Articles by other authors – 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

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

The social benefits of psychological generosity

wordpress — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 19:43:36 +0000

Linda R. Tropp

May 21, 2025

How much do you engage with others when you’re out in public? Lots of people don’t actually engage with others much at all. Think of commuters on public transportation staring down at their phones with earbuds firmly in place.

As a professor of social psychology, I see similar trends on my university campus, where students often put on their headphones and start checking their phones before leaving the lecture hall on the way to their next class.

Curating daily experiences in these ways may appeal to your personal interests, but it also limits opportunities for social connection. Humans are social beings: We desire to feel connected to others, and even connecting with strangers can potentially boost our mood.

www.boundless.org

Though recent technological advances afford greater means for connection than at any other moment in human history, many people still feel isolated and disconnected. Indeed, loneliness in the American population has reached epidemic levels, and Americans’ trust in each other has reached a historic low.

At the same time, our attention is increasingly being pulled in varied directions within a highly saturated information environment, now commonly known as the “attention economy.”

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that so many Americans are experiencing a crisis of social connection. Research in social psychology helps to explain how the small behaviors and choices we make as individuals affect our experiences with others in public settings.

Where you focus your attention

One factor shaping people’s experiences in public settings concerns where they focus their attention. Since there is more information out in the world than anyone could ever realistically take in, people are driven to conserve their limited mental resources for those things that seem most crucial to navigating the world successfully. What this means is that every person’s attention is finite and selective: By attending to certain bits of information, you necessarily tune out others, whether you’re aware of doing so or not.

By Mariusz/peopleimages.com

More often than not, the information you deem worthy of attention also tends to be self-relevant. That is, people are more likely to engage with information that piques their interest or relates to them in some way, whereas they tend to ignore information that seems unrelated or irrelevant to their existence.

These ingrained tendencies might make logical sense from an evolutionary perspective, but when applied to everyday social interaction, they suggest that people will limit their attention to and regard for other people unless they see others as somehow connected to them or relevant to their lives.

One unfortunate consequence is that a person may end up treating interactions with other people as transactions, with a primary focus on getting one’s own needs met, or one’s own questions answered. A very different approach would involve seeing interactions with others as opportunities for social connection; being willing to expend some additional mental energy to listen to others’ experiences and exchange views on topics of shared interest can serve as a foundation for building social relationships.

How others interpret your actions

Also, by focusing so much attention on their own individual interests, people may inadvertently signal disinterest to others in their social environments.

As an example, imagine how it would feel to be on the receiving end of those daily commuting rituals. You find yourself surrounded by people whose ears are closed off, whose eyes are down and whose attention is elsewhere – and you might start to feel like no one really cares whether you exist or not.

As social creatures, it’s natural for human beings to want to be seen and acknowledged by other people. Small gestures such as eye contact or a smile, even from a stranger, can foster feelings of connection by signaling that our existence matters. Instead, when these signals are absent, a person may come to feel like they don’t matter, or that they’re not worthy of others’ attention.

How to foster connection in public spaces

_{Acknowledging another human with a smile, even when using an automated system, can help them feel seen and valued}. _{izusek/E+ via Getty Images}

For all these reasons, it may prove valuable to reflect on how you use your limited mental resources, as a way to be more mindful and purposeful about what and who garner your attention. As I encourage my Flickrstudents to do, people can choose to engage in what I refer to as psychological generosity: You can intentionally redirect some of your attention toward the other people around you and expend mental resources beyond what is absolutely necessary to navigate the social world.

Engaging in psychological generosity doesn’t need to be a heavy lift, nor does it call for any grand gestures. But it will probably take a little more effort beyond the bare minimum it typically takes to get by. In other words, it will likely involve moving from being merely transactional with other people to becoming more relational while navigating interactions with them.

