"Whether I was sewing, working in the garden, cooking, milking, tending my chickens, or helping the children hoe, my mind was always with them. And watching them at times like that gave me a thrill. They were my flower garden in my hard years of toil and loneliness. As each child was born it was a flower added to my garden, each a new kind, each needing different care."
~ Mary Mann Hamilton, Trials of the Earth
In raising my children, I think back -- or try to -- to when I was a child and how I was every day, what I liked, didn't like, how I felt, what I wanted to do, what I didn't, what I liked to eat and didn't like, what were the frightening and unpleasant things for me, the happy and enjoyable, and then try to think how my parents fit into all that, my mother, my father, then see how I can use those memories in helping my children.
My parents roles and influence were very different, my dad being away a lot at sea or off on some TAD. During the Gulf War he was gone for 11 months, so my mom was in charge of the household and had to handle everything, including us kids, by herself.
Almost every summer I got bundled off to my grandparents at the ranch starting when I was eight. My brothers also came, sometimes, but being older usually had something else to do, go to Boy Scout camp at some exciting place -- to me it seemed exciting anyway -- like Emerald Bay on Catalina Island, where they learned to sail and snorkel, get lifeguard certified and all kinds of cool things. But at the ranch I had my own horse and learned how to take care of her and other animals.
My grandfather and his friend, a retired search and rescue expert, taught me how to track, which I found fascinating. What I remember most about that is that I had to go barefoot while tracking. That made me watch carefully where I stepped, looking down at where I placed my feet. Doing that, I noticed what I otherwise would not have -- all the little details, insects, scat, disturbed pebbles and twigs, a grass blade pressed into the earth.... I also learned to look behind me frequently, not only to remember the way back, but also because an animal that realizes it is being tracked will circle around behind the tracker and keep an eye on him (or her).
My grandfather would step on a blade of grass or a dandelion and have me not merely look at it but study it so I could remember how it looked freshly stepped on. Then an hour later he would have me do the same thing, then two hours later...then the next day, the day after...the next week. When I could tell him with certainty how many hours or days had passed since the blade of grass, plant leaf or flower had been stepped on, he had me do it in increments of minutes. You think that can't be done? It can. He taught me to do the same thing with scratches on tree bark, broken twigs, disturbed pebbles, footprints in soil and mud, with scat (animal feces).
I learned that if you are looking for deer, don't look for the body, which may blend in to the surroundings, but look for the ears. Not only do they stand out but they move. Sooner or later they move and then you will spot them.
I learned that any animal, human included, on a still day has a scent hemisphere about 30 feet in radius. Any animal that comes within 30 feet of you will become aware of you. But it will ignore you if you don't behave in an aggressive manner -- that includes looking directly at it: only predators stare at other animals. There are things you can do to conceal your scent, the most effective being to smear yourself with the feces of another animal. Coating yourself with mud also works, though not as well. My grandmother put her foot down on me doing that. Thank, grandma!
One useful practice I gained from that training was to mark my footwear in some distinctive way, cut a notch in the soles or something, and tell others so that if I became lost and rescuers were searching for me, when they found a footprint they could immediately know whether it was mine or not. All my family's footwear is so identified now.
My grandfather also taught me how to shoot, which I learned to do well, but which I did not like and had no interest in, but learned because I wanted not to disappoint him. He was a stern man and I was a little afraid of him and I didn't want to make him cross with me. So when he threw an old tobacco can in the air and told me to shoot the head off Prince Albert, I raised my old single-shot Ithaca .22 and knocked it out of the sky.
 |
| Relic of the old weird America. Guess what No. 10 is. |
As it is, we teach as things come up. Children are naturally curious about pretty rocks, clouds, flowers and trees and all the wild things flying buzzing, hopping and grazing they see. So without effort they are introduced to botany, zoology and geology. These lead not only to general sciences like evolution, meteorology and climatology but more practical sciences such as pedology, animal husbandry and assorted agricultural practices. These sciences are taught naturally during the day as we carry out routine activities, take walks and horseback rides, finding interesting rocks and curious plants, hear different bird songs, see frogs and newts, fish and crawdads in streams, find intriguing animal trails and spoor.
Children love to hear stories and have things explained to them on the spot: "Mom! Look! Look! What is this shiny red rock with these white circles in it?" "Dad, is this an arrowhead? Can you teach me to make a bow and arrow and can I use this as the point? What kind of wood should I use for the bow? Should I use a different wood for the arrow shaft? How can I tell those trees apart and where should I look for them? Why are there different trees anyway? How did the Indians make bowstrings without string? What...."
Finding a fossil leads to paleontology and the coolest thing of all for little boys -- dinosaurs!
Being around animals and observing the practices of selective breeding they learn about sex in a matter-of-fact way and what it is for -- producing the next generation. They see and we help them understand the differences in behavior between males and females. They also learn the value of creating offspring with a high genetic-value partner, and the troubles that come from bad mate selection. We practice eugenics with our livestock, as do all stockmen; if we didn't, we'd be out of business. We buy and sell sperm from high quality sires as a matter of course. They see the results. We point out that we breed the traits that are useful to us, not the animal; in fact some traits we breed for would result in the animal's death in the wild, and the animal has no say in how we breed it.
When they ask about the applicability of eugenics to people, we discuss the ramifications, speculate about a world ruled by eugenics and who would determine what traits were eugenic. We speculate on breeding humans for specific uses, like insects in an ant colony, and are we not now haphazardly doing it? That leads us to both literature and history. History inevitably leads to warfare, especially warfare before what we call civilization -- societies organized around agriculture, controlled by a literate elite -- when invading tribes would exterminate all the males of the conquered, but keep the desirable, breedable females. That leads to archaeology and anthropology....
So just by going about their day-to-day activities, our children are becoming very well educated. Of course, they have periods of formal study, the self-disciple and persistence required to master complex subjects being an important part of a person's education. They need to learn to focus on the goal and not the boring, tiresome early stages of acquiring a skill that in future years they will find useful, remunerative or simply enjoyable.
