Special Education Today Newsletter 2(50)

What's in this week’s news and info after 22 May 2023?

Welcome to the 90-somethingth—or maybe the 100th?—issue of the newsletter for the Special Education Today. Readers who have been following SET for at least a few issues will recognize the structure of this newsletter. After an update about the status of the SET community, appreciation for readers’ interactions, and the current contents, you’ll find a bit of personal reflections.

What did the big tree say when if snapped its trunk and fell into the arms of the little trees? Photo by John Wills Lloyd, 2023. [Please consider this work licensed under Creative Commons guidelines Attribution-NonComerrcial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International.]

Status update

SET has has grown. We are a community of > 550 members with dozens of those subscribers choosing to support SET as paying subscribers. The community is international, including people from Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America, and some Pacific Islands. These readers are people (including parents and teachers, administrators, professors, journalists…even psychologists) concerned about kids with disabilities; and I hope that SET can provide connections to helpful resources for them—and maybe any extraterretials that are hovering out in the ether.

Thanks to everyone who spreads the word (“shares”). Please continue to do so! Forward. Tweet. Give gift subscriptions. Tell friends and others! Send connections to people worldwide!

I’d especially like to recognize those paying subscribers who are renewing their monthly or annual subscriptions. Y’all make me think I should keep doing this work. Thank you!

Flashes of the electrons

Part of the reason the community has grown is that SET pals interacted with the magazine over the months.

Thanks, especially, to Tina C., Clay K, Betsy T., Angelique W., and Jane B. for sharing SET posts many times. And, thanks to The Great Leap, Scott Britton, The Educated Parent, Lisa’s Substack, and Corey Peltier for recommending SET on their Stacks.

Table of contents for the past week

Folks who only read this newsletter miss receiving most of the posts mentioned in it. This newsletter appears once a week. I post messages to the Web site multiple times during the week. Only some of them are published to the mailing list.

In addition to the newsletter for last week, there were three other posts last week. Here is a list of the posts that appeared the previous week (after last week’s newsletter):

• Special Education Today Newsletter 2(45)—Is there anything to say?

• IRIS Center published new modules—Will readers take advantage of these fine resources?

• Sold a Story: “Bonus 2” dropped—Want to learn more of changes in early literacy instruction?

• Guides to explicit, systematic teaching from CEC-Division for Learning Disabilities—Would you like to have step-by-step guides for teaching specific skills?

Keep up by watching the site https://www.specialeducationtoday. That’s how to get the latest; I only e-mail about some posts, not all of them.

Commentary

So, fellow speducation-folx, I’m interested in how I can make SET more appropriate for the community. For nearly two years, I’ve been publishing posts about a diverse array of topics. I’ve been simply guessing about what might interest readers; to be sure, I look at the stats about visitors, comments, likes, and such, but I’d like to get a some more specific feedback.

So here I’m seeking your help. I have three polls on which I seek your responses¹. Of course, the results will not be scientifically sound, but they’ll give me a little better idea about your views, so please vote. Note that you can only vote for one item in each poll, and that you can add other opinions in the comments.

The first poll ask what you’d like to see on SET and the second asks what you don’t like to see on SET.

Here’re the polls:

Alert readers will note that I omitted “John’s opinions” as a choice. That’s not because I wanted to deny readers the option to down-vote my opinions as content, but because the polling script only permits (as I understand it) five choices. So for those of you who want to have a say about my editorials, here’s one more poll:

Please, please respond. These polls will close in a couple of days, so don’t tarry. In the meantime, take care of each other. Wear your seatbelts. Don’t text and drive. Think about [stuff] systematically and using evidence. And teach our children well.

JohnL

SET Editor guy

Charlottesville

SET should not be confused with a product with the same name that is published by the Council for Exceptional Children. SET predated CEC’s publication by decades. Despite my appreciation for CEC, this product is not designed to promote that organization.

1. I’m a rookie with these polls, so I don’t know precisely how the script works. I imagine that I will be able to correlate responses with users’ data (e.g., e-mail address, frequency of visits, etc.), so please do not think your responses with be anonymous. I promise, however, not to share your answers with anyone else, except in the aggregation of responses (i.e., the total number of “votes” for each alternative). That is, I shall de-identify your responses in discussing any results from these polls.