itsme – KMZ Digest

MS: It’s a box of chocolates you don’t want to share

itsme — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 21:14:37 +0000

Kim Zolotar

August 18, 2008

Adobe stock image

Special to the Los Angeles Times

A friend recently asked me what it felt like to have multiple sclerosis. We were sitting at the park watching our kids play, and we would have looked like any other suburban moms except for my silver walker covered with Spider-man stickers stationed nearby.

I did not immediately answer her question. How could I possibly explain how it feels to have a potentially disabling, progressive and incurable neurological disease? It has been 13 years since my doctor told me I have MS, but the answer to my friend’s question changes every day, sometimes every hour.

My MS experience reminds me of that famous line from the movie “Forrest Gump”: “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” To me, having MS is like being forced to eat chocolates from a box that had all the good chocolates removed. Every chocolate I eat from the MS box is something I do not like, just like every MS symptom has the power to annoy me and sometimes even scare me.

Merck Manuals

Having MS means that I never know how I am going to feel when I wake up each morning. I have to plan around the whims of a body that no longer cooperates. The covering around the nerves of my brain and spinal cord is being slowly eaten away by my own cells, resulting in legs that no longer guide me effortlessly throughout the day. My legs are too weak for the long walks on the beach that I once enjoyed.

Having MS means I might wake up to a numb hand, an aching back or legs saddled by weakness, stiffness or fatigue. Mornings can start out with a big yawn because I was up four times the night before to use the bathroom; my stomach and ribs might ache because it feels as if a boa constrictor has been squeezing them. Most of these problems go away without treatment, but sometimes I will need a few days of intravenous steroids to help speed my recovery.

Credit: Caters News Agency

Having MS has taught me a lot about myself. I now know that I can be tough when the need arises, and that I should not worry about the future. Each day is a chance to feel stronger. Through my daily struggles with this disease, I am trying to show my son that the obstacles I face are not stopping me from living life.

Being diagnosed with MS when my adult life was just starting was a sad thing, but I am not a sad person. I am genuinely happy when I watch my little boy hit a baseball, when I have a “date night” with my husband or when a child I am working with begins reading. MS is powerful, but it cannot take these moments away from me.

Kim Zolotar is a wife, mother and educator living in Rancho Cucamonga.

latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-aug-18-he-myturn18-story.html

Shoe Envy

itsme — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 20:18:30 +0000

5 ways schools have shifted in 5 years since COVID-19

itsme — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 20:48:10 +0000

Students sit in pop-up tents during wind ensemble class at Wenatchee High School on Feb. 26, 2021 in Wenatchee, Wash.. David Ryder/Getty Images

The U.S. educational landscape has been drastically transformed since the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered school campuses five years ago.

Access to high-quality teachers and curriculum developed by teachers is shrinking, for example. Likewise, there has been a loss of emotional support for students and a decline in the school use of technology and social media.

As education scholars focused on literacy practices in schools, we’ve identified five ways we believe the COVID-19 pandemic – and the rapid shift to remote learning and back – has transformed education:The U.S. educational landscape has been drastically transformed since the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered school campuses five years ago.

1. Teachers are leaving, and those staying are stressed

At the start of the 2024-2025 school year, 82% of U.S. public schools had teaching vacancies.

Schools have tried to adapt by expanding class sizes and hiring substitute teachers. They have also increased use of video conferencing to Zoom teachers into classrooms.

A teacher works from her home due to the COVID-19 outbreak on April 1, 2020, in Arlington, Va.
Olivier Doulier/AFP via Getty Images

Teacher retention has been a problem for at least a decade. But after the pandemic, there was an increase in the number of teachers who considered leaving the profession earlier than expected.

When teachers leave, often in the middle of the school year, it can require their colleagues to step in and cover extra classes. This means teachers who stay are overworked and possibly not teaching in their area of certification.

This, in turn, leads to burnout. It also increases the likelihood that students will not have highly qualified teachers in some hard-to-fill positions like physical science and English.

2. Increase in scripted curriculum

As of fall 2024, 40 states and Washington had passed science of reading laws, which mandate evidence-based reading instruction rooted in phonics and other foundational skills.

While the laws don’t necessarily lead to scripted curriculum, most states have chosen to mandate reading programs that require teachers to adhere to strict pacing. They also instruct teachers not to deviate from the teachers’ manual.

Many of these reading programs came under scrutiny by curricular evaluators from New York University in 2022. They found the most common elementary reading programs were culturally destructive or culturally insufficient – meaning they reinforce stereotypes and portray people of color in inferior and destructive ways that reinforce stereotypes.

This leaves teachers to try to navigate the mandated curriculum alongside the needs of their students, many of whom are culturally and linguistically diverse. They either have to ignore the mandated script or ignore their students. Neither method allows teachers to be effective.

When teachers are positioned as implementers of curriculum instead of professionals who can be trusted to make decisions, it can lead to student disengagement and a lack of student responsiveness.

This form of de-professionalization is a leading cause of teacher shortages. Teachers are most effective, research shows, when they feel a sense of agency, something that is undermined by scripted teaching.

3. Improvements in teen mental health, but there’s more to do

Many of the narratives surrounding adolescent mental health, particularly since the pandemic, paint a doomscape of mindless social media use and isolation.

