Thoughts on some books I've read
Mar. 16th, 2005 11:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
celticdragonflyI just yesterday finished No Idle Hands: The Social History of American Knitting, by Anne L. Macdonald. I enjoyed the book. Hardback from the library, been having many of those lately, and they remind me why I love my bookstand on the table. I've found that I could read this book comfortably while eating, or while sitting in front of it with my knitting or crocheting, but yes, reading it with empty hands made me twitch. Why yes, I am the target audience!
I learned some interesting things. For one, the whole fuss of people pronouncing that "knitting was almost extinct, but look, now it's having an amazing resurgence!" happens over and over. The book was written in 1988; I find myself wondering what the author thinks of the current knitting resurgence. I was talking to Karl about how often that pronouncement gets made. He commented on the timing of the cycles, and says perhaps that's why I tend to find myself in a demographic hole of knitters. When I go to knitting meetups and such, (and hey, there's one tonight) I find many women significantly older than I am, my mother's age or more, and a group that are in early to mid 20s, and me. I don't meet other knitters my age. I *know* they're out there, but we seem to be demographically rare.
I also recently read Real-Life Homeschooling: The Stories of 21 Families Who Teach Their Children at Home, by Rhonda Barfield. Very interesting. She does make a point that these are anecdotal and illustrative, not necessarily demographically representative. So I am trying to avoid making too much stew out of the anecdotal oyster.
I do notice however, both in this book and in others I have looked at, that a great number of homeschooling families have a setup with one stay-at-home parent and the other parent having unusual employment - self employed, running their own business, or having a flexible job where their kids can come with them sometimes. So I wonder - is it that the help and flexibility of one parent (usually the father) being self-employed and more available makes homeschooling more likely to work out? Is it that a family already running a business finds it easier to make the conceptual jump to running their own school, too?
Given that there's no way Karl can run his own business, or work somewhere that he could take kids with him, is this bad news for us? I mean, if he was a contractor or something, sure, but that kind of thing just doesn't work with aerospace engineers.
Lots of variety in learning styles. I do NOT see myself going to the seriously "unschooled" style. I just don't think that would work for us. I like checklists, I like the reassuring idea of comparing a child against the public school curricula - not using them, probably, but being able to compare and say "yep, we're way ahead, bwahahah". I have a lot of interest in older style curricula, and in what was done in the old one-room schoolhouses. I know there's materials for those still available. I'd like to learn more about how they were used.
Hm, in that anecdotal selection, lots of families with lots of boys, or many boys and a girl or two. I wonder what the demographic numbers are on percentages of boys and girls in homeschooling. Just idly curious.
I'm reading another homeschooling book now, Homeschooling - The Early Years or something like that. I mostly don't like it. The layout is awful and distracting - lots of sidebar stuff, and every page or so has a sentence or paragraph that apparently the author was just too proud of, because it gets repeated in a gray box that interrupts the flow of text. I feel like it's being written for someone who can't read anything more complicated than USA Today, and I feel talked down to. Gah.
When I finish this batch of books, or get close to it, I'll go hit the library website and gather up more!
I learned some interesting things. For one, the whole fuss of people pronouncing that "knitting was almost extinct, but look, now it's having an amazing resurgence!" happens over and over. The book was written in 1988; I find myself wondering what the author thinks of the current knitting resurgence. I was talking to Karl about how often that pronouncement gets made. He commented on the timing of the cycles, and says perhaps that's why I tend to find myself in a demographic hole of knitters. When I go to knitting meetups and such, (and hey, there's one tonight) I find many women significantly older than I am, my mother's age or more, and a group that are in early to mid 20s, and me. I don't meet other knitters my age. I *know* they're out there, but we seem to be demographically rare.
I also recently read Real-Life Homeschooling: The Stories of 21 Families Who Teach Their Children at Home, by Rhonda Barfield. Very interesting. She does make a point that these are anecdotal and illustrative, not necessarily demographically representative. So I am trying to avoid making too much stew out of the anecdotal oyster.
I do notice however, both in this book and in others I have looked at, that a great number of homeschooling families have a setup with one stay-at-home parent and the other parent having unusual employment - self employed, running their own business, or having a flexible job where their kids can come with them sometimes. So I wonder - is it that the help and flexibility of one parent (usually the father) being self-employed and more available makes homeschooling more likely to work out? Is it that a family already running a business finds it easier to make the conceptual jump to running their own school, too?
Given that there's no way Karl can run his own business, or work somewhere that he could take kids with him, is this bad news for us? I mean, if he was a contractor or something, sure, but that kind of thing just doesn't work with aerospace engineers.
Lots of variety in learning styles. I do NOT see myself going to the seriously "unschooled" style. I just don't think that would work for us. I like checklists, I like the reassuring idea of comparing a child against the public school curricula - not using them, probably, but being able to compare and say "yep, we're way ahead, bwahahah". I have a lot of interest in older style curricula, and in what was done in the old one-room schoolhouses. I know there's materials for those still available. I'd like to learn more about how they were used.
Hm, in that anecdotal selection, lots of families with lots of boys, or many boys and a girl or two. I wonder what the demographic numbers are on percentages of boys and girls in homeschooling. Just idly curious.
I'm reading another homeschooling book now, Homeschooling - The Early Years or something like that. I mostly don't like it. The layout is awful and distracting - lots of sidebar stuff, and every page or so has a sentence or paragraph that apparently the author was just too proud of, because it gets repeated in a gray box that interrupts the flow of text. I feel like it's being written for someone who can't read anything more complicated than USA Today, and I feel talked down to. Gah.
When I finish this batch of books, or get close to it, I'll go hit the library website and gather up more!
