Special Education Today newsletter 4(10)

Shall we recapture the week of 26 August 2024?

Good morning (for those who receive and read this missive in the AM of the time zone in which they live. I hope the coffee (tea, water, whatever) is excellent for you.

[If newsletters = familiar, skip paragraph.] Here’s the usual recounting of activity on Special Education Today for the previous week. Readers will find the usual: a photo for entertainment, notes about the status of SET, links to the contents published during the week, and some frivolous ramblings from me.

Photo

Readers with good recall will remember that last week I posted a photo of a single shoe on a post at the foot (ahem¹) of a walking trail. This week when I was at the same place, the shoe was gone. Perhaps it was frightened by a marauding fish from the nearby river and ran away? Maybe a local weasel ferreted it away to its burrow? Maybe the gendarmerie removed it when they came to police the neighborhood? Maybe the child (or the child’s adults) returned to retrieve it. Maybe a thief…I knew it! Those dirty-rotten robbers! There are so many possible interpretations of why the shoe is no longer there…just like there are so many interpretations of pre- and post-test data in our domain of interest.

This week you have to opportunity to see the view from the deck at the home of Jeanmarie Badar and Jim Kauffman. They have the duty of keeping a watch on this landscape when they’re not doing other important things such as sponsoring a special education research conference (more about that in a later section of this newsletter). I am glad to know that they are taking care of this responsibility for us.

The view south over the Rockfish Valley from Afton, Virginia. Photo by John Wills Lloyd, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Status

There were roughly a net of six new subscribers this past week. At this rate of growth, SET ought to find itself with 1000 subscribers sometime…maybe late next spring?

It’s wonderful to have any growth, of course. Maybe if I just wrote more interesting posts…nah, that would require something that I’m not sure I could do. Sigh. But, anyway, thanks to subscribers who are sharing copies of the posts with your friends, colleagues, students, neighbors, and others (even your parents?).²³

And a shoutout to those who dropped likes this past week: Days U.,⁴ Tom Z.,⁵ Nee C., Tina C., John S., Sandi R., Adelaide D.,⁶ Gita U., Hill W., Jane B., Joel. M., Allison L., Jen W.,⁷ Larry M., and all those whom I missed. Thanks, y’all.

Your weekly reader

This is the regular list of posts from the past week. If you’re a free subscriber, you’ll need to read the items on this list soon before they go behind the pay wall. If you're a paid subscriber, you can read them now or come back to them later or both read them now and come back at your leisure.

1. Special Education Today newsletter 4(9): What went down on SET the week of 19 August 2024?

2. Notes about teaching multiplication: What in the world was I thinking when I posted some notes to the CEC Community Forum?

3. Frederick J. Weintraub: 1942-2014: An eminent special educator

4. Non-verbal learning disability is in the news: But, what do we know about NVLD?

5. Town and Gown: What did Tom Lovitt have to say about real-world research in March 1984

6. Fix or buy new?: How should US educators respond to problems with special education? [By James M. Kauffman]

7. Charles M. Heuchert, 1933-2011: History of special education and many pals will smile on Chuck

8. DI Webinar and panel: What else would one be doing the afternoon of 12 September 2024?

9. Machine algorithms and discriminating between ASD and ~ASD: What's going on with AI and identification of autism?

That was it for the past week. Did anyone get tired of reading posts I sent? Well…to be truthful, not all of these appeared in the mail. One didn’t.⁸

Notes & comments

I mentioned a pending Webinar on Direct Instruction in the list of posts for the week. I’m taking this opportunity to publicize some other upcoming conferences that readers might find of interest.⁹ Each has a live, face-to-face feature, so some folks might actually want to attend them in person. One also has a virtual feature so that one can attend electronically. (For more information on each conference, follow the link at the boldface name.)

• Richard L. Simpson Conference on Autism will be held 3 and 4 October 2024 in Overland Park, KS. There are workshops and traditional conference sessions, all with a bent toward evidence-based practice. This is a really great opportunity for folks in the Kansas-Missouri area. It’s fF2F only.

• Teacher Educators for Children with Behavior Disorder is slated for 21-23 November 2024 in Tempe, AZ. There are workshops and traditional conference sessions covering many aspects of EBD from academics and autism to PBIS and juvenile justice; again, many are tilted toward evidence-based practice. I’ll be attending as I often have since the 1980s—even though my attendance may drive some readers away from it. There are both F2F and virtual registration options.

• Bader-Kauffman Conference at Kent State University will be held 2-4 April 2025 at Kent State University in Kent, OH. The conference is named in honor of Jeanmarie and Jim who helped fund it originally (and who must tolerate the view shown in the photo for this issue of the SET newsletter). Those who might want to present their research at the conference should review the call for proposals (open until early October 2024)

Of course, this list is not exhaustive. It’s limited to conferences I know about and consider worthy of passing along to others. There are surely many others that merit consideration. The big dog is the Council for Exceptional Children convention (12-15 March 2025 in Baltimore, MD), but there are smaller meetings focused around special groups: The Division for Early Childhood (September 2024 in New Orleans, LA) and the Division for Autism Developmental Disabilities 2025 Annual Conference (January in Florida) are good examples.

There are conferences elsewhere on Earth—not just the US! One great resource is the Division for International Special Education Services, which has held conferences in many locations. I can find meetings of other organizations in other countries of the world, but I know little about them, so I don’t feel comfortable recommending them.

Okay, now. I’ve rambled too long.¹⁰ It’s time to get out of your faces, dear readers. So, let me leave you with the usual exhortations: Take care of yourselves, take care of those with whom you work, live, and hang; and please (please) teach your students well.

JohnL

John Wills Lloyd, Ph.D.

UVA Professor Emeritus

Founder & Editor, https://www.SpecialEducationToday.com/

Footnotes

1. I referred to it as the “head” last week.

2. Sharing is good, as I understand from Emma Seppälä of Psychology Today and Robert Fulghum of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.

3. Some readers may remember that I ran a post about a sale on paid subscriptions at the beginning of August 2024. It stayed “pinned” to the top of the Web page for SET for a month. In that month, it resulted in zero (0) subscriptions to SET.

4. I see you lurking back there, Cheryl!

5. Tom’s a well-known multiple offender.

6. Like 5 or 6 times!

7. Jen, you’re another multiple offender!

8. If you know which one didn’t, identify it in the comments and I’ll send you a smiley face!

9. Please understand that none of the organizing committees for these conferences is paying me or SET for posting about the meetings.

10. And, although I’ll defer to the judgment of you dear, dear readers, I feel pretty safe in asserting that this post has more footnotes than any of the previous posts on SET.