However, data published in 2024 shows improvements in teen reports of persistent sadness and hopelessness. Though the trend is promising in terms of mental health, in-school incidences of violence and bullying rose in 2021-22, and many teens report feeling unsafe at school.

Other reports have shown an increase in feelings of loneliness and isolation among teens since the pandemic.

4. Crackdown on students’ technology use in schools

COVID-19 prompted schools to make an abrupt switch to educational technology, and many schools have kept many of these policies in place.

For example, Google Classroom and other learning management systems are commonly used in many schools, particularly in middle school and high school.

These platforms can help parents engage with their children’s coursework. That facilitates conversations and parental awareness.

But this reliance on screens has also come under fire for privacy issues – the sharing of personal information and sensitive photos – and increasing screen time.

And with academia’s use of technology on the rise, cellphone usage has also increased among U.S. teens, garnering support for school cellphone bans.

A student attends an online class at the Crenshaw Family YMCA on Feb. 17, 2021, in Los Angeles during the COVID-19 pandemic. Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images

But banning these devices in schools may not help teens, as smartphone use is nearly universal in the U.S. Teens need support from educators to support them as they learn to navigate the complex digital world safely, efficiently and with balance.

In light of data surrounding adolescent mental health and online isolation – and the potential for connection through digital spaces – it’s also important that teens are aware of positive support networks that are available online.

Though these spaces can provide social supports, it is important for teens to understand the strengths and limitations of technology and receive authentic guidance from adults that a technology ban may prohibit.

5. Students and adults need social emotional support

Students returned to in-person schooling with a mix of skill levels and with a variety of social and emotional needs.

Social and emotional learning includes self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relational skills and decision-making.

These skills are vital for academic success and social relationships.

Teachers reported higher student needs for social and emotional learning after they returned to in-person instruction.

While some of this social and emotional teaching came under fire from lawmakers and parents, this was due to confusion about what it actually entailed. These skills do not constitute a set of values or beliefs that parents may not agree with. Rather, they allow students to self-regulate and navigate social situations by explicitly teaching students about feelings and behaviors.

A teacher provides instruction to a student at Freedom Preparatory Academy on Feb. 10, 2021, in Provo, Utah. George Frey/Getty Images

One area where students may need support is with cognitive flexibility, or the ability to adapt to current situations and keep an open mind. Classroom instruction that engages students in varied tasks and authentic teaching strategies rooted in real-life scenarios can strengthen this ability in students.

Besides allowing students to be engaged members of a school community, cognitive flexibility is important because it supports the skill development that is part of many state English language arts and social studies standards.

Social and emotional learning and cognitive flexibility are key components that allow students to learn.

Due to vague or confusing state policies, many schools have stopped teaching social and emotional learning skills, or minimized their use.

This, coupled with teacher stress and burnout, means that both adults and children in schools are often not getting their social and emotional needs met.

Message of mistrust

While we described five shifts since the start of the pandemic, the overall trend in K-12 schools is one of mistrust.

We feel that the message – from districts, state legislators and parents – is that teachers cannot be trusted to make choices.

This represents a massive shift. During the initial phase of the COVID-19 lockdown, teachers were revered and thanked for their service.

We believe in teacher autonomy and professionalism, and we hope this list can help Americans reflect on the direction of the past five years. If society wants a different outcome in the next five years, it starts with trust.

Rachel Besharat Mann Assistant Professor in Education Studies, Wesleyan University

Gravity Goldberg Visiting Assistant Professor in Education Studies, Wesleyan Universityy

theconversation.com/5-ways-schools-have-shifted-in-5-years-since-covid-19-246449

Marion Joseph’s literacy crusade for teaching

itsme — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 20:24:44 +0000

phonics in California is paying off

Students at Stege Elementary School in Richmond on Feb. 6, 2023.
Photo by Shelby Knowles for CalMatters

Dan Walters

March 19, 2023

Sometimes – not often, but sometimes – one person can have a life-changing impact on the wellbeing of millions of people.

Marion Joseph, who died nearly a year ago at age 95, was one of those people. She impacted millions of California schoolchildren present and future who struggle with reading comprehension, the vital skill that underlies all of education.

Marion Joseph
https://www.corelearn.com/

The pandemic underscored that too many of California’s elementary school students lack effective reading ability. EdSource noted that, prior to the pandemic, fewer than 50% of the state’s third-graders were reading at the expected level for their age. Three years later, after students had suffered through school closures and haphazard Zoom school, that had dropped to 42%.

It’s evident that one factor in the state’s reading crisis was that too many students were being subjected to a trendy form of reading instruction called “whole language,” which largely left them struggling on their own to decipher the words in their books.

_Shutterstock

For decades, California educators and politicians had been waging what were dubbed “reading wars” over whether that approach or the rival phonics method was more effective. School districts were left to decide for themselves which to use.

Joseph was one of the fiercest reading warriors. She had retired in 1982 after a long career in the state Department of Education, but became a tireless advocate for phonics after discovering that her granddaughter was struggling in reading.

Appalled to learn that the majority of California’s elementary students could not read well enough to learn from textbooks, Joseph started pestering state officials to do something. In the 1990s, then-Gov. Pete Wilson appointed her to the state Board of Education, which gave her a platform for the phonics crusade.

