Special Education Today newsletter 3(45)
What transpired in SET world for the week beginning 29 April 2024?
Yet another issue of the Special Education Today newsletter is right here under your personally controlled cursor (or finger?), if not in your hot (or cool) little (or medium or big) hands. I remember (Jim and Dan probably do, too) carting USPS mailing boxes to the main local post office, each box containing physical copies of an issue of SET when it was a paper publication and we had to sort the ~1400 envelopes in zip code order to meet the requirements of our mailing license. Thems was the days!1
Regular readers will recognize the structure of this post. It has the usual parts (though I am not sure I can vouch for them being in their proper places. Across all the SET newsletters published so far—this is something close to the 140th—I’m sure that there has been some variation.2 Anyway, as an advance organizer, here’s what readers can expect in this issue: (a) acknowledgements, (b) some status notes, (c) a list of recent contents, and (d) some (probably poorly developed) commentary. So, read until it makes you gag!
Acknowledgements
A special welcome to Ann R., who’s bringing her long-term perspective to SET, where it is welcome and she’ll be among friends.3
Thanks to commenters from the past week. Tina C., Michael G., Joel M., and John U. exercised their paid subscriber authority and earned lots of smiley faces for contributing to the commonweal.
Welcome to some recent subscribers, including Justin A., Nikki B., Jessica F., Adrienne G., Laura G., Charles J., Vickie O., Laura V.d.L., and Peter Z. Welcome, also, to new followers: Chris E., Vero F., Paul McG., Andrew S., Luke T., Laura V.d.L., & Nick. (Yes, Laura V.d.L. made both the follower and the subscriber list!).
And a flash of the electrons to the many of you who took the time to drop a “like” on a post or comment. Among those who saw the light are Tina C., Adelaide D. (who may be getting blinded because she likes lots of posts), Larry M., Clay K., Mike G., and Jane B. (and each and every one whom I omitted).
Status update
According to Substack, there are now 690 subscribers to SET. You subscribers constitute the largest portion of the 742 people Substack says are followers of SET. Overall, subscribers open about 3 of every 7 email messages that I send (or they see on the Substack app).
There are 939 post on SET, including this one. There were almost 14,000 views of those posts on SET last 30 days. That is about 2400 more views than for the previous month. (I don’t know what the record high number of views is.) Some times readers click 0 links they see in a post, but some times they click 12-20 links.
Jan H., Bryan W., and Betsy T. continue to be the run-away leaders in the tracking data for sharing of posts from SET. I think these data only show shares that Substack can “see”; it’s possible that manually copying a link and pasting it into a message (email or text) is not tracked (I'd be surprised if it was). However, y’all are doing sharing, please keep doing so!
For a glimpse of some of SET’s peers, please go to the home page and look under “recommendations.” There are links to some Substacks that I read and that refer their readers to SET (Thanks!). Some of those (and I’m not counting Heather Cox Richardson) are 10X the size of SET!
Recent posts
For all y’all who skip the email notices about new posts and for those who read those posts regularly but haven’t seen the posts not that go only to the Web site…well, really, for everyone, here’s a list of the posts I published over the last week.
Special Education Today newsletter 3(44): How about a recap of 22-28 April 2024?
Teaching for insight: Can teachers induce sudden changes we refer to as "aha moments?"
Behavior, evolution, and teaching: What? How do these go together?
ASAT newsletter is here again: What's in the issue for May 2024?
Kathleen Lane visited: Was I glad to see my long-time pal?
Another of “Fred’s” Fixed Intervals has elapsed: Will you contact the contingency?
If you need to see what’s appeared on the site—Maybe you’re wondering if you missed a post? Maybe you're with a friend and you don’t have your email messages handy? Maybe you don’t want to go find a message where you can click on a link?—you can simply type “www.specialeducationtoday.com” into the location section of any browser and (voilà) you’ll be taken to the home page for the site.
Comments
One day I saw this little bit of plant matter growing out of a brick post on a neighbor’s yard. I thought, “wow, that little plant is growing in an unlikely place!”
As I got up from taking the photo (I had to kneel on a driveway to get down to the level of the little plant), I got to thinking about how resilient that plant is. I wondered what it was finding for water and nourishment on its vertical purchase between the bricks. Could there be an opening large enough to allow its roots to reach beyond the far, unseen side of the bricks and into some nutrient and moist dirt? Or was it actually feeding off decaying matter on the surface of the brick and mortar?4
Then I started to remember marveling at how resilient children are. They can suffer some terrible experiences in their lives and, somehow, keep on going. Fantastic. I don’t think of disability as a gift, but I suspect that it gives some (most?) individuals with disabilities a boost in the resilience department. It seems to be all the more reason to admire (and love) our kids.
Then I started thinking about the environment in which it was growing. I knew I was in dangerous territory, because I was reasoning by analogy and I know that that kind of thinking can lead one to whacky places. So, holding the caveat about metaphors as a firm qualification, I thought about what it would be like to be a child with a disability who is growing in an inhospitable environment—home, school, neighborhood—an environment where it’s hard to get nourishment, whether the nourishment is in the form of love, food, care, reinforcement, teaching…so that led me directly to the tag line on these commentaries:
Please take care of each other and make sure you teach your children well.
JohnL
John Wills Lloyd, Ph.D.
Founder and editor, Special Education Today
Footnotes
I wrote a bit about this earlier incarnation of SET in a long-ago post published when I made the switch from Spedtalk to SET in June, 2021. I wonder if I should scan all the old issues and republish them as PDFs. (If you think doing so would be a good idea, please drop a comment here or write to me via back channels.)
I suppose we could conduct a contest for who could come the closest to describing the average (I think it was be the modal) structure of headings in the newsletters…ahh, probably no fun. Forget it.
That is, provided that the subscriber Ann R. is the Ann R. I think she is. I sent her a note during the week inviting her to own up to my interpretation of the cryptic subscriber name, but I haven’t gotten a reply.
I was out on the street exercising, so I felt like I had license to think about anything. I often listen to podcast while I exercise, but I wasn’t this time. And, when I used to run for an hour at a time, I would sometimes outline an argument, a chapter, or a lecture and rehearse it as I ran. But this time, I simply went with the thoughts about the little plant.