Special Education Today newsletter 4(19)

The week’s news and info for the week beginning 28 October 2024

Nov 04, 2024

Howdy, dear paying and free subscribers to Special Education Today, and welcome to the 1097th post from SET. Those 200 or so of you who have been around since June of 2021 should be quick and accurate in forecasting the overall contents of this message, but for those who joined more recently, this interaction of the newsletter has the usual four sections: (1) Photo, (2) Status updates, (3) Recent contents links, and (4) Comments.

Photo

When I was a child, once or twice I remember riding in a car and passing through a rural part of Virginia. We had just visited a cemetery where many forebears were buried and my mother was pointing out local features. “That’s Uncle Dolph’s house,” she said, “And that’s the place where Lafayette stayed.” I had never met Uncle Dolph, who was a brother of my mother’s grandmother, but I was old enough to know who Lafayette was—he was the famous French military officer who served with George Washington, was important in the British surrender at the end of the US Revolutionary War, was a friend of Thomas Jefferson, and was revered in his home country for his contributions to “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” in France. When I wondered about Lafayette staying at that particular place, my mother explained that he had stayed many places on a tour of the US and this was one of the stops between Richmond and Charlottesville, where he would visit with Jefferson. It became a bit of a family joke: “Lafayette stayed here,” was for real, unlike the many places we’d seen that claimed, “Washington slept here.”

That’s a long way around getting to tell you that on 3 November 2024 I attended the unveiling of a marker commemorating Lafayette’s stay 200 years earlier at that very place in tiny (it has three stops signs!) Wilmington, VA. The maker was placed at a spot only a 100 meters from where at least 15 of my ancestors are buried.

The newly dedicated Lafayette Trail marker in Wilmington, VA. The gentleman at the right represented the Layfayette Trail organization, which is installing markers around the eastern US. Sorry I don’t have his name not that of the person wearing the patriotically decorated hat at the left is blocking a little of the plaque’s contents. Blame the photographer, who is John Wills Lloyd, 2024, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Status updates

I sent this newsletter to subscribers of SET. If you’re reading it because a friend, neighbor, family member, colleague, or whom knows who (maybe even an enemy?) sent it to you, you can ensure that you get your own copy every week (as well as the intermediate mailings) by subscribing. Just click the following button!

Speaking of subscriptions, SET has between 750 and 800 subscribers. There are another couple of 100 people who “follow” SET (“follow” is Substack’s light-weight subscription; followers’ home feeds show the activity of the followed product).

There was a little increase in subscriptions, follows, and even paid subs (woohoo!) in the last couple of weeks. So, welcome to new subscribers: Erin B., Fredj D., Kurt H., Lizzie J., David K., Hardy S., Melissa T., and any others whom I haven’t listed here. As I’m fond of saying, “Welcome to the party.”

If you once looked at a page on the SET Web site during the week, you contributed one of about 5500 views. It may not represent an objectively substantial viewership, but it at least indicates that you weren’t alone. Thanks for going there!

Comments

I’ve got nothing this week. Well, almost nothing. I do have the usual and familiar admonitions: (1) Please wear your seatbelts: Remember to affix them right away when you get into your car, and then avoid distracting yourself from driving. (2) Please remember to keep immunizations current for COVID and flu; I got both at once and I didn’t need an RSV protection (even though it’s important, I got it last year), so I’m ready to travel (at least as far as these matters go to the TECBD conference1 next month (and to participate in an honor-Jim-Kauffman event while I’m there; and, yes, in honor of Jim, I’ll be washing my hands frequently, as he did). And, (3) I implore you to teach your 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 (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.

Thanks to an invitation from C. Michael Nelson, I shall be participating in discussions about behavior disorders research at the annual conference called “Teacher Educators for Children with Behavior Disorders” in Tempe, AZ, in late November 2024. I hope to see some of you readers (in addition to Mike) there! There will be celebrations about the late Jim Kauffman…some of us will probably cry.

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Special Education Today with John Wills Lloyd

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