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Three girls, a dead raccoon, and a crockpot

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Re: Three girls, a dead raccoon, and a crockpot

#31

Post by clord »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #28

This is a great story. My wife and I did similar sorts of projects when we were home schooling our kids (my favorite was the trip to Yellowstone for a geology/chemistry/geography/ecology/biology quinfecta :-) It doesn't mention, but implies something I found important. That is that as a parent I had to invest my own time in equal to theirs in their learning. It lead to push back at work when I would insist on being h…

Love doing projects like this, I like the project presented above, I think we'll try it with the next old hen to kick the bucket.

We find the hardest part of homeschooling so far is that a lot of the infrastructure for homeschooling is christian. There might be a market for a startup that caters to scientific-minded people who home-school. It seems to be a growing trend.

Re: Three girls, a dead raccoon, and a crockpot

#32

Post by callmeed »

> she really wanted to macerate a bat, to see how its wing looked on the inside. But that's not gonna happen because of the risk of rabies.

Err, depending on your location (in the US), there is a risk of raccoons carrying rabies as well. It's generally isolated to the east coast, but worth noting.

https://www.cdc.gov/rabies/location/usa/surveillance/wild_an...

Re: Three girls, a dead raccoon, and a crockpot

#33

Post by VoiceOfWisdom »

kraig911 wrote: post #30
ChuckMcM wrote: post #28

This is a great story. My wife and I did similar sorts of projects when we were home schooling our kids (my favorite was the trip to Yellowstone for a geology/chemistry/geography/ecology/biology quinfecta :-) It doesn't mention, but implies something I found important. That is that as a parent I had to invest my own time in equal to theirs in their learning. It lead to push back at work when I would insist on being h…

I am thinking of home schooling my daughter with my wife. For one my daughter is autistic and special needs programs in Texas are fairly ok to bad. Two because the curriculum is so brain draining and well my daughter simply would refused to participate in some thing like that. I just am afraid of the socialization with other kids. How did you get around that?

Not the OP, but I was homeschooled. I was in a local homeschool co-op that taught classes that we're better in a group setting. Had a lot of friends there. Was also programmer for a FIRST robotics team, where I met my now wife. I never struggled to socialize as a kid. Homeschooled for my entire education.

Re: Three girls, a dead raccoon, and a crockpot

#34

Post by ChuckMcM »

kraig911 wrote: post #30
ChuckMcM wrote: post #28

This is a great story. My wife and I did similar sorts of projects when we were home schooling our kids (my favorite was the trip to Yellowstone for a geology/chemistry/geography/ecology/biology quinfecta :-) It doesn't mention, but implies something I found important. That is that as a parent I had to invest my own time in equal to theirs in their learning. It lead to push back at work when I would insist on being h…

I am thinking of home schooling my daughter with my wife. For one my daughter is autistic and special needs programs in Texas are fairly ok to bad. Two because the curriculum is so brain draining and well my daughter simply would refused to participate in some thing like that. I just am afraid of the socialization with other kids. How did you get around that?

The social question comes up, generally first or second[1], when people find out that my wife and I chose the homeschooling route. We live in the Bay area, which is pretty urban, and there is a pretty vibrant homeschooling community.

One of the activities my kids participated in was the Riekes Nature Studies program. Once a week a group of about 20 similarly aged students would spend all day (9AM to 3PM) at Huddart Park (a wooded nature park near Woodside) and study different aspects of the park. They would count bird populations, identify tracks, identify plants and their properties, relationships between water and plants and animals, Etc. They also did camp trips to nearby places, once as far as Death Valley. All the while teaching camaraderie, respect, and how to socialize with your peers. We also did a 'science roundabout' with 6 other families home schooling where all of the kids would go to one of the parents houses for a half day of science curriculum. We had a Doctor, a couple of engineers, a couple of Chemists, and a biologist I believe. Two days a week. each day one of the parents would host the group, so while the group met twice a week each parent saw them once every three weeks. That was a good amount of time to work up a concept/lab for the next group session. They also participated in a bunch of other activities as group, whether it was Church related or softball or scouts.

What they didn't have to deal with is bullies in middle school and uninterested adult supervision. Or being traumatized by kids that were attempting to establish dominance through social stratification. When one of those negative patterns surfaced in one of the kids in our cohort it was pretty clear pretty quickly that either they could learn to be an adult about this stuff or not participate. That is really effective on 10 and 11 year olds who are trying to figure this stuff out.

[1] In my area the other question that competes with this one is "Can my kid get into a good university if they have been home schooled?" and the answer is yes, and sometimes more easily if they have a lot of activities and projects.

