6.30 Wednesday morning we had a film crew in our house. The secondary school have a media project on called “Camino a la escuela” (route to school) and they are filming ten students from waking up to arriving at school, and then carrying out interviews of family members talking about attitudes to education. They thought Teen would make an interesting story, so at 6.30 there they were in order to film us “looking natural”. Normally at 6.30 in the morning Martin would be wearing his pants and I would be wrapped in a towel, so we had to get up early enough to avoid looking quite so natural. A nice practical illustration of how the presence of an anthropologist changes the story that the anthropologist wants to tell.
Spent yesterday afternoon taming the Scouts. This year I have moved up from the 7-11 cub age range to the 11-15 Scouts, who in our group are a particularly uncivilised rabble. I was surprised at how enthusiastically they got into the idea of constructing tables. My aim is quite simply for them to start and finish a project, which hopefully might give them enough of a boost to their self-worth to start and finish another one without quite so much pushing and shoving and hitting each other.
Currently putting the finishing touches to a sermon around Joel 2 and wishing I had taken notes back in 1989 when I sat through three days of Martin Goldsmith teaching on Joel. Sadly at the time I had no idea what he was talking about, but I expect it was probably brilliant. Education is wasted on the young.