catching my breath

I actually have to go to Aiken for a couple of days next week, because my son gets a short break from being a junior counselor at a camp and it isn't worth a three hour drive each way there and back to bring him home for one day. Still, the big traveling is done and I feel like I'm beginning to catch my breath. A lot to do, though I'm through the part of my online course where I had to prepare material relating to a new book. Now the grading has hit.

Thoreau Society Session

I had organized a session for the meeting on using the Life with Principle DVD. The original plan was that two teachers were going to talk about using the DVD in quite different classrooms, with hopefully some students adding their voices, and I would just chair the session. But both teachers had to back out and the program organizer didn't want us to cancel the session, so my daughter and I decided we would do something on our own.

I couldn't speak directly to how the video went over in my daughters classroom and I hadn't used it myself, so instead I talked about the history of Montessori schools to make the point that a Montessori classroom was a particularly good fit for Thoreau's ideas. I didn't find any direct connections, but there are some correspondences, particularly an emphasis on individual self-realization. Montessori sounds rather like Thoreau when she writes:

But if for the physical life it is necessary to have the child exposed to the vivifying forces of nature, it is also necessary for his psychical life to place the soul of the child in contact with creation, in order that he may lay up for himself treasure from the directly educating forces of living nature. The method for arriving at this end is to set the child at agricultural labor, guiding him in the cultivation of plants and animals, and so to the intelligent contemplation of nature. (The Montessori Method ch. 10)

My daughter then talked about what happened in her classroom and we used quotes from other students to start discussion. There were clearly a group of people glad of a chance to talk about education.

Concord

My daugther and I are in Concord for the annual gathering of the Thoreau Society. Actually, today we made a big shopping trip to buy her things for boarding school, but tomorrow we are on the program. I had a lovely run this morning on the battle road. Tomorrow I plan to do the triathletes 6 am swim across Walden Pond.

Back to Bozeman

Yesterday there was a doe with two fawns outside our cabin when I got up:

We spent the day driving the 350 miles back to Bozeman. It made for a long day, and with record high temperatures (107 in Bozeman, 100 in Helena). We stopped at a Museum of the Plains Indian and at a dinosaur museum:

(Click on the picture to see it whole--if part of it is getting cut off by the sidebar.) The dinosaur museum looks like a Mom and Pop operation, but it is actually a fairly serious research center based around the Two Medicine site where the first dinosaur nest (showing that dinosaurs cared for their young) was found. The Wikipedia story doesn't credit the local woman who found the nest: Marion Brandvold.

Waterton Lakes National Park, Canada

We had formal tea the first afternoon at the Prince of Wales Hotel, visible on the right hand side below

We are staying at a nicer place than in Babb, but it isn't special looking, it is that we have a cabin with a kitchen. The town is full of what they call nuisance deer, though this one was near where we got off the boat:

Today we took the boat

to the end of the lake with views like this:

and then hiked back 8 or 9 miles to town. It was called the Lakeshore trail, but it went up above the lake a good bit. We crossed the border on foot:
There was some minimal immigration control by rangers at the boat landing (though it is 30 miles to the nearest road on the U.S. side) but nothing at the border but a couple of posts and a line cut in the trees.

Glacier National Park

Glacier is amazing--this picture is from a hike we took at Logan Pass, at the top of Going to the Sun Road. Most of the hike was on slushy snow.

After driving Going to the Sun Road we stayed in the little town of Babb, population less than 50.

The picture below is loose horses hanging out outside the Babb Fire Station.

Our motel was in a similar style--check in at the general store next door.


For our second day we drove into the Many Glacier area and spent the day hiking there

Yes, that is a moose in the lake.

Elkhorn

The interesting thing about this place is how much it is set up around the idea that nothing changes. One guest told a story of the year they bought a different kind of soap and the guests rebelled--it had to be Ivory.

I'm riding half days only and that is working for me--I haven't gotten to the point of unbearable knee pain.

I rented a road bicycle, though the only place to go is down highway 191. It runs along the Gallatin river--I'm starting a few miles south of where "A River Runs Through It" was filmed. In about three miles the road enters Yellowstone National Park, though not the tourist part. Smooth riding and a pretty view.