A few simple examples of psychological generosity might include actions such as:

Tuning in by turning off devices. Rather than default to focusing attention on your phone, try turning off its volume or setting it to airplane mode. See if you notice any changes in how you engage with other people in your immediate environment.
Making eye contact and small talk. As historian Timothy Snyder writes, eye contact and small talk are “not just polite” but constitute “part of being a responsible member of society.”
Smiling and greeting someone you don’t know. Take the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” to the realm of social relations, by showing your willingness to welcome other people rather than displaying disinterest and avoidance. Such simple acts may help to foster feelings of belonging and build a sense of community with others.

https://www.wnyc.org/story/pleasant-commute-talk-stranger/

Among the most cynical, examples like these may initially be written off as reflecting pleas to practice the random acts of kindness often trumpeted on bumper stickers. Yet acts like these are far from random – they require intention and redirection of your attention toward action, like any new habit you may wish to cultivate.

Others might wonder whether potential benefits to society are worth the individual cost, given that attention and effort are limited resources. But, ultimately, our well-being as individuals and the health of our communities grow from social connection.

Practicing acts of psychological generosity, then, can provide you with opportunities to benefit from social connection, at the same time as these acts can pay dividends to other people and to the social fabric of your community.

theconversation.com/making-eye-contact-and-small-talk-with-strangers-is-more-than-just-being-polite-the-social-benefits-of-psychological-generosity-252477

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

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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

This story about number sense was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

_{^{This story also appeared Mind/Shift}}

The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

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

How COVID-19 Changed College Athletic Recruiting

itsme — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 21:57:40 +0000

Hoboken High School in Hoboken, New Jersey (Photo/Luigi Novi -Wikimedia Commons)

By Nicole McNulty

April 19, 2021

ARCELIA MARTIN, HOST: On average only about 6% of high school athletes go on to play sports in college. In a normal year, graduating seniors would be signed to their college teams by now. But COVID has disrupted this cycle. Nicole McNulty explores what that means for kids hoping to play sports in college.

NICOLE MCNULTY, BYLINE: Tyler Sims has been playing basketball since he was 9 years old. And like a lot of kids.

TYLER SIMS: My dream school is definitely Duke University. You know, I’ve been watching them since I was little. That’s my favorite basketball team.

MCNULTY: That would be tough enough any year. But with the pandemic it’s even harder. Tyler is a 17-year-old senior guard on the Hoboken High School boys varsity basketball team. Normally, coaches would be in the stands watching him play. But this year, they can’t watch in person. So his only way to get in front of them is his highlight reel. He had to make it himself. His friend filmed it. Here’s a clip of him making a layup in his red Number 2 jersey.

TAPE: [Basketball game.]

MCNULTY: Highlight tapes were always a part of the process – videos players make and send to colleges. But this year, his video might be his only chance. And his season was shorter. He’s played half as many games.

SIMS: I’m nervous, but at the same time, I’m very confident that, um, I’ll be in the hands of the right school. I’m pretty sure that I’ll play college basketball.

MCNULTY: Still, Tyler, like many other kids in the U.S., is now behind the ball. The recruiting process usually looks like this:

TIM NEVIUS: It’s about getting the athlete recognized by a college coach.

MCNULTY: That’s Tim Nevius, a lawyer who works with college athletes on eligibility and other issues.

NEVIUS: And then that coach making contact with them via email, telephone and establishing a connection and then offering a scholarship or a roster spot or admission.

MCNULTY: Nevius says the COVID disruption has created two major problems. One of them is what kids like Tyler are dealing with.

NEVIUS: Because of canceled seasons or postponement or the inability of coaches to travel, the athletes aren’t actually being seen playing their sports as they normally would.

MCNULTY: And the second problem? Overloaded rosters. Because of the pandemic, the NCAA extended college players’ eligibility. Coaches can hold onto their seniors for another year. That means fewer spots for high school hopefuls.

NEVIUS: For the incoming freshmen, then, that means that they’re faced with even a larger roster of juniors and seniors than they otherwise would have been.

MCNULTY: Take Bloomfield College in New Jersey, a Division II school. Gerald Holmes is the basketball coach there. He’s bringing back three of his seniors this fall. That only leaves room for three incoming freshmen. He might be able to take one more, but there’s another problem. This year the rules are more flexible for transfer students. They’re bigger, faster, stronger.

