Ever since childhood, society has conditioned students to dread the oh-so cliché “baby project.” Depending on the relative affluence of the imaginary schools that our high-school TV shows take place in, people grow up expecting to be forced to care for anything from and egg, to a flour sack, to an animatronic baby with realistic projectile vomit and poop. Unlike the “Suite Life of Zach and Cody” would have us think, just because we go to private school does not mean we get the robot child with the tape recorder built in. No, the Vocations class at our school cheaped out, and has students take care of hard-boiled eggs.
Much like being a real parent in today’s society, the would-be mothers and fathers in our halls had to take on such responsibilities as: buying a crib and carrier, dropping the egg-child off at Little Knights, making sure the baby is dressed appropriately (as according to Mr. Joel Loecken, “naked kids at child care seemed wrong”), and stuffing the baby in the refrigerator for extended periods of time. You know, the people of Iceland say that cold air is good for a baby’s development.
It is important to point out that the prospective parents don’t actually drop their metaphoric children off at Little Knights; they drop them off in the refrigerator outside of little knights. Quite the contrary, Vocations students will be docked points if they so much as set foot in that den of infancy which ,in my opinion, deludes to objective of the project. Students are not supposed to interrupt the routine of the real-life children, however if someone is running late shouldn’t they get the awkward glare from the care taker? If a Vocations student wakes up a sleeping child he or she should be forced to apologize until they finally figure a way to escape the room. These are situations that ill-prepared parents deal with every day.
When dealing with these little representations-of-human-life, the Vocations class takes it a step further and even pre-natal care is considered. One student several years ago dropped his egg and, due to the fact that he hadn’t boiled the egg long enough, the baby suffered from what we would call either an extreme case of shaken-baby syndrome or shattered baby-skull syndrome. How, you might ask, is the rather unfortunate and traumatic event that is the loss of one’s first child to shattered baby-skull syndrome related to inter-womb monitoring at all? Well, in a world when chicken eggs are human infants, not boiling your egg long enough is equivalent to forcing your baby to be born prematurely due to the parent’s bad habit of smoking throughout the gestation period. Needless to say, this particular parent’s grade was docked.
Yes, while an egg does not share some of the qualities such as size, weight, or decibel count with the little ankle-biters that we have grown accustomed to, I believe that the project still does its job of dissuading teens from becoming single parents. Students have trouble keeping track of an object with no legs that they can keep in their front pockets, just think of being accountable for a being that can learn to run as early as nine months. I imagine that if all of the children at our school were suddenly to bear a spawn, there would be a massive influx of road kill in St. Louis Park.
When I hear students complain about having to make sure that there child is in the fridge, I feel a certain sense of kinship with those eggs; how long ago was it that my own parents were complaining about having to make sure that they had not left me in a smoldering hot vehicle? How long ago was it that my parents only bought me clothes because society frowns upon naked children? How long ago was it that my parents paid little mind to my pre-natal care? Not long ago, not long ago at all. After a period of reflection, I then feel grateful that this project is in place to keep my peers from becoming the neglectful care-givers that they are destined to be for at least a few more years.
