On February 11, 2019 Mrs. Zentz, AP Psychology teacher, assigned her AP Psychology classes to take care of an egg for a full seven day week. Students are entirely responsible for the care of an egg as it goes through the stages of development from ages 0-18. The students must parent their egg for 24 hours for seven days.
“It wasn’t really hard to take care of the egg during class periods because the egg kind of just sat there at the edge of my desk. I would keep my egg with me in my room if I was at home, if I went somewhere I took it with me or in the fridge if it started to smell weird.” Hannah Solon (11) said.
Students doing this “eggsperiment” also had to decorate and name their eggs. The eggs were given faces, hair and even little details like freckles. Since babies sleep in a crib as well so to give this experience a more real life feel students had to also create a crib and holder.
“I decided to name my egg baby Gert because I saw the name Gert on a show one time and I’ve liked the name since [then] because it’s funny.” Solon said.
Parents can not always be around to take care of their child just as the students will not always be around to take care of their egg. Mrs. Zentz implemented the rule of “Egg Daycare”, where students had to have their egg baby attend class with them everyday and be provided with free daycare during their class hour only.
“It was hard to take care of my egg baby during other classes because people wanted to touch her and try to break it. I didn’t know you had to refrigerate the egg because no one told me so I would put her on my bed and floor for hours.” Sophia Gottfried (10) said.
Throughout the week, students also needed to document the time they spent with their egg baby. Mrs. Zentz expected the students to be detailed and thorough in their explanations. Not only did she want the students to document their experiences but developm a few conflict scenarios to decide what they would do and say to their egg baby as they go through development. Mrs. Zentz also wanted the students to include all aspects of the situation such as emotion and parenting style they used to hand the conflict with their egg.
“For my scenario, I did the potty training [scenario] and I said I would reward my kid after they use the bathroom properly, but if they didn’t, I would teach them how to use the toilet the right way.” Gottfried said.
This experiment was supposed to show students that there are multiple different ways to parent. Once the experiment is complete, the students decide what type of parenting style they follow the most. The styles that the students should have used to figure out their parenting style is authoritarian, authoritative or permissive parenting.
“I definitely follow the permissive parenting style. I learned that I honestly would be kind of a bad parent because I forgot about my egg baby a few times. This wasn’t a good experiment to better understand parenting because the egg didn’t breathe, talk or walk so not really.” Gottfried said.
