I don’t often think about luck, good or bad. I feel life mostly turns out for the best. And, if I have a few lucky breaks along the way, so much the better. You are probably wondering, why am I writing about luck? This is my story.
Last year I booked an ocean cruise for myself and my husband with Viking, two weeks sailing around the Mediterranean from Barcelona to Venice. It sounded wonderful!
When I make reservations, I usually go with a room somewhere in the middle price range. In this case I picked one with a balcony, so we could go outside, and on the port side, so we’d see the coastline along the way on most of the voyage.
Over the intervening months, various papers arrived from Viking telling me to do this or that. They all began with our names and our room number. Last week the final packet arrived and the first thing I did was check that everything was correct: our names, room number, flights, hotels, etc.
I was shocked! The room number was different! What had happened?
At first I felt upset. What had Viking done? Then I decided to see where this room was and what it looked like. I clicked on the ship’s deck plan and then on the room and the screen opened up with this picture:
Wow! The Explorer Suite which has 757 or more square feet, depending on where it’s located. It includes a private wrap around deck as well as a living room, bedroom and bathroom the size of the one we have at home. It also comes with a number of perks such as three complimentary guaranteed priority reservations in the specialty restaurants and a welcome bottle of champagne as well as a number of other complimentary items! Frankly, I was gone when I saw 757 square feet! Our original room, which I’d been very happy with, came with 270 square feet, one priority reservation and no champagne.
Now I was both excited and worried! How did this happen? Would we be charged the difference in fare? This room was two-thirds to twice as expensive as what I’d originally booked.
I decided to phone Viking. I told the man who answered that I had noticed a room number change on our final papers. What had happened? Would we be billed the price difference? I held my breath. There was a long pause. He said he had to check our account. He was gone for what seemed like FOREVER. Finally he came back. Viking found some maintenance issues in our original room so they decided to move us. There would be no charge.
Wow! I let my breath out slowly. This was certainly very, very good luck!!! The Explorer’s Suite! Our trip of a lifetime! What a lucky break!
So All Can Learn: A Practical Guide to Differentiation by John McCarthy
This exciting new book is just what is needed today! It will help new teachers, as well as those with many years’ experience, reach students in a time-efficient manner. New ideas are fine. But if one doesn’t have the time to implement them, they are not going to happen.
What makes So All Can Learn, https://www.amazon.com/All-Can-Learn-Practical-Differentiation/dp/1475825714/, so relevant is that it gives the information, as well as the encouragement and resources, to create differentiated lessons today! It also shows why student ownership is essential as well as giving ideas on how to gain it. When students are involved in lesson planning and assessment, they’re self-motivated to do a good job.
I remember one fourth grade reading class. My students were of average intelligence or better but you’d never know it looking at their scores. I could see them struggling every day. This book would have been a big help! Its resources, strategies, and guidance would have given me so many great ideas and saved me so much time! Instead I had to invent the wheel by myself.
I also remember one of my favorite third grade math classes. The students came in every day smiling, happy and enthusiastic—until we got to word problems. Then I watched their moods sink. Why? Many of them were reading below grade level. They could do the math, but they couldn’t read the problems. So they didn’t know what they were being asked to do.
When I read about Assessment Fog in Chapter 3, it really resonated with me. That was the problem I had faced. Yes, I solved it, but again, it took a lot of time. If I had had So All Can Learn, with all its resources, I could have created fog free assessments much faster.
This is why So All Can Learn is so valuable. It has, all in one place, the ideas, suggestions and resources that teachers need to help create successful differentiated lessons quickly.
Once the page opens up, on the left, is a link that says, “Follow the Author”. Click on it. This shows Amazon that people value John and it helps sell the book. Thanks!!!
I belong to a book club that usually reads fiction, and I’ve read a lot of good stories that I would never have otherwise: Circling the Sun by Paula McLain, Empire Rising by Rick Campbell and Istanbul Passage by Joseph Kanon, to name a few. But most of the time I prefer nonfiction, books like Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance, I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced by Nujood Ali with Delphine Minoui and My Promised Land by Ari Shavit.
So, when I came across the book, Cure: A Journey Into the Science of Mind Over Body by Jo Marchant*, I wasn’t confident that this was the right book club to bring it to. I suggested it anyway because I was so impressed with its ideas. The group agreed, and we discussed it last week at our monthly luncheon at Paesano’s in Ann Arbor.
Everyone was very taken with the fact that there is a scientific basis for believing that “our thoughts, emotions, and beliefs can ease pain, heal wounds, fend off infection and heart disease and even slow the progression of AIDS and some cancers.”**
One of the things that impressed all of us was the idea that if you take a pill that’s a placebo, even knowing it’s a placebo, you may improve. This just seems counter-intuitive. But, it’s true.
Another idea was the importance of distraction. When burn patients have their dressings changed, it’s extremely painful. And their dressings have to be changed every day. This is a nightmare scenario.
But, if that same patient puts on virtual reality goggles and plays a computer game called “Snow World” in an ice cold environment, the patient’s pain score goes DOWN by 35%. That, plus the 40% pain reduction the patient gets from medication, makes changing the dressings each day manageable.
Cure also talks about the importance of social connections. Studies show that besides feeling good after spending an afternoon with friends, people who frequently socialize also live longer.
