The speaker asked us to identify the plants growing near our house. We have three street trees in front of our house. I cut the concrete and dug the holes for each of them, I’d say at least twelve years ago.

Left:
Genus: Zelkova
Species: Zelkova Serrata
Cultivar: ?
Common name: Japanese elm?

Center:
Genus: Acer
Species: Acer Griseum
Cultivar: ?
Common name: Paperbark Maple Tree.

Right:
Genus: Quercus
Species? That’s a good question
Cultivar:
common name: Some sort of oak tree. Scarlet? Pin? Red? (coccinea, palustris, rubra)

Then I went to OpenTreeMap for Philly and added these three. I’ll have to go do some measurements later.

“Michael Smithson, a social scientist at Australian National University who co-taught an online course on ignorance this summer, uses this analogy: The larger the island of knowledge grows, the longer the shoreline — where knowledge meets ignorance — extends. The more we know, the more we can ask. Questions don’t give way to answers so much as the two proliferate together. Answers breed questions. Curiosity isn’t merely a static disposition but rather a passion of the mind that is ceaselessly earned and nurtured.”

The case for teaching ignorance

Two quotes:

Nothing was so true, and yet nothing was so mysterious, for the questions of who the people were and what they might want remained unanswered. The lack of an answer mattered not; indeed, the lack of an answer 2was part of the power in the idea of the people that brought the men to their feet and the tears to their eyes as they shouted…Like salmon who instinctively knew when to swim upstream, we all new who the people were and who were not the people. Anyone who had to be told who the people were probably was not part of the people…

(p. 213)

No, because happiness, American style, is a zero-sum game sir…For someone to be happy, he must measure his happiness against someone else’s unhappiness, a process which most certainly works in reverse. If I said I was happy, someone else must be unhappy, most likely one of you. But if I said I was unhappy, that might make some of you happier, but it would also make you uneasy, as no one is supposed to be unhappy in America. I believe our clever young man has intuited that while only the pursuit of happiness is promised to all Americans, unhappiness is guaranteed for many.

(p. 246)

Nguyen, Viet Thanh. The Sympathizer (NY: Grover Press, 2015).

Superhero Captain Carli Lloyd

Almost six feet at this point!

Dear weather,

Thank you for the cold and rain after we’ve bolted.

Signed,

Clapper’s Broccoli

I had replaced an Azalea with this fig tree last year. It didn’t survive the winter but seems to be regrowing from the bottom up. I need to figure out whether or not I should cut off the old stuff.

Saturday morning at 8:30 I arrived for a “Servsafe” Food Safety course. If our school is going to operate a food truck (or a mobile educational vehicle) someone ought to have the appropriate certification. Apart from making sure that people don’t get sick, it’s a legal requirement for the city of Philadelphia.

It was a great experience. Some thoughts, in no order:

1. Being in a class with an instructor who knows the material, knows the purpose of the material, is professional (no late starts, no extended breaks, keeps to an agenda) helped make the eight hour day fly by. It’s trite and obvious, but being with a teacher who genuinely and obviously cares deeply about the material makes everyone feel better.

2. When the entire class is committed, the usual noise about what’s “boring” and “hard” simply does not happen. In this case, everyone needs to pass this test to be legal and avoid harassment by inspectors. There’s some solid information within the text about how to manage a kitchen safely and what foods present the greatest risks. (The class forced me to create a song to remember safe temperatures for various meats, which is also how to stack them in the fridge, roast fish chops, grinds, ducks.)) That being said, it’s mostly about memorizing a few things and hoping that the rest is common sense.

3. It really is amazing how much information people can learn quickly when they have to. Learn might be the wrong word; pack into their head and recall immediately is probably a better description.

4. Finally, the class, like jury duty or the DMV, was diverse in fun and challenging ways. There was a common cause — getting certified so you could get the license from the city — which brought young and old, male and female, black, white, Asian, Hispanic together. Significant class diversity was evident as well. At point the conversation moved off of the material into topics that are great fun to discuss with people who see the world very differently: what is organic food? What are factory farms? Why do people eat what they eat? It made me think about what’s lost in most American schools that are segregated by class and more often than not by race.

Who took my joy…I want it back.

Kids and school

The traditional view of such moments is that they constitute a charming but irrelevant byproduct of youth—something to be pushed aside to make room for more important qualities, like perseverance, obligation, and practicality. Yet moments like this one are just the kind of intense absorption and pleasure adults spend the rest of their lives seeking.