Joyfully At Home: Chapter Fourteen - Part Two

Hello!

I spent the morning digging out our driveway from the blown snow left by the last snowstorm.   The storm was during low temperatures - under 20 degrees F - so the snow is very powdery.  Combined with continual winds, I think most of the snow from our front yard and back yard was blown into the driveway where it was trapped in the depressions of the two-tracks.    I giggled a bit to see lightly snow-covered grass in the front yard and 6" of snow in the driveway.  

It helped that there was a pretty sunrise and a group of foraging juncos chirping happily in long-grass area behind our backyard.

We are working our way through the questions posed by Jasmine Baucham in the fourteenth chapter of "Joyfully At Home".  The first section we looked at had Jasmine explaining her dad's beliefs about college degrees and me discussing how erroneous those beliefs were. 

In the next section, Jasmine explains what greatly important things she was doing while being a stay-at-home daughter: 

Question 1: What is your belief on college? Do you think that women should go to college? (pg. 163) 

After much consideration, I decided against the traditional college route. The first two years after I graduated were spent under the tutelage of my parents, helping my mother with household duties while working full-time for my father as his research assistant. If people asked me what I did for a living, I'd probably quip that I was the all-purpose household and office assistant/ brother-wrangler/ sous chef. I was still learning ( at the time, I was researching for Daddy's latest book, What He Must Be) from both of my parents, particularly from my mother, because I had ample time to tag along and take notes. (pg. 164)

I have a question.   

How could Jasmine work full-time for her father as a research assistant for two years to produce a book that has seven footnotes and one paragraph length quote from an outside work in the first two chapters?   

"What He Must Be....If He Wants to Marry My Daughter" by Voddie Baucham shows more signs of scholarship than most CP/QF works, but that's a far cry from the length and depth of academic works cited in a book that had a full-time research assistant working on it for two years.

Assuming a 40 hour work week with two weeks of vacation a year, Jasmine would have spent 4,000 hours compiling and extracting research notes from books and articles.   That's what the job of a real research assistant would look like.    Instead, I suspect Jasmine read books and discussed a lot of ideas with her dad - which is legitimately helpful - but not at the amount of time or intensity required by an outside employer.  

I suspect that in part because her description of her own role has three references to being household help - household assistant, brother-wrangler, sous chef - and one reference to being an office assistant which is a different job title than research assistant.

I feel like a lot of SAHDs are a bit hazy on what full time employment means in the larger world.  It's at least 32 hours of work a week, but 40 hours of work per week.  The details vary quite a bit - but real jobs make multi-tasking between child-care, household chores and the minutia of the job damn near impossible.   That's not because child-care and household work isn't work - but rather because it is!  

I just have a hard time imagining that Jasmine at 18 was able to block out eight hours a day where she was working solely on collecting materials for her father's book without being available for taking care of her 6 younger siblings or doing one of the many chores required in a family with a lot of small children under foot.

This next section shows how Jasmine can miss the point of a complement:

And, just a note here, for those who often tell me that they admire my discipline for being able to pursue an online college degree in lieu of being told what to do every step of the way by tradition college. I think that there is something seriously amiss in a world where students are thought responsible enough to be shipped away from their parents and make wise decisions on a secular college campus, but not responsible enough to take initiative and study under the guidance of their parents at home. (pg. 164-165)

A person compliments Jasmine on doing an online degree - and Jasmine immediately claps back with the fact that most college kids are immature so more of them should study at home with their parents.

That feels like a major over-reach based on CP/QF myths about college students rather than an experience-based discussion of the merits of different methods of learning.

Doing entirely online classes are hard for many different reasons.   

First, entirely online learners miss many of the unspoken benefits of in-person classes.  Humans learn better when they feel like part of a community and showing up in person to a classroom with other students builds community.  Being physically present among other students makes planning for study groups much more simple.   Students remind each other directly and indirectly of assignments that are due soon and tests that are coming up.  Instructors and students also tend to interact more when placed in a room together.

Second, entirely online learners miss benefits accrued from being on a college campus.  CP/QF fearmongers make college campuses sound like a giant drug-fueled orgy - but that's not the main drift of campus life let alone the academic center of colleges.  Physically being present on a college campus allows spontaneous synchronous communication on top of planned online interactions.  I cannot count the number of thought-provoking conversations I've had with professors while helping take-down a lab, walking to or from a presentation, or by just stopping in during office hours.   Similarly, getting academic help can be easier because students have online options for contacting professors or tutors - but they also have access to office hours and drop-in tutoring labs.   In the same theme, there's an added convenience of having rapid access in person to the library, academic counseling and financial counseling that is simply not as rapidly available online.  

Much of this was doubly true when older members of the CP/QF generation - like Sarah (Mally) Hancock and Sarah Maxwell - were college-aged.  When we were college-aged, we could use the internet to search for references but still needed to write out interlibrary loan slips by hand.  I would then receive a photocopy of the article in a week or so.  Honestly, I was just grateful that I didn't have to do research using a card catalog!

College is challenging; online college is more challenging.   The fact that young Jasmine couldn't clearly describe why people kept complimenting her on choosing a more challenging road shows how sheltered she was from the reality of why people do college classes on campus.