jaeleslie

That's what it says on our calendar this week. They are not actually related, although I was thinking it was a wonderful juxtaposition. I am having a nice quiet day, reading and writing.

"No school" is because of the state teachers' convention the last two days of the week. In the local news from the convention, I noticed the textbook publishers have now produced books that present the precise state-mandated content for each subject area. There are different books for each state of course, because we don't have national standardized tests (...except for the SAT and ACT college entrance exams). When I was in teacher training, that is what used to be called "teaching to the test", and it was considered a bad thing, although it must be better than not teaching anything. It is not at all what the ideal of a liberal education was about, which I believe might have more to do with enabling people to pursue their own education. But that is philosophically all very confusing, so let that pass. The person at our house who got out of two days of school spent most of Friday evening studying thick, finely-printed dungeon master guides. The only books he has read voluntarily for several years now are impenetrable documentation of this kind, but he reads them cover to cover, so I can't worry much about his reading skill even though my tastes are more toward the literary.

The "burn school" is the Nature Conservancy's program for people who want to engage in their land management prairie burns. There were going to be some kind of lecture program and written test and then weather permitting they were maybe going to try it out. What fun! Mr S is has been burning small prairies for many years now, practicing with some local volunteer firemen working grass fires, and with groups in the local parks as that sort of land management became more accepted. Now that he and the guy down the block have gotten involved in the Nature Conservancy group, they participate in larger burns. They put in a lot of time preparing the areas to be burned, which have to be cleared of thick brush and snags that might make a fire unmanageable, and establishing natural boundaries like trails for the water trucks that will act as fire stops. And then the program for a particular piece of land has to be attended in great detail over many years, as some areas are burned and others left for another year, in a patchwork. It is quite an art, and very hard work. On the day when a burn is scheduled the wind might be too high or in the wrong direction, and the windows of opportunity in spring and fall when a burn is appropriate are sometimes very short. There is some thought now that the whole midwestern prairie was managed this way on a much larger scale for some thousands of years -- and huge tracts of Australia still are. But once the land is cut up by building plots, and valuable real estate, those are very bad to burn, and make it all more complicated.

We got bulbs planted in our back yard this week too. It was the most complicated planting plan I had ever done: a few potted perennial asters (which will bloom purple in the fall), and then a dozen lily corms (which will bloom pastel in July), which were planted a little more than a foot apart, and interplanted with those then some late tulips (white in May) and hyacinths (purple earlier in May) and two kinds of daffodils (April) and three kinds of earlier small bulbs that didn't have to be planted nearly as deep. Blue Scilla siberica, white crocusses (Peter Pan) and grape hyacinths. The whole bed is covered with chicken wire now to keep the squirrels from digging it up. They are very curious about that kind of activity, and have their own little ideas about what should be planted where.