Something hard

From the back cover of an old Scholastic book we picked up:

"'I don't know what I'm going to be,' said Elizabeth Blackwell when she was six. 'But I think it will be something hard.'

"Twenty years later, mobs threaten her life. Women pull their skirts away when she goes by. No one will rent her a room. No medical school wants to admit her....But Elizabeth did become a doctor--a good one--in spite of everything. Read her thrilling story."

The book is The First Woman Doctor, by Rachel Baker, copyright 1944 and picked up in 1961 by Scholastic.

Do six-year-olds today still get an urge to do "something hard?" Do we encourage or discourage them from those ideas? Do we teach them to embrace or avoid "hard?"

Would children still "get" Elizabeth Blackwell, or this back-cover blurb? Why would you choose to do something that would get your life threatened by mobs, or at the least make you uncomfortable or embarrassed?

"For you know what was paid to set you free from the worthless manner of life handed down by your ancestors. It was not something that can be destroyed, such as silver or gold; it was the costly sacrifice of Christ...." [1 Peter 1:18-19, Good News Bible]

P.S. One Amazon reviewer says that her fourth-grader daughter (who had already read Harry Potter) couldn't get past chapter 4 of this book, because it was just too...hard.

What are you reading at YOUR kitchen table?

A homeschooling blogger pointed me to this article by Mark Oppenheimer on homeschoolers and their books, from the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page. I like his point that homeschoolers (of all stripes) seem to have "a preference for long books, often parts of a series, consumed with a leisure that public-school curricula don't allow." Even as a homeschooling family, time often seems too short to read some of the good stuff we'd like to; we only got a couple of books into the Swallows and Amazons series and I've always wanted to go back and read more. The Apprentice and I are currently reading Oliver Twist when our schedule says "Apprentice's time with Mom" and our other work is done. Dickens is another one of those writers whose books take awhile...but that's good, isn't it? You feel like you've lived with his characters for awhile after spending a long, leisurely time working through Great Expectations or Hard Times.

And public-school curriculum doesn't allow for long books and series books? Hmmm...that would seem to deny the popularity of Harry Potter, but I know what he means. It's the advantage we sometimes do take for granted: time. Take it, even if you're public-schooling, even if you have only a few minutes a day to read together. In Edith Schaeffer's book What is a Family?, she tells about the years when her daughter and son-in-law found their only uninterrupted time together with their school-age children was at the end of lunch hour (because their dinnertime and evenings were often shared with other people in their ministry). So that was it...a few minutes to read from a book together at the end of a quick lunch...but that was what they did.

P.S.: We don't read at the kitchen table, though; well, sometimes with cups of tea and a book of poetry. But usually we're on the couch or on the parental squirrels' bed.