Special Education Today Newsletter 3(8)

Did you miss some post this past week?

For the week beginning 21 August 2023, this is the Special Education Today Newsletter. Welcome. I hope you find valuable and entertaining content in this issue—and past and future issues.

Regular readers will recognize the usual areas of content. After a coupla-few updates, there is a list of previous posts, and then some comments. Read on!

This is the restored barn at Solitude, the named place where my mother, grandmother, and great grandfather were born and raised. I believe my great grandfather was responsible to building the original barn more than 100 yeas ago; over the past 30-40 years, recent owners were responsible for restoring it to this lovely condition. Photo by John Wills Lloyd. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Table of contents

This past week, I added five posts to the site. Most everyone received email notices about them, but one of them was just published without any notice (and, therefore, it’s like to be viewed way less often that the others).

Here’s a chronologically ordered list of those posts:

• Special Education Today Newsletter 3(7): What's to report for the week past?

• US Office of Special Ed Services released a blog series on transition planning:

  Shall we hope that this is the start of beneficial policies and practices?

• Aphorisms, sayings, and such: #1: Could a razor be used to slice and dice a theory?

• Popular press on resources for parents of kids with disabilities: Is this advice column rich or empty?

• Passing notes: late August 2023: How about some quick takes on articles from the Internet?

• Aphorisms, sayings, and such: #2: What has William Shakespeare got to do with this?

Status

SET pretty much held steady this past week. There was one subscriber who converted from free to paid and two new free subscriptions. SET is sneaking up on 600 total subscribers.

Continuing recognition for Mike G. and Dan H. for engaging in conversation about posts. Thanks, too, to those who drop likes on posts. Thanks to everyone who’s helping make the site active.

Comments

What in the world will I post during the coming week? It’s hard to predict. I have a couple of partial drafts, but I’ve found that I only sometimes complete drafts…they may wind up just lying there with some breeze blowing through them.

Most readers are probably familiar with the idea that odd events occur. For example, if coins are flipped randomly, some time over the course of vary many flips there will be a run of 100 heads (or tails) in a row; the probability is quite small, put it’s pretty dang sure to happen. Tversky and Kahneman (1971) showed that we humans believe inaccurate things about probability.

There is a popular variant on this idea. In basketball, for example, one often hears of a player being “on a hot streak”—in a particular period (say, a half or and entire game), she is making more of her shots than the average percentage she has made during her career, current season, or some other period. So, an observer might expect that she is likely to make the next shot, too…or miss, because she’s “due” for a miss. That expectation would be wrong; each shot is essentially an independent event (except, of course, that players are more likely to make lay ups than then are to make 17-footers).

There is another version readers may have encountered. If 1000s and 1000s of monkey press keys of keyboards randomly 1000s and 1000s (and 1,000,000,000s) of times, somewhere among the text generated by all those monkeys will be the entire works of Shakespeare. Now you see, in my view, this is a good explanation of my writing. If I keep on publishing content, eventually readers will find that I’ve written something worthwhile.

So, what should readers expect in the coming week? Well, more drivel, no doubt, but keep reading just in case there is something worthwhile among my childish babbling.

My father’s old Royal portable typewriter. I still have it! Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Thanks for reading! In preparation for future reading, please remember to take care of each other and of yourselves. And please teach your children well.

JohnL

SET editor guy
Charlottesville, VA, USA, Earth, Solar System, Milky Way…Payday?

Source

Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1971). Belief in the law of small numbers. Psychological Bulletin, 76(2), 105–110. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0031322