Joseph had some success in advancing the phonics cause, which stresses fundamental instruction in the letters and letter combinations that make up sounds, thus allowing children to sound out words and eventually whole sentences and passages.

In 2005, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education policy research group, honored her, saying, “Her relentless, research-based advocacy – for which the retired grandma didn’t earn a dime – is still a sterling example of what a citizen-activist and lone individual can accomplish in reforming U.S. schools.”

https://firstbook.org/

Alas, after Joseph retired for a second time, the advocates of whole language, which assumes that reading is a naturally learned skill, much like speaking, recouped and reading scores once again stagnated. However it now appears that phonics, now dubbed the “science of reading,” will become the state’s preferred method.

Phonics have a new champion in Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has struggled with dyslexia and thus has a strong personal interest in improving reading skills.

Buried on Page 123 of a trailer bill attached to Newsom’s proposed 2023-24 state budget is a $1 million appropriation to the Department of Education for creation of a “Literacy Roadmap” aimed at improving reading and other language skills using “evidence-based literacy instruction in the classroom, including explicit instruction in phonics, phonemic awareness, and other decoding skills.”

_{Logo-The California Reading & Literature Project (CRLP) UC San Diego}

Newsom’s support isn’t the only indication that Joseph’s long struggle is paying off. Beginning next year, credentialing of teacher preparation programs will require reading standards aligned with phonics.

Perhaps most importantly, 14 leading figures in California education research and advocacy, including those who have fought in reading wars on both sides, have issued a joint paper that calls for more vigorous and targeted instruction in basic reading skills, including phonics.

It’s unfortunate Joseph is not alive to see what’s finally happening to address California’s literacy crisis.

calmatters.org/commentary/2023/03/reading-instruction-phonics-california

March 13, 2020 or The Day Everything Changed

itsme — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 20:07:59 +0000

Note: the photo above was taken from my office not long before I left it on March 13, 2020.

John A Casey Jr

April 3, 2020

We knew that week that something big was on the horizon. Faculty had been told earlier in the week to prepare for the possibility of class cancellations and the need to teach from home. We knew that things were going to be different, but no one could appreciate just how much our lives would change.

The week before my wife and I had met her mother and step father for dinner out in Rosemont. She’d be leaving for a month in Spain the next day. I had misgivings. I told my wife “Are they really sure they want to travel. This coronavirus seems kind of deadly. A lot worse than people are saying.” I’d talked to my students from China. They were scared for their families. Not always getting accurate information on what was going on. Almost all of them had been wearing masks already back in January. I looked at my father in law, already frail from Parkinson’s disease, and wondered if I’d ever see him again.

But we pressed on. We pressed on because no one ever wants to believe that a calamity of this scale can happen. Especially to them. This is historic shit. It belongs in sepia tone. Not in my community. Not on my Facebook wall. But it happened anyway. It happened the week of March 13, 2020.

That week began with premonitions. I told my students to expect guidance soon from the university on what to expect in the weeks to come. I told them to wash their hands and clean their phones and computers regularly to help them stay well.

On Wednesday, I got home. My wife had a hair appointment so I drove the car. While eating dinner, I saw the President give a speech. The US borders closed to foreign travelers. I thought of my mother in law still in Spain. I texted my wife. “Can she get back in the county? What will happen? They better leave now.” Her mother decided to stay a few more days. It would soon blow over. No one seemed all that worried in Bilbao.

Then on Thursday sports leagues started to shut down. First the NBA and then the NHL. Suddenly it seemed real. Without sports to distract us, people began to freak out.

I decided on Wednesday to make Friday my first distance learning class for my First Year Writing Students. But I still had an exam to proctor for my American Literature class. I came to an eerily quiet campus, quieter than I had seen it since 9/11 and taught my comp classes on line from my office while waiting to proctor the exam.

Going into the classroom building, I discovered my classroom had been locked. An ominous sign. We took the room next-door because it was unlocked. Most classrooms already seemed empty. The custodians nervous. Wearing face masks and gloves as they swept and sanitized the building.

I gave my students the exam and they completed it in silence. Were they nervous about the exam or the possibility of catching what was now being called COVID-19? I have no idea. The last student finished around 3 pm. Those still remaining packed up to leave.

As I walked outside the classroom and prepared to head back to my office, a student stopped for a moment to talk to me. “What do you think will happen?” “I don’t know.” I said. “We’ll try to make things work on line, but I don’t see us coming back to campus this semester.” “I don’t know,” he said, “some classes don’t work well online. Like this one.” “Yeah,” I said, “but we don’t have much of a choice. We’ll all do our best. Just be patient with me and I’ll be patient with you.” I wished him the best and told him I’d pray for his grandparents with whom he lived. He worried about their health just like I worried about that of my family. My dad has COPD and my mom MS. Even a regular cold is a cause for concern. And this shit, ain’t no cold or flu.

_{March 2020: Streets of downtown Chicago are completely desolated, empty due to the national COVID pandemic.}
_{— Photo by Wirestock/ Deposit Photos}

Going back to my office, I started to pack things up in my bag. I wondered when or if I would ever see this space again. I’ve never liked the Brutalist architecture on campus, but I felt a sense of sadness at losing the routine of going to work and coming home again. I put away things I knew I would need and headed outside to wait for my wife to pick me up in the car.