GERALD HOLMES: A lot of coaches would prefer to have a transfer versus a freshman. So, high school kids are taking the brunt of that.

MCNULTY: This year there are many new rules: each sport and division has their own. And the pandemic has changed a lot of them. An already complicated situation is worse — everyone from coaches to parents and students are confused.

HOLMES: It’s almost like the wild, wild west out there.

MCNULTY: For high school athletes, it’s a struggle to stand out. Holmes says he gets at least 100 emails a day from recruiting services and high school players. He agrees, the ripples of COVID are going to be felt in the recruiting process for years.

HOLMES: In reality, this is going to be a full cycle of four years, is going to be because a kid who is a freshman for me this year is still a freshman next year.

MCNULTY: The rules say that if a college player’s season was disrupted by COVID, they can play an extra year. As for Tyler, the 17-year-old in Hoboken, he sent his tape to a few schools. But no one knows when he’ll find out for sure about making a team. If he doesn’t get in this year, he’ll wait, keep training and try again next year.

Nicole McNulty, Columbia Radio News.

columbianewsservice.com/2021/04/19/how-covid-19-changed-college-athletic-recruiting

This story first aired on Uptown Radio.

About the author(s)

Nicole McNulty

Nicole McNulty is an audio journalist based in New York. She was born in Texas and spent her adolescence in Germany and Colorado. After traveling in her van for two years she now calls the city home. Her freelance print work can be found in The Boulder Weekly, The City Weekly and The West Side Rag. Nicole is currently studying at Columbia Journalism School where she’s focusing on crafting audio stories for Uptown Radio. Connect with Nicole on Twitter @nicole_mcnulty and via email nicole.mcnulty@columbia.edu

Moral Shaming: “You do You”

itsme — Fri, 29 Mar 2024 19:57:44 +0000

By Jill Neimark

November 4, 2022

Airline passengers, one unmasked and one wearing a face mask, await their flight at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport after the Biden administration announced in April 2022 that it would no longer enforce a U.S. COVID-19 mask mandate on public transportation, following a federal judge’s ruling that the 14-month-old directive was unlawful. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

When people have different views about health and freedom, they misuse morality to demonize one another, letting policymakers and corporations off the hook.

One evening last September, Gavin Yamey, professor of global health at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, dined indoors and tweeted a selfie of himself and his two tablemates—Chris Beyrer, director of the Duke Global Health Institute, and Gregg Gonsalves, a Yale epidemiologist and global health activist who won a MacArthur genius grant for his work on AIDS, global health, and social justice. Gonsalves has long been a voice for the vulnerable and disabled. Throughout the pandemic he lofted the torch of COVID caution and precautions, including masking, testing, vaccine boosts, and better ventilation indoors. He has been unafraid to critique those he regards as COVID minimizers, including President Biden himself (as in an article for The Nation, “No, Joe Biden, the Pandemic Is Not Over”).

Dining indoors these days certainly isn’t news. But within minutes, Pandora’s box had been flung open—unleashing an online tsunami of calumny directed entirely at Gonsalves. It was a moral condemnation of his life, his decency, his very self, based on this single, public act. Mike Hicks, one of Gregg’s online critics, summed up his view this way: “Does it make sense to engage in low-risk behaviors for 90 or even 95 percent of the time so you feel justified sticking a revolver to your head and pulling the trigger in a game of COVID Russian roulette?”

The reaction reveals a level of moral outrage increasingly entering debates over public health. For Gonsalves, it is concerning. “After three years of a pandemic we have to think about what’s sustainable,” he responds. Expecting responsible behavior from others is reasonable, but asking for totally, completely flawless behavior 100 percent of the time is not. “An absolutist moral framework pits us against each other and takes the public out of public health.”

