Our Society And What the COVID Pandemic Lays Bare For All To See

We have all see the fissures the pandemic has exposed...let's venture in and examine how they got there in the first place.  In Nicholas Shaxon's book The Finance Curse - How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer explains it well.  And don't be put off by the title - very readable, at times actually a page turner.

Building on the accepted and familiar concept of free market capitalism and healthy competition we have moved (or should I say finessed) to finance capitalism and monopolies.  I'm old enough to remember when monopoly was a dirty word.  Not so now.  The courts have replaced concern for concentrated control of a market to a focus on keeping consumer prices down - a huge shift.  We have heard the mantra that we need to get lean and mean to compete in the global economy, but there is no "we."  In fact, in finance capitalism there is not society, so no wonder our infrastructure is crumbling - our schools, town, and states scrambling for funds.  The pandemic is only amplifying this.

Financial derivatives, financial sector, commodity swaps, futures contracts, limited liability, stock buybacks, tax havens... the vocabulary swirls around us in the news, but do we understand what these words actually mean and how these financial tools are used?  I sure didn't except in the most vague sense, and the effect deliberately obscures what is going on.  Shaxson writes that "The finance curse constitutes one of the most significant, troubling, and complex national security threats the Western world has ever faced."  And many of us don't really see it!

It reaches us in various forms, but you will recognize them; hospital closings, large corporations bully communities into accepting compromised PCB (or other toxin) cleanups, public school special needs programs get slashed, teacher layoffs, water giants get rights to regional aquifers, family farms destroyed, meat packed with antibiotics and hormones, and politicians that aren't acting on our behalf, etc...

Saxson's book takes the world of finance that is dominating our nation, and much of world, and pulls it out into the sunlight, demystifying its parts and how they are used to drive the economic inequality divide even wider at breathtaking speed.  This is an important book.

(If you are going to purchase it, try to avoid Amazon. )
The photo is by my son, Sean McCabe.

The Pandemic Forced Slow-down and Reading

People have complained that their sleeping patterns have been disrupted and they have trouble concentrating.  I count myself in their numbers, though it is improving as I adjust and learn to live with the underlying anxiety caused by the pandemic.  A friend of mine recently said she hasn't been able to read.  I totally get it.

When work stopped abruptly and I was confined to my apartment (since I'm in the at-risk category) suddenly I had endless hours of unstructured time.  Like many others the first week was dedicated to cleaning, and my apartment sparkled like never before.  But with that done and long walks still leaving me with the bulk of the day, I turned to books.  My daughter had dropped off a pile of them and they had been sitting in a tidy stack on the coffee table untouched.  She had mentioned that the top one was a page turner though not particularly well written, and it's that one that launched me.

It's not that reading is new to me, but with work dominating my days and evenings (fellow educators will understand how teaching prep can eat up time like no other), my reading time was short snatches, diving briefly into passages between classes, and before bed when my lids were on the way down. I was out of practice, plain and simple.  Fortunately, the page-turner got me back into the habit of extended uninterrupted reading, and now I can read more elevated text and go into what Maryanne Wolf (maryannewolf.com) calls a slow deep read.

Wolf makes the point that reading on-line is very different.  We tend to skim, searching for the information we are looking for and find relevant.  It's fast and efficient, but a totally different kind of reading, and one most of us do a great deal of.  The slow deep reading of books needs to be practiced or it gets weaker and takes more effort.

So, if you are having trouble curling up with a book and doing the slow, deep read, you might consider picking up a low-brow page turner just to get back into the swing.

How Students Respond To Text Matters - This is what the research tells us:

 

Summaries: 
Writing summaries has the strongest impact on reading in all grades, but especially in elementary grades. Identify the main information,and write a synopsis with supporting information for each paragraph. 


 Write Notes:
This is more effective than underlining,  Report Form and Story Form, by Project Read https://www.projectread.com/ is a great program - very kid friendly and easily modified for older students.  I've also used Postit notes.  For fiction, Comprehension Booster app is very good. (See an earlier post.)

Answer Questions In Writing:
This is better than verbal responses and more memorable.
Teach the difference between a good and poor question.  Have students create questions from the text
and answer them.   If they can't answer it, just have them make another one that they can answer.

Teach Spelling and Sentence Structure:
Both improve reading.

Other Recommendations:
My mantra - ongoing practice, explicit instruction.   All of the above can be applied to narrative texts as well as expository and across all subject ares. 

 

Social Skills Instruction for Kids and Adults with Aspergier Syndrome

Just finished reading a wonderful article by Susan Stokes, "Using Technology for Social Interaction Skills Instruction for Children and Adolescents with Asperger's Syndrome."  You can find it at Closing the Gap,
 
You have to be a member to have access to their articles, but it's a great organization and resource.
 
Stokes reminds us how limited the rote responses are that are taught to school children who are on the spectrum, that social interactions are complex, varied and can be very subtle.

 
Stokes writes that individuals with Asperger Syndrome are generally average or above average intelligence, yet "Social interaction skills are a huge predictor of a person's success later in life, much more so than cognitive functioning."

The article lists many low tech strategies as well as the use of videos and software.  The one that caught my attention was Mind Reading, a software program developed by Simon Baron-Cohen. 

It includes over 400 emotions and facial expressions, the level can be adjusted, and it has interactive games.  It cost $249.97 new, but Amazon has used copies at a considerably lower price.  This is certainly worth exploring.