Dioramas

Forget computers, books and blackboards. Today’s educational tool of choice, by all appearances, is that three-dimensional quasi-artistic monument to household upheaval called the diorama.

You can't pass a school today without seeing at least a handful of kids carting their creations up to the school doors. In theory, these dioramas gave the kids a greater understanding of and appreciation for a tiny corner of our world. In reality, all they did was give these kids' parents a good idea of what the world would look like if God were a fourth grade surrealist. Rabbits would be the size of Kilimanjaro, grass would be 90 feet high, alligators and polar bears would live in the same trees, the hills would be covered with glitter and Selena Gomez would hover overhead beside the sun. Which is shaped like an eggplant.

Popular though they may be, I have the sneaking suspicion that dioramas are basically useless. Since when do kids have to build dioramas to learn something? Do you think anyone associated with the Apollo Program built dioramas in grade school? How about Einstein? Oppenheimer? Edison? Can you just see young George Patton building a diorama of the Brazilian rainforest? And those fellows did OK for themselves. Yet for some reason, there's always a diorama under construction in our three-schoolgirl home. They're building a habitat for an Aye Aye (a Madagascar lemur that's about as relevant to my kids as SETI is to the skunk in my yard). Building one of the Stations of the Cross. Building a grassland. Building -- as God is my witness -- a Mexican burial altar, complete with a plastic elephant, a picture of Bach, a chocolate-covered pretzel, a Gryffindor badge and a sugar skull.

Yes that's right. A sugar skull. What is a sugar skull? It’s a skull made of sugar. A human skull. With a patch of shiny foil on top. It’s about the size of a plum. And it cost me five damned dollars. I could have bought two five-pound bags of sugar for five damned dollars. Instead, I got one goofy plum-sized freaky-looking sugar skull that could have come from the world's tackiest Satanism superstore. I’m told they’re all the rage in Mexico. That would help to explain something else that's all the rage in Mexico: drug-gang massacres. How about a diorama of that?

Teachers that assign dioramas assume several things:

1. Parents have spare shoeboxes sitting around at all times just waiting to be desecrated
2. We have crap laying around that we wouldn’t mind hot-gluing to a shoebox
3. We have hot glue guns
4. We have children with artistic ability
5. We have spare fabric
6. We budgeted $5 This month for a goofy damned sugar skull

Note to teachers: you're wrong.

“Well,” teachers might say, “kids have fun with them.” Well of course they have fun with them. They’ve basically just been ordered by the primary authority figures in their lives to do something they love more than life itself: make the house look like a Mardi Gras float exploded in it.

In our house, one diorama — just one — completely ransacks three rooms. There’s the den, where the art supplies are kept and which must be thoroughly scattered so as to find the right foam, construction paper, twigs, cotton balls and walnut shells. There’s the dining room, where all that crap has to be meticulously disorganized into 35 individual piles, half of which are on the floor. Then there’s the kitchen, where everything comes together to create a darling display, which as it sits there all finished and shiny and colorful, looks a lot like an FTD Pick-Me-Up Bouquet in the middle of war-torn Baghdad.

It's not like they're learning a valuable life skill that will help them in their career some day. "Jim, the Mayo Clinic folks are coming in on Wednesday. I'd like you to build a diorama of an operating room that shows our new imaging tool in action. I think it'll seal the deal."

The worst part about dioramas is that after the kids take them to school, they eventually bring them back home again. What the hell am I supposed to do with it now? Yeah, I want to put that Mexican burial altar with its freaking $5 voodoo-shop sugar skull on my mantle. Yet you can't throw it away because, "Oh daddy I like it and I worked so hard on it." No, all you can do is leave it low to the ground and hope that someone breaks it eventually. Then you can pretend it's a darned shame as you carry it out to the garbage laughing quietly to yourself while sipping the iced tea you sweetened with that now-fractured sugar skull.

So please, teachers. No more dioramas. But if you must, here’s the deal: they’re coming to your house to make it. And then you get to keep it.

Enjoy.