Deserted. Quieter than 9/11. That was my impression as I waited. Today was the end of something. I didn’t know what. I just knew that what came out on the other side would never be like this again. When I got in the car, I told my wife “Let’s go out to eat. This will probably be our last normal meal for a long time.” We went to Portillos. To date, it is the last night we have been out to eat.

We then decided to go to the store. We thought that maybe Friday night would be quieter than Saturday afternoon. We were wrong. The Jewel was more crowded than I had ever seen it before. Store shelves decimated of the most random things. Someone had bought all the cheap frozen pizza, all the onions, all the flour. But they had left behind the TV dinners, the eggs, and the yeast. There was also a lot of alcohol to be had. But no toilet paper. Thank God I had bought some on Wednesday before the panic buying had hit high gear.

That night we brought our purchases inside in stages along with the items from work. My wife would still have to go to the office for a few more days. Then the governor would shut the state down, sending us all home for an indefinite period of time.

So here I sit. Writing this blog post today on April 3, 2020. Like many of you, I feel like I have lived more than a year in a few weeks. And yet, the bad news continues. Death upon death. Disaster upon disaster.

Who knows what the future holds. But my mother in law and her husband eventually got home before Spain and all of Europe shut down. They are both healthy. Thank God. As are my family so far.

I work from home now. Teach distantly. Grade papers as before. Looking over my shoulder as history happens. Reminded again of the tenuous hold humans have on their environment. We have always been mastered by our setting. It’s just that living in a city, one not prone to many natural disasters, has given me the privilege of ignoring this for a long time.

No more. Only God and our immune system can tell us what the future holds. May they both be kind to you and yours.

johnacaseyjr.com/2020/04/03/march-13-2020-or-the-day-everything-changed

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Can learning cursive help kids read better?

itsme — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 20:14:57 +0000

Pennsylvania is considering legislation that mandates cursive instruction in public schools.
Angela Guthrie/iStock via Getty Images

Some policymakers think it’s worth a try

Shawn Datchuk

May 6, 2025

Recently, my 8-year-old son received a birthday card from his grandmother. He opened the card, looked at it and said, “I can’t read cursive yet.”

Image: Cartoonstock

Then he handed it to me to read.

If you have a child in the Philadelphia School District, chances are they have not been taught how to read or write cursive either.

But cursive handwriting is making a comeback of sorts for K-8 students in the United States. Several states in recent years passed legislation mandating instruction in cursive handwriting, including California, Iowa and Oklahoma.

Pennsylvania and New Jersey are considering similar legislation, as are other states.

I’m an associate professor of special education and the director of the Iowa Reading Research Center. At the center, we’re conducting a systematic review of prior research to improve cursive handwriting instruction.

We also want to know how learning cursive affects the development of reading and writing skills.

Cursive instruction sidelined

In cursive handwriting, the individual letters of a word are joined with connecting strokes, such as in a person’s signature.

Cursive fell out of favor in U.S. schools over a decade ago. In 2010, most states adopted Common Core academic standards which omitted cursive handwriting from expected academic skills to be learned by K-8 students. In fact, the standards only briefly mention print handwriting, a writing style in which the individual letters of a word are unconnected, as a skill to be taught in early elementary grades.

Educators often have trouble finding enough time in the school day to teach all the expected writing skills, let alone something that’s not mandated such as cursive handwriting.

In several national surveys, teachers have reported limited amounts of time for writing instruction and that they have found it difficult to address both the basic skills of writing, such as handwriting, and more advanced skills, such as essay composition.

Benefits of handwriting

The increased interest in cursive handwriting likely stems from effort by policymakers to improve the literacy performance of K-12 students across the country.

Ode to Cursive
Amy DiGi

On the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading assessment, a measure of nationwide reading progress, only 31% of fourth grade students scored proficient or above. Philadelphia’s numbers were worse, with just 19% of fourth grade students scoring proficient or above.

Research suggests it may be possible to improve overall writing and reading through handwriting instruction.

The benefits have been more closely studied with print handwriting, but preliminary evidence suggests cursive handwriting instruction may also be beneficial. Some studies have found cursive handwriting instruction can improve handwriting legibility, writing length and select reading skills. In a 2020 study, researchers found cursive handwriting instruction can also improve spelling accuracy and storytelling ability.

Why might cursive make a difference? On the surface, it seems like a simple motor skill. But under the surface, cursive handwriting draws upon deep reading knowledge and requires the coordination of multiple cognitive and physical processes.

To handwrite letters or spell words in print or cursive, students need to commit multiple aspects of each letter to memory. For example, if students handwrite the word “cat,” they need to know the overall shape of each letter, as well as its name and sound.

After drawing upon this reading knowledge from memory, students use a combination of motor and vision systems to write each letter and the entire word. Gross motor movements are used to adjust the body and arm to the writing surface. Fine motor movements are used to manipulate the pencil with one’s fingers. And visual-motor coordination is used to write each letter and adjust movements as needed.

A skill with staying power?

Besides potential benefits to overall writing and reading development, cursive handwriting continues to have social importance.

It is often used to sign formal documents via a cursive signature, or to communicate with close friends or loved ones. Furthermore, understanding cursive is needed to read important historical documents, such as the Declaration of Independence.

