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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

#41
post #39
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.

I might be missing something, but a pressure cooker is a completely different thing to a crock pot isn’t it?

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

#42
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I might be missing something, but a pressure cooker is a completely different thing to a crock pot isn’t it?

You are right. I cannot seem to figure out how he went into the topic of crockpots from the other comment. Unless some of them look alike and he was just trying to make people aware of not mixing them up?

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

#43
If any of y'all liked the idea of this project for your kids but not the roadkill aspect, "Make Your Own Dinosaur Out of Chicken Bones" http://www.levins.com/bonebooks.shtml ... is a fun project. And instead of just macerating, you get to make soup!

NB: as I recall, it takes 2 chickens, some tools, and a lot of patience

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

#45

My wife did this as a PhD student in Animal Science, along with a fellow grad student. Only her skeleton was that of a draft horse — she mainly wanted the skull. It took place on the hill in back of the lab building and used a fire, an enormous cauldron, and a canoe paddle. I can only imagine what undergrads wandering by thought. But we still have the horse skull in a tupperware in the basement. She teaches comparati…

I wonder if you could use an anthill for this work. Put the carcass in a cage of some sort so it doesn't get scattered and put the cage near an anthill. Come back a month later and the cage should have nothing but bones.

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

#46
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I might be missing something, but a pressure cooker is a completely different thing to a crock pot isn’t it?

I have a pressure cooker, but I only ever use it in the crock pot/slow cooker mode. I guess the two are quite similar, except for the lid.

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

#47
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I might be missing something, but a pressure cooker is a completely different thing to a crock pot isn’t it?

Well there are dual cookers that can do both.

But anyway, in the article a crock-pot is used, while bluedino mentions a pressure cooker, so I was just clarifying that a crock-pot is not a pressure cooker. But maybe I only added confusion. :-(

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

#48
I'm glad the girls' natural curiosity was supported and enjoyed.

When I was little we would bring in little things we'd found out back (frogs, mice, birds etc) and my mum was always happy to say, "lets open them up and see how they work". For the frog we used some vodka in a margarine pot but after that she kept some ether in the fridge (also useful when castrating the cat).

She was pretty happy when I sent her a photo of her grandson, scalpel in hand, dissecting a dead bird he had claimed from the cat. Unfortunately the only book he had was on human anatomy but we were able to find gross parallels and gross differences and that was pretty educational too.

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

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 P…

I will go ahead and challenge this- not that you can't be right, or even aren't right in the case of your kids (who I am sure you do a great job of taking care of- this isn't meant to insult you personally), but as someone who was homeschooled and had a very different experience, it's worth having a cautionary point of view- if for no other reason than to illustrate how NOT to homeschool.

First, OP is specifically asking about their child, who is autistic. While I would generally suggest that the average person is incapable of providing an education equal to that provided by a whole school full of teachers, it's often the case that if one child requires more attention than the rest of class, they might benefit more from additional attention and 1-on-1 teaching than they might from having more skilled teachers without additional time to spend. So it is a reasonable suggestion.

I'll start at the end, with the question: can you get into a good university? Sure. I didn't really apply to a lot of universities but I did get a full ride at the best engineering school in the state. It hinged more or less entirely on my GPA and standardized test scores. There's probably a whole book you could write on how poor these criteria are, but that's tangential to my point.

I was homeschooled through high school. In general, it was a negative experience. Primarily, I would say, it was because I didn't socialize much. That's not to say that I didn't have bs activities that my parents came up with, I did. We were a part of the local home school group, I took classes with a group of other home schoolers at what I pejoratively referred to as "homeschooler public school." I even managed to join a sports team for a tiny christian school that couldn't get enough players for a full team (I did enjoy that). I think that probably my parents would have said that I had all the social interaction that I ever needed. But actually I spent days or weeks completely alone. I had essentially two friends, that I saw every few weeks. In high school I basically taught myself all of my classes, then studied and took the tests. It sounds like you're doing things a lot better than that. But this isn't meant to be a critique of you(I don't know enough about what you're doing to even attempt that, even if I wanted to), it's supposed to be a cautionary tale.

I don't know if my experience was "average," but taken from my acquaintances (all home schooled) my results were actually better than average. Many had no outside contact for even longer periods of time, and lived in more isolated areas. Most did very little after high school and then joined the family business. I suppose it's likely that this is a difference between rural Missouri and SF.

>What they didn't have to deal with is bullies in middle school and uninterested adult supervision.

I my experience, that's not really a plus, it's just another overextension of supervision which has become so common these days. The world doesn't stop functioning the same way just because you don't experience it. You just wind up with kids that don't know how to deal with that sort of thing- or worse, try bullying themselves when they think they can get away with it. I personally witnessed this on multiple occasions at ostensibly supervised events where the adults were on the other side of a room or we had gone out back.

My parents were very strict and I was virtually never away from them until after I got a job, but that didn't stop me and my five siblings from breaking rules, instead we worked out systems to help us break our parents rules with no or minimal repercussions. We would have whole fake storylines of what we were doing going on that we would switch to if we got caught and post sentries. The sentries would frequently have codewords so that they didn't get caught helping others disobey. My point, so tangentially made, is that kids sometimes need a chance to interact with others without omnipotent but less than omniscient judges interfering.

In summary, what I am attempting to say is that homeschooling certainly can work well but from my (admittedly quite limited) sampling rarely does. That's not to say you shouldn't do it- just make sure that you want to, and that you're ready to spend the time to do it right.

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

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might be missing something, but a pressure cooker is a completely different thing to a crock pot isn’t it?

I have a pressure cooker, but I only ever use it in the crock pot/slow cooker mode. I guess the two are quite similar, except for the lid.

They aren't at all. There are some electric devices that can do both. A regular, old school pressure cooker is in essence a simple pot with a lid that gets affixed and has a vent to regulate pressure. It goes on your stove top just like any other pot.
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