Knitting in Public School

I am fired up.

My sweet, adorable, wildly eccentric 9th grader told me that his principal took away his knitting and said, “School is for learning, not knitting.”

This is quite possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard for many reasons.

1. The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania says it helped nuns ward off dementia.
2. Knitting helped some lady rewire her brain after a terrible stroke.
3. Yahoo! Health says it will sharpen your brain.
4. Wellsphere says knitting is like meditation and 20 minutes of it will slow your heart rate and calm your brain waves. Do you know any teenagers that would be good for?
5. International Center for Leadership in Education says teaching knitting will turn your school into a brain health center.

All that and I was only on the second page of google. I think it’s pretty freaking obvious that knitting will calm teenagers down and give them something to do with all that free time. You know, like instead of drugs or knocking people up. Here’s a really interesting article written by Cat Bordhi about her experience teaching her students to knit and allowing them to knit during class.

I’m calling his school on Monday to find out what the principal’s principle objections are and then I’ll go from there. What really sucks about this though, is I have a terrible sinking feeling that if my little he had been a she, I wouldn’t have to make that phone call tomorrow.

Maybe this is what the principal was afraid of.