Even in the digital age, touch-screen tablets and other devices often come with the ability to handwrite text with an electronic pencil. I teach courses at the University of Iowa, and many of my students handwrite their notes on electronic tablets.

For schools, low-tech options such as paper and pencils remain more cost-efficient than high-tech options. For example, it can be time-consuming and expensive to replace a broken laptop but relatively cheap to sharpen a broken pencil or get a new piece of paper.

Although it may be difficult for educators to find sufficient time for writing instruction, students will likely benefit from developing the capacity to express their ideas in a variety of ways, including cursive handwriting.

For anyone interested in learning about cursive handwriting and teaching it to their children or students, the Iowa Reading Research Center will release a free online course and curricula called CLIFTER on June 2, 2025.

theconversation.com/can-learning-cursive-help-kids-read-better-some-policymakers-think-its-worth-a-try-253610

‘Number sense’ is one of the building blocks of math

itsme — Fri, 02 May 2025 20:23:48 +0000

By Holly Korbey

February 19, 2025

The building blocks of math that students need to excel — but aren’t always getting

ATLANTA — Students gathered around a bright blue number board in Melissa Williams’ kindergarten class at the Westminster School, gazing at the bank of 100 blank squares, organized in rows and columns of 10. Their assignment was to pick a numbered tile and figure out where it should go on the board.

The task seems simple, but Williams’ goal was to bolster students’ “number sense” — a difficult-to-define skill, but one that is nevertheless essential for more advanced mathematics.

_{www.beginlearning.com}

One student with a “42” tile carefully counted the squares in each row. “Ten!” he said. Counting each row by tens — 10, 20, 30 — he came to 40, then moved his finger to the next row and counted the next two to arrive at 42.

The fact that the student was able to count by tens and then add two, rather than counting each square up to 42, is an example of number sense.

Other examples include understanding the size of numbers in relation to one another, finding missing numbers in a sequence, understanding that written numbers like “100” represent 100 items, and counting by ones, twos, fives and tens. Each of these skills is critical to understanding math, just like grasping the connection between letters and the sounds they represent is a must-have skill for fluent reading.

Number sense is so innate to many adults that they may not remember being taught such skills. It is crucial to mastering more complex math skills like manipulating fractions and decimals, or solving equations with unknown variables, experts say. Research shows that a flexible understanding of numbers is strongly correlated to later math achievement and the ability to solve problems presented in different ways.

Unlike the recent surge of evidence on science-based reading instruction, research and emphasis on number sense isn’t making its way into schools and classrooms in the same way. Students spend less time on foundational numeracy compared with what they spend on reading; elementary teachers often receive less training in how to teach math effectively; and schools use fewer interventions for students who need extra math support.

https://ca.pbslearningmedia.org/

Many American students struggle in math. According to the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, nearly 1 in 4 fourth graders and 39 percent of eighth graders scored “below basic,” the test’s lowest category. An analysis of state tests shows that few states have recovered students from pandemic math losses, with disadvantaged students from low-income neighborhoods hit especially hard.

For those struggling students — including those diagnosed with dyscalculia and related learning challenges — lack of number sense often plays a significant role.

“For kids that have a fundamental weakness in mathematics, 80 percent or 90 percent of the time that’s going to be linked to a lack of understanding numbers,” said Ben Clarke, an early math researcher and department head of special education and clinical sciences at the University of Oregon. “If we want students to be able to access other pieces of mathematics that are really important, then they need to build this foundational understanding of numbers.”

_{For the Love of Teaching}

Doug Clements, the Kennedy endowed chair in early childhood learning at the University of Denver, said many American students struggle with seeing relationships between numbers. “Children who see 98 plus 99 and line them up vertically, draw a bar underneath with an addition sign, then sum the eight and the nine, carry the one and so forth — they are not showing relational thinking,” Clements said. “Children who immediately say, ‘That’s 200 take away three, so 197,’ are showing number sense.”

Even in the early years of school, researchers can spot students who can make connections between numbers and use more sophisticated strategies to solve problems, just as there are some students who start school already reading.

Also as with reading, gaps between students are present on the first day of kindergarten. Students from low-income and disadvantaged backgrounds arrive at school with less math knowledge than high-income students. Boston College psychologist and early math researcher Elida Laski said research has found income-based differences in how families talk about math with children before they ever reach school.

“Lower-income families are more likely to think about math as narrow, it’s counting and numbers,” Laski said. “Whereas higher-income families tend to think about math as more conceptual and around in everyday life.”

These differences in thinking play out in how flexible students are with numbers in early elementary school. In one study, Laski and her team found that higher-income kindergarten and first grade students used more sophisticated problem-solving strategies than lower-income students, who more often relied on counting. The higher-income students also had more basic math facts committed to memory, like the answer to one plus two.

The memory recall and relatively advanced strategies used by higher-income students produced more efficient problem-solving and more correct answers than counting did. Also, when students from high-income families produced a wrong answer, it was often less wrong than students who were relying on strategies like counting.

Solving math education

Laski said many of the low-income students in the study struggled with addition because they didn’t have a firm understanding of how basic concepts of numbers work. For example, “When we’d ask, ‘What’s three plus four,’ we’d get answers like ‘34,’” Laski said. “Whatever ways they’re practicing arithmetic, they don’t have the conceptual basis to make sense of it. They didn’t have the number sense, really.”