We are now in the “You do you” phase of COVID-19, but that may be nothing new. Medical anthropologist Martha Lincoln of San Francisco State University notes that America has a long tradition of framing individuals as the most influential actors in their own lives, and this lets regulators off the hook. “We are reduced to looking to individuals as the major cause of and culprit for the outcomes that we’re living with,” she explains. “Diverting responsibility from institutions such as the CDC or the White House means that we can’t really locate a common enemy, and so enemies appear to be potentially everywhere. People may experience catharsis from identifying those who seem to be straying from the behaviors we think are correct. But it’s counterproductive.”

Instead of focusing on individuals, adds Gonsalves, “more lives can be saved when we shift the environmental and structural factors of society that throw us into the path of risk. The entire debate about individual interventions deals with downstream effects. Yes, individual interventions save lives, but they leave the larger sources of sickness unaddressed. It’s a ruse.” An analogy he likes to use is this: If you’re standing on the shore of a river watching hordes of people flailing as they drown in a fast current, you can either jump in and save one, or go upstream where you find the bridge has collapsed and needs to be repaired.

In America today, most of us are standing on that metaphorical shore, trying to decide whom to save from or blame for infection, climate change, staggering health care costs—one, two, ourselves, everybody, nobody? Moral frameworks about health can slide into our lives almost unnoticed and ignite self-righteous outrage as well as deeply felt betrayal, grief, or contempt. The result is more than toxic in today’s world, when so many engage in what molecular biophysicist Joseph Osmundson calls “these online clusterfucks of shaming, which never work anyway. Morality is so baked into our language of illness, it is almost the default setting, the language given to us to think about sickness,” he says. “It takes active, thoughtful work every day with every sentence one uses to reframe illness in ways that don’t make it a moral state.”

Mismoralization is exactly what it sounds like—the misapplication of the moral impulse in places where it does not belong and cannot help.

A powerful sense of right and wrong, of justice and injustice, forms early in life. Research has shown that toddlers as young as two are capable of judging what is fair and unfair. We may acquire an internal moral grammar in lockstep with the acquisition of actual language. But when moral frameworks spill into the realm of public health, we end up with what bioethicist Euzebiusz Jamrozik and his collaborator Steven Kraaijeveld have dubbed mismoralization.

Mismoralization is exactly what it sounds like—the misapplication of the moral impulse in places where it does not belong and cannot help. Mismoralization in public health can lead to shaming, blaming, and ultimately the fracturing of society. “Across societies,” write Kraaijeveld and Jamrozik in an August paper in Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, “human beings are inclined to punish norm violations.”

“We as a culture don’t think about how policy makes people sick,” says medical historian Jim Downs, author of the book Maladies of Empire. “We’re much more willing to ask, ‘What did YOU do to become sick?’ As soon as you hear someone has lung cancer, the first question is ‘Do you smoke?’ That’s a moral question.”

At its worst, mismoralization leads to criminal sentences. Thirty-five U.S. states still have laws that criminalize exposing others to HIV, even though AIDS is now a preventable and treatable disease. In some states, the maximum jail sentence is still life in prison.

On the other side of the coin, getting infected with HIV has also been moralized. “I cannot count the times I’ve been told I brought HIV on myself because I couldn’t keep it in my pants,” says Gonsalves. “I deserved what I got.” Even now, he says, he occasionally gets emails and direct messages calling him things like “an AIDS-infected f%#@*t.”

During the 1980s and 1990s, when HIV infection and mortality rose and peaked, there was a kind of moral calculus that went like this, says Osmundson: “Did you get it from a monogamous partner who cheated? Well, that’s bad but not that bad. Did you get it at a sex party? Oh my God, you should be ashamed.”

If you didn’t wear a condom back then, you were seen as killing yourself and others, adds Liz Highleyman, a medical journalist specializing in HIV and other infectious diseases.

Last summer, when monkeypox swept largely through gay communities—most often transmitted, it appeared, during the physical intimacy of sex between men—old stigmas resurfaced. One epidemiologist who caught monkeypox told the Philadelphia Tribune that he was afraid people would think, “If you got monkeypox, you got it in a very slutty way.” Public health officials applied harm reduction principles that had proved effective in the fight against HIV, says Highleyman, but the public response was not so forgiving. As one tweet put it: “So Big Brother shut down your churches and businesses for Cov19, but won’t tell gay men to stop having orgies for monkeypox.”

