Back in the good old days when homeschoolers were viewed mostly as illiterate, unsocialized weirdos, curriculum shopping was an endeavor requiring both ingenuity and luck. Fortunately, my mother had a a sort of psychic knack for finding out about used book sales. Some of our favorites were the mammoth sales in which the California school system jettisoned old, “outdated” (read: not trendy, dumbed down, or politically correct enough) curricula.
On one occasion, we got over a dozen beautiful hardcover books of folk songs from around the world, which fueled her children’s choir for several years. On another, I became the proud owner of Livestock and Poultry Production, an unbelievably dry high school (or possibly college) text on farming, which I nevertheless devoured, producing several poster-sized adaptations of diagrams from the book on such fascinating topics as “Common Unsoundnesses of a Horse” or “Choosing Laying Hens.”… Read more