Laski said early childhood classrooms could be “far more direct” with students in teaching number sense, weaving it in explicitly when working on more concrete skills like addition.

PBS Learning Media

Clarke, the early math researcher at University of Oregon, agreed.

“Our understanding has drastically grown in the last 20, 25 years about effective instructional approaches” to help students learn number sense, said Clarke. “If you are only going to get X number of minutes in kindergarten or first grade to support student development in mathematics, kids that are not responding to the core instruction — you have to be pretty focused on what you do and what you offer.”

But elementary school teachers often aren’t trained well on the evidence base for best practices in teaching number sense. A 2022 report from the National Council on Teacher Quality highlights that while teacher training programs have improved in the last decade, they still have a long way to go. By their standard, only 15 percent of undergraduate elementary education programs earned an A for adequately covering both math content and pedagogy.

Teachers aren’t often taught to look at math learning as a whole, a progression of skills that takes students through elementary math, beginning with learning to count and ending up in fractions and decimals — something that some instructional coaches say would help emphasize the importance of how early number sense connects to advanced math. Grade-level standards are the focus that can leave out the bigger picture.

Both the Common Core State Standards and Clements, who served on the 2008 National Mathematics Advisory Panel and helped create a resource of early math learning trajectories, outline those skills progressions. But many teachers are unaware of them.

https://us.sofatutor.com

Instructional coach and math consultant Neily Boyd, who is based in Nashville, Tennessee, said she often works with teachers on understanding how one skill builds on another in sequence, how skills are connected, using the progressions as a jumping-off point.

“When teachers have been trained on both the whole math concept and how the pieces progress from year to year, they’re able to teach their grade-level piece in a way that builds from the previous pieces and towards the future pieces,” she said. “Learning math becomes about widening and refining understandings you’ve already built, rather than a never-ending list of seemingly disconnected components.”

Young students also spend less time with numbers, which often only appear during “math time,” than they do with letters, reading and literacy.

“Often I’ll go into classrooms with literacy stuff all over the walls, but nothing in terms of number,” said Nancy Jordan, professor of learning sciences at the University of Delaware and author of “Number Sense Interventions.” “In the early grades, there are so many ways to build number sense outside of instructional time as well — playing games, number lines in the classroom. Teachers can think of other ways to build these informal understandings of math and relate them to formal understanding.”

On a recent fall day at Nashville Classical Charter School, in Nashville, Tennessee, fourth grade math teacher Catherine Schwartz was walking students through a complicated subtraction problem with big numbers: “Lyle has 2,302 dog treats, but he needs 13,400. How many more treats does Lyle need?”

To solve it, students had to “subtract across zeros,” regrouping from one place value to the next. Subtraction’s standard algorithm is an important skill to learn, Schwartz said, but can’t be done well without strong number sense.

Number sense for older students has some of the same ideas of magnitude and relationships, Schwartz said, but the numbers get bigger. Students began the subtraction problem using 13 thousands and four hundreds to recognize the magnitude of the numbers in each place value, for example, but slowly simplified it into the classic stack-and-subtract method.

Schwartz, who has taught for seven years, said at first she didn’t realize how big a role number sense played in calculations like subtraction with big numbers. ”Number sense or number flexibility, it’s never truly named” in the curriculum, Schwartz said. “We try to practice it.”

Even something as simple as counting big numbers, including hundred thousands and millions, some educators say, can help develop number sense. Counting might seem simple, but for young children it’s foundational and essential. “These are really big ideas for little kids,” Jordan said.

hechingerreport.org/the-building-blocks-of-math-students-need-to-excel

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Contact the editor of this story, Christina Samuels, at 212-678-3635 or samuels@hechingerreport.org

Do you know the Ten Cannots?

itsme — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 21:24:05 +0000

Lawrence W. Reed

“That you may retain your self-respect, it is better to displease the people by doing what you know is right, than to temporarily please them by doing what you know is wrong.”

_{William J. H. Boetc}_ker _{(1873–1962)}

There’s a lot of valuable and timeless wisdom in that one sentence! Its author was William J. H. Boetcker, who died at 89 in 1962. Born in Germany, he emigrated to America as a young man, became an ordained Presbyterian minister, and gained a national reputation as a superb public speaker. He also said, famously,

“A man is judged by the company he keeps, and a company is judged by the men it keeps, and the people of democratic nations are judged by the caliber of officers they elect.”

I recently learned of Boetcker and his short essay, “The Ten Cannots,” published in 1916. It was widely circulated while he was alive and is the one thing he is probably best remembered for. Its core principles are well worth taping to your refrigerator. If you’re a politician, get them engraved on both your lectern and your heart. And if you watch tonight’s presidential debate, make a note each time one of them is violated:

What a difference for the better these truths would make if every citizen took them to heart and lived up to them. Think about it.

Lawrence W. (“Larry”) Reed is FEE’s President Emeritus, Humphreys Family Senior Fellow, and Ron Manners Global Ambassador for Liberty. He previously served as president of FEE from 2008-2019. He chaired FEE’s board of trustees in the 1990s and has been both writing and speaking for FEE since the late 1970s.

fee.org/articles/do-you-know-the-ten-cannots

ADA30

itsme — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 22:00:19 +0000

30 Years After the Americans with Disabilities Act,

There’s Still Work to Be Done

A student makes his way through the campus of UCLA in Los Angeles. The university has eased barriers to enable students and guests with disabilities to access classrooms and dorms. However, many public places remain difficult for people with disabilities to access. Photo by Kirkikis/iStock.

