Dear Valentines...including colleagues, friends, and other pals! Happy heart day!

Welcome to the 35th issue of the first volume of Special Education Today. Raise your hand if you expect anything like the usual in this issue...all y’all who didn’t raise your hands, here’s a simple recitation: After an updated status report, you’ll find a catalogue of articles publish on the Web site this past week. Then, as usual, there’s a little commentary at the end.

Status update

SET has been in a holding pattern on free subscribers. By the way, a lot of y’all have addresses that end in .edu, so you must be affiliated with a governmental organization. Lots of subscribers use .org addresses and others use gmail.com addresses (that domain name doesn’t indicate affiliation, of course).

I take heart that there is a diversity of addresses. But I am hopeful that people with many different connections to disability and special education are subscribing. I hope current readers will help promulgate the opportunity to subscribe.

Thanks to everyone who has been sharing SET…shout out to those e-mail subscribers who are passing along SET content to others. Please continue to encourage colleagues and interested others to read and subscribe (*for FREE now!*). Thanks!

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Flashes of the electrons for this week

Here’s another incomplete list of known readers who interacted with the magazine during the week beginning 7 February:

• Lysandra C., Michael K., Jane B., John R., Beth P., Betsy T., Clayton K, and Peggy K-S. Order doesn’t matter and the number of interactions varies from person to person. But I especially like that so many of these people are re-offenders.

• Thanks, too, for tweets, retweets, and likes on Twitter. I didn’t comb through the activity and identify folks there, but thanks and keep ‘em coming @SpecialEdToday.

This week’s table of contents

Well, I posted five messages this week to the Web site, Please remember that you can find the current SET posts by simply going to the main page at https://www.specialeducationtoday.com (this week in LIFO order for a change):

• Some students wait longer than others befor getting special education—Do students’ ethnicities delay access to services? https://www.specialeducationtoday.com/p/some-students-wait-longer-than-others

• Friday photos—16—Ola, Ana Paula Loução Martins! https://www.specialeducationtoday.com/p/friday-photos16

• LeBron shouts out Kent State—Why would a go-to-college-program have an NBA star acknowledging it? https://www.specialeducationtoday.com/p/lebron-shouts-kent-state

• Next week: PCRC

• Teaching practices—3: Frequency of questioning affects performance—Who knew that more frequent questions increased attention and accuracy? https://www.specialeducationtoday.com/p/tt3-frequency-of-questioning-affects

• Evaluating curricula—#7—How do the intrepid 3 follow up on their efforts to get help with assessing curricula’s effectiveness? https://www.specialeducationtoday.com/p/evaluating-curricula-7

Commentary

Many readers will know that I am an older guy (maybe not a gentleman, but an old male), and so they wouldn’t be surprised that I have some pre-cancerous lessions on my pate.

My dermatologist had removed some of those lessions (cryo-cauterization ?) over the past few years, but he recommended a different plan in recent months. He recommended and I agreed to apply a salve for five days. It’s supposed to prevent (remember that word) not-yet-developed precancerous lesions on my head, because the surface of my pate has too many areas of possible problems for cauterization of the individual lesions.

So, I opted for the therapy, fully aware that that it might be aversive (and ugly). Indeed, after seeing one of my closest friends, he said to me just the other day, “You look awful.”

Well, it got me to thinking...big problem, me thinking: What if some therapies look awful to some observers, but they prevent later problems?

Could it be possible that some special educational therapies make some of us say, “That’s horrible,” when those “horrible” things might actually provide good outcomes? Might very valuable “Tier 1” programs look awful to some of us?

How would we decide whether the outcomes are worth the “horrible?” Might it be that the “horrible” is more a figment of our subjective opinion than evidence? How would one decide whether a therapy is horrible or beneficial?

Most readers will accurately guess that my answer to that string of questions requires we speducators to (a) identify measurable goals, (b) assess objectively whether instructional activities a, b, or c, help learners to achieve those goals, and (c) ensure that those outcomes can be achieved consistently.

Sounds like two familiar things (order doesn’t matter): IEPs and objective research. Let’s go there!

O.K., here’re the usual admonitions:

(1) Buckle your seatbelts right when you get in your vehicle and make sure others to, too; (2) Get vaccinated and boosted, stand at safe social distance, wash your hands, and use masks; (3) Take care of our neighbors; and (of course) (4) teach your children well.

JohnL

John Wills Lloyd, Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus, UVA School of Ed & HD

Co-editor, Exceptional Children

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

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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 (nor denigrate) that organization.