blows the Leprechaun into this electrified titanium cage …”
Go grandiose or go home.
That was always my motto as a kid. I would get projects at school — build a birdhouse, add 2 + 2 — and then go off to my desk to come up with amazing solutions.
As a kid, there was no better homework than a project like this. It was a chance to let your mind run wild, to invent, and to dig through cabinets in the garage that hadn’t been opened in 20 years. (Often they contained hazardous materials that had been banned for causing tumors in metal.) But it was a treasure-trove for an inventor. “Asbestos and benzene-laced paint? This will work perfectly on my windmill model.”
I can’t remember how many times the hazardous materials unit had to shutdown my school, but it was a lot.
My dad taught at the local community college and always took my brother and me into the labs for stuff we could use. There was all manner of cool stuff at our disposal — a school project funhouse. Circuit boards, transistors, switches, lights, unidentified substances growing in forgotten coffee mugs. We plugged them all together and submitted them for literature projects.
I don’t think my grades were ever very good on them. For starters, inventiveness demands veering off course and going wherever your mind takes you. My teacher would say things like, “Mr. Thompson, it’s a very lovely robotic self-charging back scratcher, but the assignment was on the signing of the Declaration of Independence.”
Ooops.
And then there was the fact that my plans often called for materials that were quite expensive, or hadn’t even been invented yet. Disappointment doesn’t begin to explain the feeling of having to settle for balsa wood and modeling cement.
Sleek futuristic space ships ended up looking like ramshackle clubhouses from “The Little Rascals.”
“It’s not a hobo camp!” I would protest. “It’s a vehicle for interstellar space travel!”
Did Edison have to contend with this?!?
My daughter has her own ideas for the Leprechaun Trap. She’s gone to her own desk with her own pencil and paper to sketch out her own plans. I’m fighting the urge to look over her shoulder. To offer advice and suggest little additions to the project, like a warp drive or some kind of plutonium-powered stun gun. It’s tough to let her be. To not jump in. To just be the helper, and not the inventor. But it’s her project — her idea — and a dad’s got to know when to step back, and not step in it. (Damn that growing up!)
It’s her time to feel the excitement of inventing. And who knows? Her project might work. Might get a good grade. Might even look like a Leprechaun Trap, instead of a hobo camp. Wouldn’t that be something?