Special Education Today Newsletter 4(24)
What was happening the week of 4 December 2024?
Good [morning | afternoon | evening], dear readers. Thanks for subscribing to Special Education Today.
I am not sure exactly when each of you will open this newsletter (and not all subscribers will…sigh), so I wanted to recognize the differences in the timing of your reading. Also, and this is nice to me, even if you all opened it at Greenwich Mean Time of (say) 12:00 PM, some of you would be opening it the morning, afternoon, or evening (or tomorrow!) in your local time. We, SETers may not be present in all 24 time zones, but we’re certainly not all in mine. Maybe “G’ day” would suffice?
Also, “volume 4, number 24” makes me think about how many of these newsletters we’ve shared with each other. I don’t have the patience to conduct an actual count, but I can estimate that that, including this one, it has been 172 issues.
You may be getting eye strain!
As with many of those 172-or-so issues, this one has familiar sections. There’s a photo, some notes about the community’s status and activity, a quasi-ToC, and some notes. Let’s get started.
Photo
One of the pleasures of living here in Beautyville is that one can enjoy wonderful scenes throughout the seasons. I like the spring flowers and the fall tree colors, to be sure, but the winter scenes (even without snow) are pretty cool, too. The accompanying photo shows a decoration that Pat and I found while walking through some woods along the Rivanna River just outside of town.
Someone whom we don’t know had hung multiple picture frames out in the woods. Whimsical. This is a view of one of them. It seems just odd enough to remind me of an artificially generated photo.
There’s more about how I frame SET in the commentary of this newsletter. Just playing with the words….
Status
SET subscriptions are holding steady in the mid to upper 700s overall with another ~150-200 following the SET site via Substack Notes. Thanks to all of you, things that happen on SET can have some influence.
That influence (“clout,” if you will) was reflected in new subscriptions. Welcome to Lisa B. andMary R. 🙏🏼,
As I‘ve noted previously, it’s delightful to have readers’ comments on posts. Thanks, Jen W., Clayton K., Jane B., Dan H., Kathy M., and anyone whom I overlooked. Your contributions help build community for SET.
Thanks to everyone who dropped likes on posts, too. Woohoo!
On of the most reinforcing aspects of having subscribers for SET is having subscribers who actually pony up the few $$1, €€, ££, ₱₱, or other name for currency for a paid subscription. After the first year or so of its existence, SET offered paid subscriptions, and the first paid subscribers were almost exclusively people whom I knew in real life. I still see friends come in out of blue (or from the free side) with a paid subscription, but over time the proportion of paying subscribers who are folks whom I’ve never met has increased, and, now, about a third of y’all are people whom I only know through this medium. Your help is helping to move SET closer to the level I hope it can reach and sustain. If we continue to grow to a healthy level, I’ll be able to consider hiring research assistants, a fact-checker, and even a proofreader—y’all know how I could use a proofreader!
So, here’s a special thanks to Mary R., Candace S., Jen W., Caitlin W., Cheryl D., Kristen A., Kristen S., Anita A., Kim L. (there are two of you!), Pam S., Jean C. (great to see you!), Tina C, and June R. That’s just a few of you folks who keep SET afloat and also buoy my spirits.
Although hundreds of loyal subscribers—free and paid—visit each time I post an email message, there are dozens of other visitors each day. I am interpreting the overage as reflection of non-subscribers visiting. Also, the records about sharing of posts indicates y’all are passing along info about SET to others. Thank you!
Anyway, please tell your friends, tell your colleagues, tell your kids’ parents, tell your neighbors, tell your relatives (including in-laws), tell your administrators.
Table of contents
Here are the links for the posts from the past week. The first one is, as usual, a reference to last week’s newsletter.
Special Education Today newsletter 4(23): The week’s news and info for the week of 25 November 2024
Happy special education day!: What? Didn't we already celebrate?
Advocacy for South Africans with disabilities: What's about to happen with disability rights in South Africa?
Math matters: What about the math papers in Teaching Exceptional Children for December 2024?
ASAT is at it again: Would any readers know that the venerable resource about autism was publishing good stuff?
Friday photos: Ludy Benjamin: Whom should you ask if you want to know about the history of psychology?
Happy b'day Patty & Jimmy: Just remembering these pals
So, that was the week’s posts for the previous seven days. If you missed any of these, you can follow the links. Of course, one can always go to the home page to these and earlier posts (some of which require a paid subscription).
Commentary
Some readers may have wondered why I posted an entry about and adult with disabilities and his family in South Africa. What’s that got to do with special education today?
For anyone who has those thoughts, I hasten to remind you that I’ve been saying all along that I want SET to be about special education and disabilities and that issues in special education and disabilities are not unique to the US, English-speaking countries, the industrialized western (or northern) world, etc.
Disabilities are not usually unique according to people’s geography, gender, ethnic background, race, or other human factors. In the US, in fact, they’re not even limited to members of one or the other political parties! There are, no kidding, kids with disabilities in both “woke” and “MAGA” households.
In my view, regardless of race, sex, geographic location, religious affiliation, political association…we are in this together. And, by “we,” I mean individuals with disabilities, their families, their educators, their communities, their politicians…all in it together.
Disability issues are human issues. As a part of the public, public health issues are just as important for people with disabilities as they are for any one else. Clean drinking water isn’t any less important for people with disabilities than it is for “normies.” Available and trustworthy health care is just as consequential for kids with disabilities as it is for other humans.
To be sure, I focus heavily on education for individuals with disabilities. That is not to diminish the importance of education for individuals who do not have disabilities. Indeed, I hope that what we do to improve special education does not take away from general education, but helps improve it, too. Oh, sure, I can hear howls about the financial costs of special education diverting funding from general education…to me, that’s just an argument for increasing support for education overall. I don’t want to steal general education funding. Let’s join together and advocate for greater resources for both.
I consider an attack on any one person with a disability as an attack on anyone who has a disability. I consider efforts to secure public health services for any one person with a disability as an effort on behalf of us—our kids and their associated people.
So, I hope that SET can cover special education and disability in general, regardless of where on Earth things happen. I hope that SET can be a vector carrying out to the people of Earth that individuals with disabilities are humans and deserve to be treated like humans.
And I hope all that expression of my opinions will help readers to understand my usual exhortations with a broad view: Take care of each other (make sure everyone’s belted into their automobile seats and if you’re walking along a sidewalk and see someone about to step into path of on-rushing vehicle, pull the person out of the way, regardless of whether she has a white cane). And, of course, teach children well.
JohnL,
John Wills Lloyd, Ph.D.
Charlottesville
Your SET guy
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 (see “Lovitt’s Lines” for examples from those days). Despite my appreciation for CEC, this product is not designed to promote that organization. I’m not selling anything here other than what you read in the posts.
Footnote
Although I’m using the US dollar sign here, I want to recognize subscribers whose countries use that sign (or a damn similar one) for their own currency: Australia, Canada, Taiwan, and others.
The frames along the Rivanna—cool. Would love to know who hung them. Email me privately if it was you.