We have a long tradition in this country of shifting blame to those who don’t deserve it.

When confronting illness or frailty, this tradition of moral outrage does not recognize the systemic failures that are the true drivers of illness. “United States history has often featured the criminalization of infection,” observes medical ethicist Harriet Washington, author of the book Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present, which won the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. Pellagra, for instance, was called a Black infectious disease that struck “African Americans because of their supposed penchant for living in filthy conditions.” It was actually a disease of malnutrition that largely afflicted the enslaved. It wasn’t until the 1920s that physician Joseph Goldberger discovered that the illness stemmed from nutritionally inadequate corn-based diets. Later researchers learned that the disease is due to a deficiency of the B vitamin niacin.

When the higher SARS-CoV-2 infection and death rate of African Americans was first documented, many causal theories tended to blame the victim, says Washington. She explains that some health officials asked whether higher drug or alcohol use, disparate genetics, or failure to don masks and shun crowds heightens Black Americans’ risks. Others, she says, invoked Blacks’ high obesity rate, although obesity is an American problem, not a racial one. “In any event,” says Washington, “obesity in African Americans is tied to living in “food swamps” where a dearth of affordable nutritious fare is worsened by saturation of tobacco and alcohol products whose marketing is targeted to racial groups.”

Tuberculosis, a scourge caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, surged in widespread epidemics in Europe and North America during the 18th and 19th centuries. Once it was understood to be an infectious disease, the sickness was moralized. Women and the poor were targeted—the former for apparent failures in keeping their houses clean, thus allowing tuberculosis to spread; the latter for living in squalid conditions that favored transmission and threatened the rest of society.

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, a hundred Asian Americans were being attacked in this country every day, according to Washington. “People initially shun, exile, and then want to kill others who may be perceived as carrying dangerous infections.” Washington says this is an example of protective prejudice based on the fact that we are indeed more vulnerable to novel pathogens.

The principle is correct, but the application is often misguided. In the late 1800s, for instance, coastal West Africa was called “white man’s grave” because European soldiers and missionaries, exposed to infections to which they had no established immunity, died in high numbers there. Similarly, Native Americans succumbed to the strain of syphilis brought to the New World by European settlers. But where outbreaks of infection are concerned, “majority groups wrongly demonize minority groups,” Washington says, “avoiding them and then expelling them.”

We have a long tradition in this country of shifting blame to those who don’t deserve it. As anthropologist Lincoln points out, in almost every domain in American life where public health is at stake, large industries reflexively move their own responsibility out of view. For instance, nearly 60 years ago, a young lawyer named Ralph Nader wrote Unsafe at Any Speed, proving that car crashes were not caused only by “bad drivers “ but also by the auto industry’s unwillingness to spend on safety features like antilock brakes and airbags. During their long legal battle with the Justice Department over the opioid epidemic traced to its drug, oxycontin, Purdue Pharma and its owners, the Sackler family, shifted blame onto the individuals who became unwitting addicts. “Abusers aren’t victims; they are the victimizers,” Richard Sackler stated in one email. And the fossil fuel industry has long popularized the concept of an individual’s “carbon footprint” as a way to shift attention away from its own excesses—while individuals are left homeless from the wildfires, hurricanes, and vicious storm surges that are now commonplace effects of a changing climate.

These days it is the individual who is just plain tired of our current pandemic. That may be the case, but it does not constitute the basis of a valid public health response. It’s a form of manufactured futility that can be self-fulfilling. “A tired public is not an argument for public health policy,” says Lincoln. “So I understand why individuals are blaming other individuals. We all feel we’re trying to resolve a national public health crisis ourselves at home or online.”

What can we do to cope? First, recognize that “humans are gloriously messy,” says Osmundson. “We make mistakes, and there is no moral failing to wanting to have dinner with friends, eat pie when we’re on a diet, or have sex once without a condom. We have to build systems that are robust enough that these deeply human behaviors don’t lead to bad outcomes.”

