Old stuff

On Friday, we were learning about Texas history and geography. I found a 10-minute video online from the 1950s about the Southwest states (Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma) that was quite interesting for its historical value. For starters, it is all in black and white. That's unusual to my children. When talking about agricultural products, it shows a line of black men picking cotton--calling them "Negroes", incidentally, which is a term my children never hear--but nowadays cotton is mechanically picked in the USA. Cotton is only picked by hand in developing countries. It's sobering to realize that my mother and father grew up in a country that was similar in many ways to today's developing countries.

Among other fun parts of the video, all the people, male and female, walking down city streets wear hats, and the women are all in skirts. It talks about the large herds of Angora goats being raised in Texas to meet the demand for mohair; I'd bet those herds are quite a bit smaller now. The Northeast is described as being the source of manufactured goods for the Southwest; nowadays, it seems we get most everything manufactured from Asia, especially China.

Inevitable?

My husband overheard someone talking yesterday about feminism and the fight against "patriarchy." It made me think: It's a truism in relationships that the person who cares less about the relationship has more power. And aren't men, for whatever reason, less committed on average to staying faithful to the women in their lives? The evidence seems to point that way. So doesn't that make it inevitable in the realm of western heterosexual relationships that men will tend to have a bit more power than women? Doesn't that cause a small degree of male dominance, i.e., patriarchy, to be inevitable? And are there other areas of life where the matriarchy, i.e., women, will inevitably end up more powerful on average? What would they be? My first thought is parenting, for biology makes it so that mothers are more likely to be physically proximate to their children than are fathers.

Venezuela and Communist Ideals

Venezuela has an enormous amount of wealth in oil reserves, but the people there don't even have enough toilet paper. I sincerely hope that they oust Maduro soon. They're never going to get a perfect president, but surely they can get one that doesn't destroy businesses like nationalizing Chavez (who enriched himself to the tune of a billion USD by the time he died) and Maduro have done.

If there is one thing that last century's history teaches us, communist systems do not work for long. Even voluntary communes (kibbutzim, United Order, Brook Farm, etc.) fall apart or move away from communist ideals over time. People are, on the whole, beings that look out for their own interest. People need to be able to profit from their labor and investment, or they will not labor or invest. People need free markets, or they will create black markets.

Happies

My baby just turned two. She says "Please!" when she wants something, draws "happies" (happy faces) on pieces of paper (we think she might finally have figured out that she really isn't allowed to draw in books, especially library books), and likes to dress up in dresses and pretend to be a ballerina.

I love seeing my children grow up. Sometimes the process seems so slow--I blame pregnancy and postpartum fatigue for that--but as I put old-fashioned clip-on earrings and a grown-up necklace on dd9 last night for a church "tea party" (no actual tea, just water, but lots of sweets and flowers), I had a momentary vision of her in ten years, a lovely, fun-loving, and self-assured 19-year-old dressing up for a special evening.

I think she actually will be a confident young woman. I'm very grateful for the chance to homeschool/part-time public school her these past few years. She has an Aspie streak and exhibits social delays similar to those which made some of my school years miserable, and I think our current schooling arrangement is going to allow her to skip a lot of that misery herself. Children need socialization time in a group setting of peers, but it's torture for some children to have to be in those situations 35+ hours a week (much more if one counts extracurriculars and social media interactions). I didn't really start recovering from my "pariah years" in grades 5-6 until I was homeschooled for a semester in 8th grade. Sometimes kids just need a break. Emotional wounds are like scabs in that they need to be left alone for a while in order to heal.

Too much choice? Ain't no such thing.

Both my family and that of one of my sisters live in Colorado, a veritable wonderland of school choice options. My sister lives in an affluent area with good schools, especially the multiple charter school options. She has homeschooled in the past and utilized a part-time enrollment option at a charter school, and her children now go to a Core Knowledge charter school full-time, and everyone in the family seems very pleased with it. But she was telling me that sometimes she worries that maybe she should be sending her children to a different charter school because that might be a better school. She complained that having "too many choices" made life harder because she didn't know for certain whether she was picking the best choice. I've heard the claim that "too much choice doesn't make people happier" from a local parent, too, after she had taken her child out of the charter school that my children attend part-time.

I energetically proclaim that there is no such thing as "too much choice" when it comes to school options! One might as well complain that life is "harder" because we have the option of shopping at stores besides Kmart or picking our own spouses. Yes, there are opportunity costs to worry about, but freedom to choose the stores and spouses we most prefer easily trumps those.

My husband is happy at his job, but as savvy workers do, he gets emails from professional organizations about job openings in his field. Today he forwarded me one from a smallish city in central Texas. Since we're snow-and-cold-bound (the kids are watching Wild Kratts and weaving today), I spent a couple of hours researching the city in Texas, and the educational options there are appalling for a family like ours (bookish, non-sporty, interested in different cultures and science, etc.).

The public schools there have drug and gang problems and don't seem very focused on academics (which I thought was kind of the point of schools, silly me), and the only charter school in town appears VERY focused on sports with just a teensy mention of academics on their website. There are no part-time enrollment options; unlike nearly half the country, Texas hasn't figured out how to let homeschooled kids attend choir, band, and track at the local public schools for which their parents are paying property taxes--opposition to such participation appears to be based on worries about multiple Tim Tebows "unfairly" competing against the public school jocks. Again, silly me for thinking that schools care about a little thing like actual education when there are sports to worry about. 

The university in town doesn't appear to accept part-time enrollment of high-school aged kids unless they are dual-enrolled full-time high school juniors or seniors. The local community college is geared towards very low level academics (cosmetology?). The private schools and one homeschool co-op are nearly all associated with specific non-inclusive religious views, and from an earlier post you can probably guess how unwilling I would be to put my children in educational environments that construe the Bible to require the rejection of modern scientific findings. There are online charter schools in Texas, but I don't need some bureaucrat's favorite curriculum jammed down my throat for the entire school day; I can choose my own textbooks, thank you. What I need is a moderate amount of classroom enrichment for my kids as a supplement to their personal and academic development, and there seems to be nothing of the kind available in central Texas.

Here in Colorado, we have school choice (i.e., one can "permit" into schools outside of the assigned ones, space allowing, and funds follow the student) and many different kinds of charter schools, including ones that fund college classes for students who are ready for them. The public school districts have to actually try (gasp!) to attract families, so they offer Montessori-style schools, part-time programs for homeschoolers, part-time enrollment at regular schools, etc. And yet somehow we haven't seen an explosion in homeschooled kids destroying the local athletics scene for everyone else. 

Viva la choice! To misquote Trace Adkins' country song, "I Ain't Never Had Too Much Fun,"

Too much choice, what's that mean? It's like too much money, there's no such thing. It's like a girl too pretty, with too much class, Being too lucky, a car too fast. No matter what they say I've done, well, I ain't never had too much choice.

My husband can just ignore that job posting in central Texas.

Weaving

Dd9 learned to weave on a cardboard loom at her part-time school program today. She was so delighted with the product (a little 2x8 inch four-color weaving) that she taught dd4 and dd6 to do it this evening. They spent around 2 hours or more on it. Dd6 was very frustrated several times, but dd9 patiently helped her, as well as doing most of the work on dd4's weaving. 

I would have never attempted this craft with such young children, but dd9 can sometimes be quite dogged about things she is interested. Glad it worked out well tonight!