Jennifer McLelland

December 2, 2022

As an abled parent of a disabled child, I’m learning to help my son manage accessibility burdens because our communities and institutions aren’t designed with him in mind. We can do better for children with disabilities by building more accessible, more inclusive communities and by teaching them how to assert their rights in situations that aren’t in compliance with the law.

The Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law in 1990 and forms the foundation of disability integration into employment and public spaces. The ADA prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability and requires that public spaces be made accessible to people with disabilities.

But the mechanism of enforcement relies on people with disabilities filing individual complaints and lawsuits – the system as it exists delegates a collective responsibility for accessibility onto the people who are excluded. The result is that, even though the law requiring accessibility for public spaces is more than 30 years old, many places are still inaccessible for people with disabilities.

During the first few years of my son’s life, he had several medically complex health issues and life was overwhelming – my focus was on keeping him alive. I didn’t have the bandwidth to pick fights over accessibility, so when things weren’t accessible, we just didn’t do them.

As a child with medical complexities, my son took a few years to learn to walk well enough to get around. The process of him learning involved several different walkers, along with a stroller to carry his medical equipment. The ADA rules that are in place to make public spaces accessible for wheelchairs should have made more spaces workable for strollers and walkers – but they didn’t. I threw out my back more times than I can count trying to balance a crying, fragile child in one arm and 40 pounds of equipment in the other.

Jennifer McLelland, right, with her husband, Justin, and children James and Josephine. Photo courtesy of Jennifer McLelland.

What did I do to solve the problems in those early years? I leaned hard into abled privilege and tried to steamroll my way through them. I figured out a 40-pound backpack system that could carry his oxygen, suction machine, feeding pump and all his gear with me on the move. As a small child learning to walk in a world that constantly tripped him, he fell constantly. And with forty pounds on my back I had a hard time picking him up.

My next solution was Crossfit – if he was going to get heavier and still need to be carried, I would just have to get stronger to keep being able to lift him. I love being strong – but I was wrong in thinking that I could powerlift a solution to his need to interact with the world.

As Americans we tend toward individual solutions, even when structural solutions would do a much better job at fixing things. The ADA has existed for my son’s entire life, but it’s still up to us to figure out whether or not a location is going to be accessible. The process of figuring out accessibility concerns in advance places a time and planning burden on people with disabilities, and the amount of pre-planning that is required to do basic things that abled people take for granted is immense.

Now that I’ve given up on being a bulldozer mom, I’m learning how to be more assertive about accessibility needs, and at the same time teaching my son how and when to pick a fight over accessibility. In scenarios where there is likely to be pushback, I take the lead as the adult. In scenarios like the movie theater, where staff is (usually) trained and compliant with ADA requests for closed captioning, I nudge him to make the request.

Our major accessibility concern recently has been less about the built environment and more about the way we all behave in public spaces. The lack of COVID-mitigation strategies in most of public life creates a substantial accessibility burden for children and youth with medically complex disabilities. Children like my son are at much higher risk for death and serious illness from COVID-19 than children without underlying medical conditions. To pursue their right to an education, medically complex children have to either accept the substantial risk of COVID transmission in classrooms with unmasked, frequently sick and symptomatic classmates or opt out of in-person school entirely. It’s in scenarios like these – where the potential for harm is high, but the pushback on accommodations is frequently hostile – that I don’t have any good guidance to give him.

The curb-cut effect, a phrase coined by Angela Glover Blackwell, a civil rights advocate, refers to the way programs originally intended to benefit people with disabilities actually turn out to benefit society as a whole. Her initial example is how curb cuts – the small ramps built into sidewalks to allow for wheelchairs to roll smoothly down – make life easier for pedestrians, bicyclists and families with strollers. The kind of reasonable accommodations under the ADA that make life run smoothly for children and youth with special health care needs work in much the same way. If we look at the accommodations that children with disabilities need as being part of inclusive and universal design, rather than looking at them as special requests, we can all end up with better solutions.

Jennifer McLelland has a bachelor’s degree in public policy and management from the University of Southern California and a master’s degree in criminology from California State University, Fresno. She worked for the Fresno Police Department in patrol for eight years. She is currently a stay-at-home mother and paid caregiver through the In Home Supportive Services program. She is active in advocating for disability rights and home- and community-based services.

Thecalhealthreportx.org/2022/12/02/analysis-30-years-after-the-americans-with-disabilities-act-theres-still-work-to-be-done

What We Lost in the War on COVID

itsme — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 20:32:30 +0000

Daniel Dal Monte

August 22, 2024

The news cycle moves so quickly these days that we can forget to dwell on major events. But tyranny thrives on a short attention span.

Just a couple of years ago, we witnessed government dictates turn the entire world into a highly regimented military encampment.

A Military Response: The Role of the National Security Council

Ongoing research has revealed that the response to COVID-19 shifted early on from the public health authorities to the military. For instance, the then deputy national security advisor, Matthew Pottinger, in November 2019, appointed Deborah Birx to spearhead the COVID response.

