Considering we’ve had people claiming to be lawyers come in here for legal advice on behalf of their clients it seems a little churlish to deny a middle school student a dab of homework advice.
I think we need to know what class this assignment was for, and the purpose of the exercise. Is it meant to demonstrate how much plastic trash a person creates in a day, or to figure out the most efficient way to fill a void with a specified weight of product? Were they allowed to purchase items, or supposed to use household plastic waste? Can they cut the top part of the bottle off to insert larger items and then tape it back together (I’ve got a ton of old plastic Happy Meal toys I could fill a bottle with)?
Why do you feel the need to redo your kid’s assignment? All you’re teaching them, (no matter WHAT you tell them), is that you’re unsatisfied with what they produced.
What do you think she’s learning from you doing it for her? Aren’t you sending her to school so SHE can learn?
This type of parental behaviour always mystifies me. Who exactly will feel better here, for your effort? Her? Or you?
how about acrylic paint?
I think the board rule that I quoted in post 18 is fairly clear. Asking for help to understand concepts is fine, but asking for the answer is not. Looks like the OP is asking for the answer, so he can re-work his daughters homework assignment, which he himself failed at the first time.
Yeah, we’re not helping the kid with her homework. We’re helping her parent who’s… what? taken over the project?
I just re-read the OP:
Poor kid. I had a boss like that.
But I could quit…
My best guess is it’s some kind of exercise in lateral thinking or problem solving.
It would depend on exactly how the assignment is phrased, but can you cut the top of the bottle and then fill it?
Gorilla Glue is polyurethane. You can get an 18 ounce bottle at a hardware store and pour the whole thing into the PET bottle. The stuff expands as it sets, but there should be plenty of room for it.
I’m on my phone so I can’t search for it, but a mod stated that they have relaxed the rules.
naah, “Doing the homework” in this case would involve one of us stuffing a bottle with plastic and sending it to the OP. We’re just brainstorming here.
And my suggestion is to grate some scrap PVC or similar, that should help with getting it fine enough for packing without resorting to melting or buying glue…
Hello Gents. Thanks for all the suggestions. With regard to the propriety of my actions, the project is what I suspected it was, an exercise for environmental awareness. And making a certain weight cut off tests one’s resourcefulness. Still, I thought the 0.5 kilo requirement was too tasking for a 13-year old girl. And it got worst. The wash lady arrived while I was working on it and she complained that her grade school son was required to make THREE such “eco-bricks.” Then it dawned on me. This was a fvcking money drive. The wash lady also complained about the 500-gram requirement, and reported that “collectors” often rejected a kid’s hard work because it didn’t make the weight requirement. Well, the kids didn’t receive anything for their efforts but I’m pretty sure some a-hole made money. My kid studies in a private Catholic school. The wash lady’s in a community public school. So someone in my city wanted several thousand half-kilo waste plastic bricks neatly stuffed into a PET bottle, FREE. How would you feel as a parent?
One thing about the exercise though, you’ll really end up hating plastics.
Last thing: you want know how the wash lady did it? She commandeered her family of five to scrounge all cellophane wrappers in the neighborhood and they spent one night snipping them into miniscule bits. She demonstrated and she cut millimeter sized triangles from a corner of one piece of cellophane.
You redid a 13yr old’s project, of literally ‘putting plastic in a jug‘ because you thought it too taxing for her?
And that’s somehow all okay because they may have had some side reason for the project, that you’ve imagined?
Your 13yr old can’t put plastic in a jug in a ‘right enough’ way to meet your exacting standards?
You redid this project so that YOU will feel good about the result. Your kid will feel like an incompetent shit that can’t be trusted to put plastic in a jug correctly, but that doesn’t matter, it’s all about how you feel not about what she learns from struggling to solve the puzzle.
That’s pretty poor parenting in my opinion.
Perhaps one assignment which turned out to be a crap money drive as I suspected won’t hurt too much. She’s doing quite well in her math and letters, and not asking for things like gender affirmation or a skin color change. A little bad parenting every once in a while is ok.
I’ve been thinking about this more than I should, and this floored me (in a good way). Almost every other parent would go to great lengths to justify their actions, but you didn’t. You’re taking responsibility for stepping in and redoing her assignment.
I hope you get to have a talk with her about this. I often told my kids “I’m going to be a good example for you sometimes, annnnd… a bad example more times.”
But thankfully I usually realized it (and stopped) and we could talk about it. It meant all my kids could raise an eyebrow and say “Another one of your good examples, Dadso…?” Once said to me as I was trying to get my breath back after being the guinea pig for a huge bike jump their friends had constructed at the end of our hill.
Other kid said *“HOW *old are you?”