Babbling Botkin: "What if My Husband Dies?" - Part Eleven

Hello!

I am decidedly over winter right now.   I'm enjoying having enough snow to cross-country ski out behind our house - but we've had high temperatures in the mid-teens for over a week.    Every time I leave the house, I'm cold for at least a half hour after I return inside.   

It's way too cold for Spawn and I to enjoy our weekly walks from his school to the local greasy spoon - and I miss those walks much more than I expected to.   We'd probably be ok enough on the walk - but he's got my pale, dry, eczema-prone skin - and he's been getting windburn on his cheeks in the few minutes he's outside on the way to and from school.   

I'm soothing myself by remembering that spring is right around the corner.  I'll be setting up a low-tunnel to warm up the soil for cold weather crops within two weeks and get my specialty tomatoes and peppers started in the basement.    

And soon enough, I'll be crabby because I'm hot and stuck outside working in that dratted garden all the time.....

Here's the next installment of Geoffrey Botkin's video "What if My Husband Dies?"  In the previous post, he'd happily explained that young men can become lawyers in Virginia through an apprenticeship - but hadn't done the background work to realize that the first qualification required to enter the apprenticeship is a college degree. 

 Awkward.   

The next minute of video features Botkin doing a stream-of-consciousness patter about what young men need to learn from working next to older men:

[00:11:10] Young men learn most about maturity by working alongside older men in the affairs of everyday life - in business - so they need they need this working knowledge -not just head knowledge - a working knowledge of a work ethic. 

They need to know how men engage in honest business deals. 

They need to know what capability looks like in action. 

 So it's not just something they can get from a textbook. And yes, there are textbooks out there about business, but to be able to do it and really have to show up for work and be faithful and get more you know  and get more responsibility 'cause they are faithful in little things and then faithful in other bigger things. 

And so older men can train them not only in useful skills but really in professional conduct.  How to manage money how to manage contracts how to deal professionally with difficult people.  

Botkin-rambles like these cause me to wonder what Geoffrey Botkin thinks the life of a stay-at-home mom of many, many littles who are also being homeschooled looks like.

Are young men oblivious to the sheer amount of work that their mothers and sisters do in a day? 

 Cooking three meals from scratch while teaching all of the students and managing the many mini-crises in the life of tiny ones is a never-ending slog of work.   I have many reservations about massive families trying to home-school - but I've always assumed "willing to work beyond the point of exhaustion" is a given character trait.

Maybe Botkin is simply passing on a two centuries of Western civilization's view of women and work: work is only worth praising if it is done for currency.   Women shouldn't demean themselves by working for currency.....so women's work inside a family structure isn't work.

Botkin's sudden obsession with "capacity" is a hoot.   Extensive sheltering of homeschoolers mutes a child's or teen's ability to compare their personal skill set against peers.   If Botkin had allowed his daughters to compare their writings with the writing skills of other teenagers, the daughters would have realized that one sister is a solid writer and the other sister has some serious short-falls in fluency, sentence structure and planning of topics.   

The part where Botkin declares that boys can't learn about business from a textbook - then suddenly remembers that business textbooks do exist! - causes me to giggle every time.   In fact, there's an entire section of ethics that deals with businesses - but that might cause Botkin's mind to explode.   

Oh, Lord....that could be his next business venture if he ever clears his head of his current QAnon fixation......

I'm a bit lost as to why young men can only learn about work ethic from other men.   I imagine most of the early learning about work ethic happens at home.   Parents can encourage or ignore the work ethic of their children.  I grew up in a family that appreciated hard work and I replicate how my parents raised me with my son.   He's spent a great deal of his childhood so far working at PT, OT, and Speech.  I praise my son for working hard and notice when he continues working on a difficult task - regardless of his end result.   The process of working hard is something I want to pass on to him - so I point it out with pride when he's working hard even as a preschooler.

The bit I disagree with Botkin on is that hard work doesn't always lead to success.   I've spent a great deal of time and effort attempting to learn how to do two-dimensional art.  The outcome of all of that hard work is that I am a very poor sketcher or painter.   I do not regret the time or effort I've used in that area - but I simply lack much aptitude in visualizing how a three-dimensional object becomes lines 
and in getting my hand to make lines that match the line in my head.     

Not everyone is great at a task - and knowing when to spend more time on more productive area is a skill worth having, too.   After all, a basic aptitude plus hard work is a great foundation for excellence.  I am very weak at drawing or painting - but I'm a very talented textile artist in both crochet and sewing.   I've spent thousands of hours crocheting since I learned when I was 12.   My first pieces were very basic and showed a normal lack of technique - but I found a crochet hook and yarn easier to manipulate than pencils or paintbrushes.  

 Slowly, I learned how to keep the yarn tension constant which made the gauge of the stitch even. I learned how to count stitches and to recognize when a row didn't look right. 

As I got more skilled, I learned how to adapt patterns and make my own. 

I remember the first time I recognized that a line of written pattern was clearly not right.   I also remember the first time I was able to write out the correction to the pattern.

I learned the wisdom of starting over when my first plan for a project turned out wonky.  (Hello, the three false-starts on Spawn's winter hat!)

I learned the importance of trying a small practice swatch when doing a new complicated pattern because unraveling a six-inch by three-inch swatch of yarn leftover from your son's hat is way less exasperating than unraveling 40 inches by 4 inches from a baby afghan.

Where did I learn this work ethic?  From my parents - neither of whom worked at home.   

Mom worked at a retail store - but her coworkers all seemed to think she worked hard.   When my twin and I applied to work at that same store as teenagers, the managers were clear that being our mother's daughters was a great asset because they assumed we work hard.   

Dad taught - and I saw how much time and effort he put in outside of school on his job.   That and the sheer amount of effort and enthusiasm he brought to high school and community theater.

 I didn't have to sit and watch them work every day because I saw how they worked at home, too.   Mom and Dad both expected us to help out our elderly neighbors by shoveling their driveways during the winter and raking leaves during the fall.   We did it because that's what we saw the adults in our family doing.

For the woman who wrote to Botkin in the first place, please don't start a family business because Botkin thinks it's the only way for kids to learn a work ethic.   It's not.   Most hard workers come from families where parents worked outside the home - and that's ok.