Since Christmas 2021 the experts have been crowding the news with their professional opinion as to whether children should go back to in the classroom face to face learning or stay at home for a couple weeks because no one knows how this very virulent omicron COVID variant will act, (mild or a child killer? Are the kids safer at home or in school?)
One time someone described an . . .
expert as “ex” being a has been and “spert” being a drip under pressure. (You decide.) Then several parents were interviewed and they looked desperate and burned out. The main argument for getting the children back to school seemed to be because the ex’sperts thought that the children were being mentally harmed.
This made me wonder what would grandma do? Back in her time most children went to one room schools, often with one of last year’s school graduates being the schoolteacher. Maybe the teacher didn’t graduate from that same school, but from a school a few miles away. From the time a student was in the fourth grade he or she was already helping teach the younger kids because the real teacher was busy teaching the older grades.
In those one room schools, children learned more than the three Rs. Girls learned how to sweep the floor and keep the school neat and tidy. Boys learned to keep the wood box full, start a fire and keep a pail of cold, fresh water carried in from the well or spring. Older children took turns at shoveling a path to the outhouse and keeping it tidy. Teachers didn’t have to moniter how long or often a child went to the outhouse because is was often a cold snowy or rainy trip to cold or smelly outhouse. Children were only kept home from school if a parent was sick and the child had to do a man’s work while at home.
This made me think of my very first occasion to attend a lecture on psychology which was taught one morning at a week long dairy conference several hundred miles from home. If I had not paid several hundred dollars for the course, prebooked my hotel room for a week and known that an entire morning was reserved for a psychology lecture I would not have been there.
Farm safety and psychology lectures are the poorest attended classes that farmers might go to. A little education in farm safety might save serious injury or your life or the life of a family member. Psychology, well, it teaches you how to get along with your family, the milk truck driver, the feed truck driver, the banker, the police man, the environment inspector, the nutritionist, the electrician, the vet, your employees, your dog, etc. Everyone you meet.
The Psychology professor was also an inspirational speaker and after he mentioned how important it is to keep the wife inspired there wasn’t one man who left that class. Before we left that morning, we were given the names of a few very basic, easy read books if we wanted to brush up on our psychology. The first book on psychology that I read in my life is: All I really need to know, I learned in kindergarten. Although this little five dollar book was written in 1986 it’s still on the best seller list. Every day-care worker and kindergarten teacher that I know still teaches these basic values today:
– Share everything;
– Play fair;
– Don’t hit people;
– Put things back where you found them;
– Clean up your own mess;
– Don’t take things that aren’t yours;
– Say you’re sorry when you hurt someone;
– Wash your hands before you eat;
– Flush;
– Warm cookies and cold milk are good for
you;
– Take a nap every afternoon.
Forty some years ago I had the pleasure of teaching a class of Agriculture Students at MacDonald college and was quite surprised that psychology was still not taught at an institute of higher learning. I still wonder if it’s the children who are being deprived by being taught at home, or …
Children are very quick to notice problems at home. Stress because of a job loss. Stress because of parents not in their routine that they have become accustomed to for the past several years. Stress because of parent insecurity.
Sometimes I think that farmers are very lucky because they are used to being faced with new challenges and problems to face each day (the water pump broke, it rained unexpectedly with 200 acres of hay cut, a cow has a DA, the dry cows broke the fence down, there are army worms in the grain field; etc.)
Chris Judd is a farmer in Clarendon on land that has been in his family for generations.
gladcrest@gmail.com