If you lower your mask to take sips and bites at a wedding, should you be willing to go to jail for manslaughter, as queried in this tweet? If you insist that everybody wear a mask, are you robbing others of the opportunity to “richly connect, to fall in love, to live a full life”? Or are we shadowboxing to fill the vacuum left by the public health agencies that guide our national decisions—the CDC, the FDA, and the White House that presides over them both? “It’s not rocket science, what people need at a population level,” says Osmundson. “We need free health care, paid sick leave, an infrastructure that tackles public health head-on, and policy that reflects the fact that we function as a global superorganism.”

While we are nowhere close to that nirvana, we can stop hurling the slings and arrows of moral outrage at one another and join hands to demand more of our institutions, now and in the future. In that sense, we do have a moral obligation, for we are, as Gregg Gonsalves often says, “our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. Even in our human imperfection, that’s all we’ve got.”

^{Jill Neimark is a writer based in Macon, Georgia, whose work has been featured in Discover, Scientific American, Science, Nautilus, Aeon, NPR, Quartz, Psychology Today, and The New York Times. Her latest book is “The Hugging Tree” (Magination Press).}

https://www.openmindmag.org/articles/the-moral-outrage-of-health-acts

Clubhouse Rules:

itsme — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 21:26:43 +0000

New York’s New Young Republican Leader Eyes the Future

Gavin Wax sits in the “Clubhouse” of the New York Young Republican Club. (Credit: Aidan Kahn)

November 8, 2022

By Asta Kongsted

Gavin Wax sat on one of the many brown leather couches lining the studio apartment that serves as the “Clubhouse” of the New York Young Republican Club (NYYRC) on a recent Thursday afternoon. It is thanks to Wax that this group has that Midtown apartment at all – a fact which the 28 year-old Queens native does nothing to hide and which no one does anything to dispute. When Wax took over the presidency of the Club in 2019, it had 50 members and nowhere to host them. These days, membership stands at 1,100, while more than 76,000 have subscribed to their newsletter. With the members came the donors, making it possible to rent the space. Among them are Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, whose sizable donation helped pay for the couches.

Across from Wax, a young and visibly awestruck man settled into a leather seat of his own. He looked around the room, admiring the heavy, crimson curtains, the elaborate hunting trophies and the prominent display of KellyAnne Conway’s book Here’s the Deal on the mantelpiece of a fake fireplace. Žiga Ciglaric, a member of Slovenia’s right wing populist party, Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS), had come to receive political advice from Wax, who took on the role of wartime consigliere with ease: “When did you lose the election?” he asked, brow furrowed. “How’s your relationship with the media?” he added and nodded with acknowledgment when Ciglaric complained of a “communist” media elite that is “brainwashing” the minds of the Slovenians, who turned their backs on SDS during a parliamentary election this April.

Under Wax’ leadership, meetings like these are common at the NYYRC clubhouse. Since 2019, the Club has created “coalitions,” as he likes to call them, with far-right youth movements from all over Europe. Meanwhile, Wax is gaining more attention in the United States. Media outlets like Newsweek reported on it when Wax enthusiastically endorsed Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán —whose government the European Parliament recently referred to as an electoral autocracy— in early 2022. When Wax later traveled to Hungary to speak at the first-ever Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) held in Europe, The New Yorker and Arkansas Online made note of his presence.

When Wax finished counseling Ciglaric on this particular October afternoon, he was headed straight to the Taiwanese Embassy.

Wax’ idea is to nurture a global network of young, far-right politicians with a shared ideological framework, which he describes as populist and centered around “opposing free trade, opposing free immigration” and “economic pragmatism.” Ideally, the New York City-based Club will be the movement’s center of gravity.

At the same time, there’s work to be done on a national level, Wax said. Were it up to Wax, the Republican establishment would be on its way out and the remaining party members would adopt what he describes as the populist agenda that former President Donald Trump might have instigated, but of which he is only the beginning.

“The end goal for us is to take over the governing infrastructure that runs the Party. We need to put people that ideologically agree with us in positions of power so they can influence and shift things overnight,” said Wax.

