Hearth Cooking and Homeschooling

Two things  that don't seem to go together, but yesterday, for me, it did.

I'm very lucky that I have a job that allows me to do all of the activities I love to do.  Like gardening, and hearth cooking, and chasing around chickens, and being chased around by turkeys.  All fun activities! And what makes it even better is that I can teach it to others.  That makes it extra fun as well as extra special.

So yesterday, all afternoon, I taught a group of nine home school students, ages eight to thirteen, how to cook a five course hearth cooked meal.  Say that three times fast.  And believe me it was just as much a learning experience for me as it was for these kids.

I showed them how to cook hard-boiled eggs without a timer.  They showed me how exciting cracking an eggshell of a hard-boiled egg is.  I showed them how to make biscuits from scratch and cook them in a dutch bake oven.  They washed dishes faster than I've seen any group of kids.  I let them make the johny cakes, and they came out excellent.  I sent them on a turkey wrangling expedition in the middle of johny cake making, and though it took 5 of them 45 minutes to hunt them down, they still got all the turkeys in and finished working in the garden.

But most of all they got to experience a pretty tasty meal, if I don't mind saying so myself, and I got to witness a group of children who had a better work ethic, more common sense, and a great ability for solving problems than most adults I know of.  Through my work I've come to interact with lots of children.  And by lots I mean LOTS of children.  Thousands of them.  And many of them were nice and curious.  But these children impressed me to know end with their intelligence, their politeness, and their desire to always have something productive to do.

I'm not going into a rant whether homeschooling or public school is better for a child's upbringing.  I think each has it's place and I'm still deciding what I wish to do with my future children.  But I have to say, with this recent interaction with these very industrious, inquisitive and polite home schooled children, I think homeschooling has got a few more points over public schooling right now.