[2] http://www.riekes.org/nature/

Re: Three girls, a dead raccoon, and a crockpot

#35

Post by ars »

chrissnell wrote: post #11
pavel_lishin wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I could never use that crockpot for food again. They actually mentioned that the crockpot in question was brought home from a lab, and it was used specifically for cleaning biogoo from bones. But otherwise, I totally agree on the ick factor. I'm a little surprised that a crockpot with detergent, and then hydrogen peroxide, is all it takes to sufficiently disinfect dead critter stuff. (Then again, I toss raw meat in…

Disinfecting things isn't as hard as some might think. Sewage processing, for example, is pretty low-tech. By the time your toilet water makes it to the plant, most of the poop has dissolved. They run the liquid through a metal strainer to get most of the non-organics out (condoms, tampons, etc). Then the sewage is pumped into settling ponds where most of the solids settle to the bottom and they aerate it so that the…

> but they typically dump it into a stream

And then the next city downstream gets that water and drinks it anyway.

Depending on where you live (i.e. near a large river) reducing water usage doesn't really make much environmental difference, as long as you dump it in the sewer: The water gets reused many many times on its way to the ocean.

Re: Three girls, a dead raccoon, and a crockpot

#36

Post by 100k »

This is really cool!

When I was a kid, I read a book about Eugenia Clark (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenie_Clark) who defleshed a dead animal she found as a kid. I found a dead bird and tried to do the same using an old coffee tin over our camp stove in the garage. My parents were nonplused (my dad was a biologist too, but he studied plants so I don't think he was into defleshing dead animals...) and that was the end of my biology experiments.

I'm glad to know to actually do this. Maybe someday my daughter and I can do the project.

Re: Three girls, a dead raccoon, and a crockpot

#37

Post by mygo »

killgrove wrote: post #24
bluedino wrote: post #5

I was eating lunch with some co-workers around the time of the Boston marathon bombing a few years ago. One of the people didn't know what a pressure cooker was, and they were showing one on whatever news channel was playing. Another co-worker piped up with, "When I was in 5th grade my mom used a pressure cooker to clean the bones of a dead sheep I found" Intrigued, I had him finish the story. They lived in a farm ar…

I do wonder, with the ridiculous popularity of the InstantPot, when we'll see a post somewhere about how to use it to macerate a dead animal. It'd be perfect for it!

We do this all the time. When they mentioned a slow cooker I was thinking have they not heard of a pressure cooker? I read in an InstantPot ad that you can get fall-off-the-bone meat, from frozen, in less than an hour and I thought man that’s the tool for de-fleshing the bones of small vertebrates right there

Re: Three girls, a dead raccoon, and a crockpot

#38

Post by emj »

chrissnell wrote: post #11
pavel_lishin wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I could never use that crockpot for food again. They actually mentioned that the crockpot in question was brought home from a lab, and it was used specifically for cleaning biogoo from bones. But otherwise, I totally agree on the ick factor. I'm a little surprised that a crockpot with detergent, and then hydrogen peroxide, is all it takes to sufficiently disinfect dead critter stuff. (Then again, I toss raw meat in…

Disinfecting things isn't as hard as some might think. Sewage processing, for example, is pretty low-tech. By the time your toilet water makes it to the plant, most of the poop has dissolved. They run the liquid through a metal strainer to get most of the non-organics out (condoms, tampons, etc). Then the sewage is pumped into settling ponds where most of the solids settle to the bottom and they aerate it so that the…

Sewage treatment is really hard and a costly thing to do, it might be low tech but it is still hard to disinfect water once you have polluted it with water flushing toilets. Grey water is another thing completely but that is off topic here.

Re: Three girls, a dead raccoon, and a crockpot

#39

Post by js2 »

bluedino wrote: post #5

I was eating lunch with some co-workers around the time of the Boston marathon bombing a few years ago. One of the people didn't know what a pressure cooker was, and they were showing one on whatever news channel was playing. Another co-worker piped up with, "When I was in 5th grade my mom used a pressure cooker to clean the bones of a dead sheep I found" Intrigued, I had him finish the story. They lived in a farm ar…

Just FYI, crock pots are slow cookers and don't keep the contents under pressure.

Re: Three girls, a dead raccoon, and a crockpot

#40

Post by killgrove »

clord wrote: post #31
ChuckMcM wrote: post #28

This is a great story. My wife and I did similar sorts of projects when we were home schooling our kids (my favorite was the trip to Yellowstone for a geology/chemistry/geography/ecology/biology quinfecta :-) It doesn't mention, but implies something I found important. That is that as a parent I had to invest my own time in equal to theirs in their learning. It lead to push back at work when I would insist on being h…

Love doing projects like this, I like the project presented above, I think we'll try it with the next old hen to kick the bucket. We find the hardest part of homeschooling so far is that a lot of the infrastructure for homeschooling is christian. There might be a market for a startup that caters to scientific-minded people who home-school. It seems to be a growing trend.

Oooh, if you have a chicken, you can mummify it. (Have to take off the feathers first.) Just stick it in a giant plastic bag with loads of salt. Change the salt out when it gets gooey. In a few weeks, you'll have a mummy!
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