The kids' school, in addition to the standard curriculum, which is demanding in and of itself, requires them to take extra enrichment classes as they do their studies.
Some are excellent - for example a trip to Alabama to learn about segregation and the civil rights movement which Abby enjoyed, and learned a lot while seeing actual historic places and talking to people who were there.
An enrichment on photography was pretty good, as was a class on learning how to make reasoned arguments.
Some of these enrichments though are not so good.
The current enrichment they both signed up for was on the environment. It was available to fit their schedules, they needed an enrichment this term, and so they signed up.
So their required assignment for the enrichment was for each of them to create a sleeping mat to be donated to the homeless.
The environmental catch - it had to be made by them via crochet with them using plastic bags to create the mat following instructions. Apparently this is to teach the kids to reuse evil environmentally-unfriendly plastic bags in new ways rather than as actual useful and reusable bags.
Well, it's in fact actually more an example of environmental stupidity than anything else.
To make the mats, you first have to cut plastic bags into strips and then crochet them into ropes and then into the mat design.
It does come out ok, eventually, but there's a catch.
We ran out of plastic bags to use at home. Our bag of bags rapidly became empty. We also need those bags as Piper accident waste bags. This caused issues. Every bag we had and more got turned into crochet pieces.
It also makes the mats not look particularly good with the many varieties of plastic shopping bags being used.
We then started giving them new kitchen garbage bags to use for the project which are a lot easier to work with than the thin plastic shopping bags. The second mat was made with 100% new kitchen garbage bags.
Add to this material issue is the fact that it takes hours and hours and hours and hours for kids to crochet a 6-foot-long sleeping mat. Hours they could be using studying or doing other useful rather than busy-work. It's literally taken them months and lots of hours of time to get this done.
In the simplest terms this enrichment class is more about environmentalists' stupidity, feel-good-ism, and wasting time and resources while not effectively solving a problem, than it is about environmentalism.
Not what they were trying to teach, but I sure hope the kids picked up on it.
In short, for the amount of time and materials the kids put in, mats could instead be purchased from Amazon, in a quantity sufficient enough for an entire Platoon to sleep on, providing nice, high-quality, sleeping mats for 50 homeless people rather than two ersatz ones. Likely even more could be bought at a discount in a bulk purchase.
There's a lesson to be learned here, but it's certainly not the one the environmental enrichment class was trying to teach.
