Argh! I'd written three paragraphs of a journal entry (while I was installing MacOSX updates) and then forgot to save it before I restarted the system. Unlike an editor, that might try to warn you that you had open documents, Safari just shut down instantly. One other misfeature of Safari is that you can't Undo edits inside a text box. You accidently deleted a paragraph? Sorry! No can undo!
Yesterday I went with Lucy to the weekly Northampton Esperanto-group meeting. For several years, Lucy has talked about the wonderful little garden where they meet. Everytime I've gone, the meetings have been in a building: either the Davis Center or the Library. This summer I decided I would try to attend sometime when the meeting was going to be in the garden, but almost every week, it has rained on Wednesday. Yesterday morning, it rained again and they were predicting more rain for the afternoon. At 3pm, however, Lucy said that the rain had stopped and there was even a little sun peeking through. So I went along and finally got to see the garden.
The garden is divided into regions by hedges, that have narrow gaps or holes. Some regions have a more formal feel while others are more natural and all are overflowing with with a staggering array of flowers. There were some big Babtesia plants -- I popped open one of the pods and was surprised not to find any weevils. Maybe the pods aren't dry enough yet. There was a handsome metallic-green Halictid bee on one of the cone flowers. There were bees gathering dark red pollen on another flower, which caused their pollen baskets to assort very strangely with their regular black and yellow coloration.
S arrived and we were surprised to see that she had brought another esperantist, M, who is visiting from Florida. We read a few chapters from La Fotoalbumo by 
Trevor Steele. Each chapter contains a brief description of a photograph from the photo album of a family in Australia and is followed by a short vignette that tells the story behind the picture. In the chapter I read, the picture shows a girl and her father, still wearing wet work-clothes and the story describes how he sprinted and jumped into the river to save her from drowning after she fell in. M invited us to two presentations associated with NASK. We won't be able to attend the presentation today, but I might attend tomorrow when Humphrey Tonkin speaks. I expect the speech will be the same as he gave at the Landa Kongreso, though, so it probably doesn't warrant the trip. Still, it's fun to hear Humphrey speak.
I've finished Bowling Alone. I had been holding off writing a final summary until I digested it, but there really isn't anything to digest. He doesn't offer any guidance for how to kick-start increased social participation. He presents a lot of reasons why people should, but I don't think the answer is to get everyone to read Bowling Alone. So I think I'll start by trying to organize a local group to study Esperanto. I need to find a place to meet. I would like it to be someplace slightly formal: like the Community Center. I need to see if there are rooms available. I found a page with PDFs of posters advertising Esperanto, which I should be able to adapt to advertise the local meetings. Now I need to get the email addresses of the local newspapers to submit items for the "community calendar" to get the news of the meetings out. I'm hoping to start just as the students come back and see if we can get enough interest to create a student organization. It's a nice theory anyway.
This evening we attended the Pageant for Charlie's "Journey Camp". The children had designed a more-or-less coherent story line for a play that had the audience and actors move through a series of scenes. This image comes from a story the children told about Rainbow Crow, who brought fire from the sun to the earth, but lost her rainbow colors in the process.
Near the middle of the pageant, while the children set up for the final act, the parents were led in singing a Native American song. It was nice and multicultural, I suppose, but without knowing what the words mean and the cultural context for understanding why the song was important, I found the experience empty. It reminds me of when I first realized that much of what I had valued as a student, was empty of meaning. Mark Jeness was describing how, when leading a field trip, students are desperate to know the names of the plants. Why? Probably we have a sense of name magic: if you know its name, you have power over it. That's Winged Sumac! That's Black Cherry! That's Boneset! But providing the answer often shuts down the process of observation the student is engaged in. Telling the students what the right answer is reduces the likelihood that they will develop a good answer of their own. They substititute remembering the "right" answer for developing their own ability to reach a satisfactory conclusion. An empowering pedagogy could provide students with encouragement to look more and provide some time and resources for figuring out what the tree is, if that's really important. And if it's not (that) important, why bother with it at all? I would like to think the words of the Native American song were worth singing, but without knowing what they meant, I don't have any way to tell. I'm probably being overly analytical of what was 5 minutes of "filler" between acts of the children's play. It was a great play.