Pottinger had no experience in public health but knew Birx through his wife, who worked at the CDC. Birx admitted in her congressional testimony that the National Security Council had recruited her for the position on the COVID task force. Birx was an immunologist and an Army colonel who had worked on AIDS research but had no experience in epidemiology or novel airborne respiratory viruses.

It appears as though the National Security Council, which is responsible for foreign policy and protecting the nation, took over the development of the pandemic response protocols, scrapping those already established by public health officials. According to a March 13, 2020, document titled “PanCap Adapted U.S. Government Pandemic Response Plan,” the National Security Council was entirely in charge of policy development for the COVID response. PanCap stands for “pandemic crisis action plan.”

Debbie Lerman, a persistent investigative journalist on the pandemic response, points out that the adapted PanCap shifted the implementation (distinct from the policy development) of the pandemic response away from the Department of Health and Human Services to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The National Security Council (NSC) ran policy, and FEMA became the lead federal agency on the interagency cooperation necessary to implement the policy.

This shift in power from public health authorities to military management helps us understand the exceptionally blunt and one-dimensional response to the COVID pandemic —that is, the “quarantine-until-vaccine” response. I want to highlight here three aspects of the pandemic response that flagrantly violate standards of medical ethics.

Bad Medicine

First, the COVID response coming from NSC insisted that a vaccine was the only proper response to the virus. Alternative treatments—so they told us—were largely ineffective at best, and dangerous at worst. The insistence on the vaccine as the unique panacea to COVID was the basis for the mandates coming from all sectors of the economy because if there were alternative treatments, we would not all have to receive the vaccine.

For instance, authorities dismissed the idea that natural immunity was sufficient protection, equal to or better than the vaccine. Therapies like ivermectin suffered ridicule and severe warnings, even though now a massive number of meta-analyses attesting to the efficacy of this drug against COVID have been published.

Instead of offering an array of viable treatments, the militarized COVID response insisted on “quarantine until vaccine” for the entire population. We could not go to work, the gym, or even to a restaurant, unless we took the vaccine, which wasn’t even available for a year after the pandemic was declared.

This heavy-handed approach, characteristic of a wartime response instead of a sophisticated public health strategy, violated the medical ethics principle of beneficence. Beneficence refers to the duty of acting for the good of others: We cannot merely refrain from harming people, but we must actively help them when they are in distress, especially when we occupy positions of public trust, as do physicians. Beneficent people seek what is best for the other, like the good Samaritan in one of Jesus’ parables.

By insisting on a crude quarantine-until-vaccine military strategy, pandemic response leaders did not act in our best interests. Someone truly motivated by beneficence will use all the options available to help someone, particularly if those options have low risk. When someone is drowning, a beneficent person will not arbitrarily refuse to use, for instance, a life preserver, or other lifeline, or to at least call for help, but instead insist on only using a helicopter for the rescue.

A beneficent medical professional will not provide just one option for therapy (especially one that isn’t yet available) when there are multiple low-cost, low-risk therapies available. To push just one therapy, one must have selfish, not beneficent, motives. A drug manufacturer would not be beneficent if it pressured doctors to prescribe only its medication when others are also available.

The quarantine-until-vaccine policy had a high cost for the population, with questionable benefit. The forced quarantine caused kids to miss school and people to lose employment. The vaccine was a novel product with little track record for safety and efficacy. Indeed, vaccines in general are complicated and often have no effect on mutated forms of the originally targeted virus.

On the other hand, natural immunity and ivermectin had a much better risk-to-benefit ratio. Anyone who has already had the virus has natural immunity, and the WHO classifies ivermectin as an essential medicine that any functioning health system must keep in stock.

With a novel product like the COVID mRNA vaccines, the government should have adopted a precautionary principle, waiting to see the early effects on willing trial participants of the vaccine to ensure its safety, rather than immediately imposing mass vaccination.

‘Follow the Science’

Secondly, the quarantine-until-vaccination strategy also showed a naïve confidence in the effectiveness of one strategy for an entire global population. Careful clinicians recognize that the practice of medicine is not like following a cookbook. Evidence in medicine is not a universal algorithm, providing an exact solution to a very complex problem for an entire population.

Philosophers of medicine have noted that a single complete algorithmic and infallible methodology for fixing medical problems is not possible. The scientific method reaches microsolutions for particular contexts, not general solutions. We cannot provide objective ranking for different types of evidence, and oftentimes it is hard to extrapolate evidence to new contexts. Medical evidence is pluralistic not monolithic, but the militarized COVID response applied a one-size-fits-all strategy.

Government officials continually blasted us with claims that “the science says,” as if the scientific method were some omniscient, unambiguous oracle instead of ongoing discovery.

Big Brother

Finally, the militarized COVID response showed a complete disregard for patient autonomy. This response exercised hard paternalism, a form of paternalism in which an authority takes away decision-making from someone who is fully competent. No one could make their own medical decisions during COVID, even highly educated and healthy people.

Hard paternalism is an authoritarian style of leadership that is foreign to American democracy and our culture of respect for the individual. We do not accept the idea that Big Brother knows best, nor should we accept such egregious violations of medical ethics like those characteristic of a military response.

intellectualtakeout.org/2024/08/what-we-lost-in-the-war-on-covid