In the future, it may very well be up to him. He’s president of the largest and oldest Young Republican Club in the country, he’s added appearances on alt-right podcasts and Fox News, he has ties to the likes of Steve Bannon and Matt Gaetz, so Wax’ words hold sway. And he intends to put action behind them. Eyeing the midterm election, he’s focused on a bright red future that few others see for true blue New York.

The “Emperor”

By mistake or design, and probably as a result of both, Wax’ origin story somewhat resembles Trump’s. As a former Bayside, Queens-resident with a college degree from Nassau Community College, Wax doesn’t possess the political pedigree of a traditional Republican leader.

Wax was raised by a single mother working shifting office jobs and the two of them moved around New York a lot. He frequently changed schools and found it difficult to fit in among his peers who wore clothes that his mom couldn’t afford. In high school, Wax said that he started selling “weed and mushrooms” to students and parents. He never touched the stuff himself, he said. He was in it to afford the same clothing as his customers.

“I didn’t like the clothes I had, I didn’t like that I was poor. You know, stupid petty shit,” Wax said. It took him a few years – and the political emergence of Trump – to realize that “fitting in” was not going to be the most politically salient strategy in the future.

These days, he’s selling political ideas. And like any good salesman, he easily attunes to the audience he’s trying to reach, weaving himself in and out of different discourses: at times speaking softly on the leather couch, while at others, screaming 140 characters onto Twitter, where he, until recently, called himself “The Emperor.”

At the Club, his leadership seems to agree he’s earned that title.

“Gavin’s problem is that there’s just not enough time in the day,“ said Nathan Berger, vice president of the Club. A sentiment that is echoed nearly word for word by the leaders of the club’s Black and Catholic caucuses, Jude Somefun and Michael Bartels. Perhaps once an outsider, he’s now the center of the world in the Midtown apartment promoting a Trumpian agenda, which may once have seemed fringe but is quickly becoming mainstream within the GOP.

The club’s former leadership is less likely to praise Wax’ talents. Some have claimed that he took over the once liberally Conservative club by way of a coup in 2019, when alumni of the NYYRC enticed Wax and then-associate Vish Burra to replace the presidency.

“We won an election without opposition and it was unanimous,“ said Wax, calling it a coup only “in the metaphorical sense. The club rapidly changed direction, ideologically and otherwise,“ embracing a more divisive profile: Disputing the 2020 election results while embracing a far-right political agenda. The former leadership have since left the club and the five members that were contacted for this story declined to comment on the specific circumstances of their departure.

When confronted with the fact that some are unwilling to go on the record about him, Wax seemed pleased: “If I’m going to be hated, I’d rather also be feared.“

Meanwhile, a collective amnesia seems to hover over the current members, who all have a hard time remembering the details of the change in leadership, Wax included.

As he walked around the Clubhouse, tidying the already immaculate space, he pointed to pictures of notable alumni, recounting their names and dates of membership. At the same time, he found it hard to remember the name of the former president from whom he took over the Club. It’s Melissa Marovich, a young woman who presided over the Club from 2016-2019 and has since left politics altogether. She, too, declined to comment about her exit.

Wax simply refers to his predecessor and the rest of her former presidency as a group of “no-names,” unable to fulfill the potential of the Club.

Winning on the Margins

Why anyone would want to ascend the throne of a tiny Club of 50 members ruled by a bunch of “no-names” only makes sense if you can spot the political potential that Wax is committed to realizing. Many think of New York as a decidedly Democratic state, but in Wax’ mind nothing is set in stone.

“There is a very fertile ground in New York based on a very populist agenda: crime is up, the economy is a mess, people are fleeing the state in droves, taxes are too high, the services are too bad. The situation is abysmal and I think it’s shifting the political dynamics in favor of the Republicans. That doesn’t have to do with the brilliance of the party. That just has to do with the fact that the average Joe-Schmo, the average Sally-Jane, realizes they’re spending more money and they’re getting less in return,” he said. Wax argues enthusiastically that the key to flipping the state red is getting a third of New York City to vote for a Republican.

