Amendments IV-X

With schools being closed for much of the last year (even though they may have offered remote learning), we all know a lot of students have fallen behind academically. However, what is not clear is exactly how far behind our kids have fallen and in what areas.

The consequences of not knowing could be especially dire for the children in this generation.

We don’t know how much access to remote instruction school-aged children received during the spring and fall of 2020. There is little reason to believe that virtual learning environments were effective for primary school–aged children. The only way to know the extent of harm done to student learning from school closures is to test our students and find out.

But school boards across the state are passing resolutions, sending emails to legislators, and embarking on a path to oppose conducting the Colorado Measures of Academic Success test. This test, required by law, measures student educational growth. It’s a test that didn’t happen last year, and if school superintendents and school districts have their way, it won’t happen this year either.

COVID-19 has been a challenge for everyone; a challenge no one could have foreseen or planned for, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t gauge the damage done from what is now being called the “COVID slide.”

A recent Yale study found “pandemic-related school closures are deepening educational inequality in the United States by severely impairing the academic progress of children from low-income neighborhoods.” The study goes on further to state, “learning gaps created by the crisis will persist.”

The mission for the Colorado Department of Education is “to ensure equity and opportunity for every student, every step of the way.” Their goal is to graduate students with the knowledge, skills and experience needed to be successful. Students, and their parents, deserve to know the impacts of the past year and learn what students are lacking in their education and what instruction and guidance, they need to be successful.  And we all should know how our schools and teachers are performing — not as a punishment for an unforeseen event but as a gut check on how much ground was lost.

Not testing, not measuring a student’s academic growth and progress, and not looking after the students’ educational health is a disservice to these children and amounts to abandonment.

After all, the purpose of a public education is to enrich every child’s life and to help every child reach their full potential even if that means we must help them make up lost ground.

#7-9

Focus on Getting Better, Rather than Being Good — Think about your goals as opportunities to improve, rather than to prove yourself

Be a Realistic Optimist — Visualize how you will make success happen by overcoming obstacles

Don’t Tempt Fate — No one has willpower all the time, so don’t push your luck

Roughly two years ago, I wrote about the “Nine Things Successful People Do Differently,” which became HBR’s most-read piece of content over that time span. It was a list of strategies, based on decades of scientific research, proven effective for setting and reaching challenging goals. I later expanded that post into a short e-book, explaining how you can make each one a habit. But how would readers know if they were doing enough of each “Thing”? (After all, we’re terrible judges of ourselves.) To help answer that question, last spring I created something I called the Nine Things Diagnostics — it’s a free, online set of questionnaires designed to measure your own use of each of the nine things in pursuit of your personal and professional goals.

What Were Helen Keller’s First Words?

On April 5, 1887, less than a month after her arrival in Tuscumbia, Anne sought to resolve the confusion her pupil was having between the nouns “mug” and “milk,” which Helen confused with the verb “drink.”

Anne took Helen to the water pump outside and put Helen’s hand under the spout. As the cool water gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other hand the word “w-a-t-e-r” first slowly, then rapidly. Suddenly, the signals had meaning in Helen’s mind. She knew that “water” meant the wonderful cool substance flowing over her hand.

Quickly, she stopped and touched the earth and demanded its letter name and by nightfall she had learned 30 words.

Helen quickly proceeded to master the alphabet, both manual and in raised print for blind readers, and gained facility in reading and writing. In Helen’s handwriting, many round letters look square, but you can easily read everything.

In 1890, when she was just 10, she expressed a desire to learn to speak; Anne took Helen to see Sarah Fuller at the Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Boston. Fuller gave Helen 11 lessons, after which Anne taught Helen.

Throughout her life, however, Helen remained dissatisfied with her spoken voice, which was hard to understand.

Helen’s extraordinary abilities and her teacher’s unique skills were noticed by Alexander Graham Bell and Mark Twain, two giants of American culture. Twain declared, “The two most interesting characters of the 19th century are Napoleon and Helen Keller.”

The closeness of Helen and Anne’s relationship led to accusations that Helen’s ideas were not her own. Famously, at the age of 11, Helen was accused of plagiarism. Both Bell and Twain, who were friends and supporters of Helen and Anne, flew to the defense of both pupil and teacher and mocked their detractors. Read a letter from Mark Twain to Helen lamenting “that ‘plagiarism’ farce.”