Lessons From the Ranch: Schooling a Teen in Hard Work Sen. Ben Sasse’s daughter got a month-long education in caring for cattle and driving a tractor. Kyle Paterson
http://www.wsj.com/articles/lessons-from-the-ranch-schooling-a-teen-in-hard-work-1459899578
For the past month, Ben Sasse, the junior U.S. senator from Nebraska, has been tweeting out his “lessons from the ranch”—or, rather, his daughter’s lessons. While her peers across the country might have spent much of the past few weeks lolling about their bedrooms, staring at smartphones instead of doing homework, 14-year-old Corrie Sasse was hours from home, laboring as a farmhand in exchange for room and board.
“We just believe in work,” Mr. Sasse tells me. “In our family we try to figure out ways that our kids can work.” The freedom to do so is one benefit of home schooling, since Mr. Sasse and his wife, Melissa, clearly consider working hard an education in itself.
Corrie seems to have taken the ranch assignment in stride, texting updates to her father, who then shared them on Twitter. Production agriculture, she learned, can be a dusty, dirty, smelly business, not least during calving season, when this particular ranch expects 300 new arrivals.
Text #FromTheRanch: “Today we checked to confirm some cows were pregnant—which Megan did by jamming her hand up their rectum. Eww.”
We should confirm, for the uninitiated, that the pregnancy-check generally involves a shoulder-length disposable glove . . . but still. Mr. Sasse says that surprise, more than anything, helped his daughter overcome the ick factor: “It was just all of a sudden, the moment they were at, and she was told to do it, and that was the work that needed to be done that day.” Corrie donned the long glove too.
Text #FromTheRanch: “Am not going to call now. I need to get some sleep before checking cows—and feed the fats—at midnight. . . By the way, Dad, the ‘fats’ are cows soon to be slaughtered.”CONTINUE AT SITE
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