Special Education Today newsletter 4(1)
What has happened on SET in late June 2024?
Say, hey!1 Here we begin the first issue of the fourth volume year for Special Education Today. Woohoo!
If you thought you might have escaped my intrusions in your in box, sorry. You didn’t. I put SET on hiatus for the last two weeks of June 2024, but it’s back again.
If you now regret your decision to subscribe, you are welcome to unsubscribe. Of course, I hope that you’ll stick around longer. If you are a free subscriber (and you stick around), you can expect to receive these newsletters every Monday; you may also receive occasional posts by email, and you can always go to SET on the Web to see a listing of all the content for SET.
Note, however, that most posts only stay publicly accessible for about eight days.2 Once they are archived, posts are only accessible to paid subscribers. (Paid subscribers not only have access to the contents of the archives, but they also have the authority to comment on posts, receive special posts, and participate in other activities…oh, yes: They also have (a) the satisfaction of knowing they’re contributing to the enterprise and, especially, (b) my gratitude.)
Photo for the week
It’s not a bird. It’s not a plane. It’s not Superman. It is in the water.
Yes! It is a fish. I photographed it June 2024 from the bank as it was swimming upstream in the Rivanna River near Charlottesville’s Riverview Park. I estimate that it was almost one meter long. What kind of fish is it? Any ichthyologists among the readers?
Status
As noted in the introductory paragraph, this is the first issue of the fourth year of SET. There are have been > 970 posts prior to this one, and
There are > 700 subscribers to SET. Subscribers come from all but six US states and > 40 countries. I interpret this distribution as an indication that SET has a toehold in special education on Earth. I suspect that the spread of SET is a product of readers sharing posts, newsletters, and observations with colleagues and friends. Please continue to do so. Pass along a copy of this newsletter or the URL for it. Thanks!
List of contents
Although there were no newsletters for the last two weeks of June 2024, Published a few posts. Here is a list of those posts (some of these may already have slipped behind the paywall):
Friday photos: It's another chance to remember Barb Bateman: What would special education be like if Barbara Bateman hadn't affected it?
Secretin and autism: What was that treatment that garnered interest among so many people in the neurodevelopment community?
Changing the literacy landscape in Victoria: Will policy change promote effective reading, spelling instruction in the Australian state?
Retro SET: Neuro-psych and such: What are some posts published on SET about neurological and biological aspects of disability?
Some good news about police and individuals with disabilities: Are concerns about preparing low enforcement personnel for encounters with individuals with disabilities paying off?
Kimberly L. Bright, 1957-2010: One can learn a lot about education by learning about Kim Bright.
Janet Weiss Lerner, 1926-2015: Didn't she provide lots of help for individuals with disabilities?
Ancient evidence for community services: What lessons for caregiving can we derive from ear bones from 15000 years ago?
Notes
Okay, Here we go. It’s off into the wild blue yonder (AKA, Volume 4)!
This volume will feature more of the familiar (e.g., brief treatments of news and events). However, I hope to incorporate some new features, too. I anticipate publishing some longer pieces, perhaps with accompanying read alouds for those who’d rather listen to posts while, say, driving (thanks for the suggestion, Tina C.!). I hope to return to some long-ago series (“Evaluating curricula: #1…”) and, mayhaps, serialize some other fiction. And, I hope to have other writers join me by authoring posts for SET.3
If you have ideas, questions, or concerns about SET and its contents, please write to me (thanks for the corrections, Hal McG.!). You can simply reply to any post or newsletter that you get as an email and your reply will come to me. I’d be happy to hear from readers.4
In the meantime, in keeping with my concern about the kids who are the focus of our shared concern, please remember to teach those children well.
JohnL
John Wills Lloyd, Ph.D., UVA Professor Emeritus,
Founder & Editor, https://www.SpecialEducationToday.com/
Footnotes
“Hunt?” you say. Well, “say, hey” was supposed to have been the way that “The Say Hey Kid” greeted people. That kid was the baseball player, Willie Mays, who died 18 June 2024. As in any area of endeavor (but especially in sports), there are often conversations about who was the Greatest of All Time; in baseball, Mr. Mays would be one of the players about whom the experts would argue. I don’t want to engage in such an argument; I’ll leave the debating to the experts. Let me just say, though, that if I got to create a fantasy all-star team, I’d choose Willie Mays first.
I keep the weekly newsletters on the “open” side as best I can. Doing so require a manual editing of each one, so I may have failed to updated some; if you find a newsletter issue that’s behind the pay wall, please alert me (include the volume and issue numbers) so that I can update it.
In this vein, maybe I’ll transcribe some contributions by friends who wrote for the original (1980s!) SET: the late Tom Lovitt and Barb Bateman. It might be a gas to read what they wrote ~40 years ago and think about how dated or current those publications are now.
Oh, yes…I think that fish in the photo for this issue looks a lot like what the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources calls a Longnose Gar.
In personal communication, long-time reader (and pal) Mike N. wrote, "It looks like a gar." I agree!