Calling the ground “fertile” is an overstatement, at least for now. No polls indicate that the road toward a new golden era for Republicans has been paved.

“Suppose that you were able to convince a third of New York City voters to vote Republican,” said associate professor of Data Journalism and former database journalist at FiveThirtyEight, Dhrumil Mehta. “It still doesn’t make much of a difference to the overall New York State result.”

Wax is, however, convinced that with the right candidate – and the right Democrat to run against – it can be done. Wax gave the example of Democratic Mayor Eric Adams.

“Eric Adams was a former Republican who ran as a cop on an anti-crime agenda. He did not run like a left-winger. Eric Adams kept the margins where they were, but if you get rid of Eric Adams and swap him with a Far-Leftie, you’re talking about 30-40 points for Republicans in the city. So it can happen,” Wax said.

Besides, “politics is about winning on the margins,” and so Wax is committed to keep chipping away at the Democratic majority while they’re looking the other way.

The rivals at the Manhattan Young Democrats (MYD) are indeed looking the other way. But perhaps not for the reasons Wax would like to think.

“I don’t think about Gavin Wax,” was the succinct answer from the president of MYD, Jeremy Berman, when asked about Wax’ political efforts. Berman paused briefly after learning about the recent growth of the Republican Club, but then added:

“They can have as many members as they want, but we are the ones who are electing the elected officials. I’m less concerned with how fancy the venue my banquet is in, and how many Congress members I can meet from outside the state of New York, and I’m more concerned with making people’s lives better.”

Berman said the focus of the MYD is on local politics rather than international relations. He is running for the Democratic State Committee this year.

Meanwhile, Wax is aware that little will come of his aspirations without political power. So he’s got a plan targeting his own party.

“We can take over the local party. We did a test run this year, and we got a few dozen people elected to the county committee,“ he said, referring to a contested Manhattan county committee election, in which the NYYRC was accused of committing ballot fraud – an allegation Wax refuses. “If we committed ballot fraud, we would have been prosecuted.”

So he’ll apply the same strategy going forward, starting with intentional moves to lift up local leaders.

“And slowly but surely, we’ll put our people into positions of power within the party, and have direct political influence and control of the levers of power,” Wax said.

Pace is a recurring theme for Wax. “Slowly,” Wax’ political faction will carve out the GOP establishment through the county committee. “Slowly,”that faction will start to seriously challenge the city Democrats. And slowly, no rush indeed, Wax himself may consider running for office.

With Tweets disputing the recent Brazilian election results and an endorsement of the now-defeated former president Jair Bolsonaro, Wax’ Twitter-presence would surely scare off New York City liberals. His real life persona is less extreme. Compared to characters like former Republican mayoral candidate and Guardian Angels-founder Curtis Sliwa or the underwhelming gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin, Wax has a few extra strings to play. He’s traded Queens for the Upper East Side and secured a job as Global Digital Marketing Director of the alt-right tech startup GETTR, a social media platform not unlike Trump’s TRUTH Social. Dressing the part might have been an issue in high school, but these days, the cufflinks on his suit are Gucci.

Wax may be busy, but he’s not in a rush. He recently flew down to Florida to attend the wedding of the Congressman Matt Gaetz to Ginger Luckey; Gaetz has continually made headlines recently for his alleged involvement in a sex trafficking probe. It was an intimate event, Wax said, visibly proud to belong to Gaetz’ inner circle, who celebrated next to punny signs announcing that “Gaetz got Luckey.”

The following Monday, Wax was back at the Club, keeping the leather couches occupied and the NYYRC’s membership growing. He may also be calling his real estate agent soon. The Club is starting to outgrow their current clubhouse. Lucky for him, more private donors – whose identities Wax will not disclose – are lining up to show their support. He’s convinced that, eventually, the voters will too.

Correction: A previous version of this story misspelled Dhrumil Mehta’s surname.

About the author(s)

Asta Kongsted

Asta Kongsted is an M.S. student at Columbia Journalism School. She is the former editor of the Danish media Føljeton.

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