Now, the mind, even in the best of circumstances, can’t heal everything or make you well if you have cancer or a broken arm and refuse to get treatment. What it can do is improve your mood, make your medical care more effective and help you to enjoy what you do have.
There are many other helpful ideas in Cure. So if I’ve excited your curiosity, I hope you check out the book. I think you’ll be glad you did.
*Cure: A Journey Into the Science of Mind Over Body by Jo Marchant, Crown Publishers, New York, 2016.
I don’t see any damage, but I’m uncontrollably jittery. It’s a good thing I brought my journal tonight. My mocha Frappuccino will just add caffeine to my jitters, but the journal, well, that’s relaxing. I hope.
It’s an older journal, and I’m looking for something writing related. A passage caught my eye this morning, notes from my belly dancing article for U. S. 1. It draws my mind back to the interview.
Kim, my instructor, says, “I learned that I want to stay there.”
She’s talking about her time in Turkey. “It was more of a style and a feel that I learned,” she continued, discussing her dancing techniques. “Turkish feels very funky, earthy, aggressive.”
Movement draws my attention. The two chess guys have left my table, so I pop over, freeing myself from Mr. Wobbles here. I’m closer to the windows now. It’s suddenly dark outside, the dark of a storm approaching. Trees are stretching their branches in that helpless way, reaching to stop the storm, knowing they can’t. They’re victim to the tosses of storm winds.
I continue reading my notes and transcription. I might as well because I can’t find what I’m looking for.
“It confirmed a lot of things I’ve learned over the years,” Kim says.
“You learn things and you’re not really sure what their roots are.”
I spread out with room to spare and reread the U. S. 1 Philly nightlife article. I still adore the twists and turns of the language. I don’t like the attitude of the writer–she comes across as too know-it-all in-your-face–but the language is alive. “Rolling sushi with ‘frightening perfection'” is still my favorite.
Her vibrant language makes you want to keep reading to discover what she’ll describe next, and how. This is how you write Show Don’t Tell: “J. Crew crowd and martini meat market.” Her typing tongue makes some of my Singles articles pale in language comparison. But it also inspires me to write outside the box, to stretch, to compare and to create.
Back to my journal. What did Kim say next? How good was my article with the material I collected?
“I learned and loved it and wondered later, ‘where does it come from, why does it feel like this, what does it mean?’”she says, “so it brought these things home and I got my answers.”
My fiancé–oh, I just love the sound of that– just called to share warm fuzziness. He’s on his way up for the weekend, and he was thinking how he’ll only be doing this drive for a few more months–155 days, to be exact. Then I’ll be in Delaware. That made him think of the box and shopping bag of my stuff upstairs. I take a symbolic “something” every time I drive down to spend the weekend. He said he realized soon all my stuff will be in his house. Our house. We did a simultaneous awwwwww. Together.
He’s an adorable man. We are going to have a great life together.
10:15pm. I’ll be kicked out soon. That’s okay—I’m done for the night.
When I think of Civil Rights, my mind immediately goes to voting rights, the 15th Amendment* and the Voting Rights Bill of 1965.** I remember how people marched, protested and died to push President Johnson, Congress and their congressmen and senators to pass this bill. In other words, I think of the past. This has all been discussed and litigated and it’s over.
In the last few years I’ve been unpleasantly surprised to find out that I’ve been wrong. Voting rights are not in the past, they are now. It’s a fight that’s still going on.
Today I attended a lecture titled “Bringing Dignity Back to Voting in the Robert’s Court”. The speaker was Ellen D. Katz. She is a Law Professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her expertise is writing about and teaching election law, civil rights and their remedies, as well as equal protection.
While she was being introduced I focused on the word dignity. It’s not a word we often use. What is it really? I like this definition: Dignity is “the state or quality of being worthy of honor or respect”.***
Dr. Katz’s point was that dignity is intrinsic to the right to vote. It’s a central component because being disenfranchised is humiliating and degrading. It is the opposite of being worthy of honor or respect.
Professor Katz gave a number of examples from history:
There was Carter Glass who introduced the Poll Tax in Virginia in 1902. He said its purpose was to discriminate so as to eliminate every Negro voter that it could. He felt Black Suffrage needed to be blocked because it bestowed dignity on African-American men.
Then there were the opponents of Women’s Suffrage. Many of them said that enfranchising women would decrease the dignity of men and therefore should be opposed.
In 1965, President Johnson, speaking in support of the Voting Rights Act, said to Congress, “I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy…”.
John Roberts became Chief Justice in September, 2005. From then to now there have been massive cutbacks in the reach of the Voting Rights Act. For example, in Crawford v. Merion County, Justice John Paul Stevens upheld Indiana’s Voter I.D. Law while at the same time acknowledging that 43% of Indiana citizens at that time did not have proper Voter I.D.s and thus would lose their right to vote. He also noted that there had never been a case of voter fraud in Indiana–ever. The Voter I.D. law was a remedy for a problem that did not exist. But more importantly, by disenfranchising almost half of Indiana voters he took away their dignity as citizens.
In 2014 there were a series of lower court decisions that spoke of Voter I.D. laws as being problematic. At the time the Supreme Court stayed these decisions. This meant it ruled to halt further legal process in these trials or other legal proceeding.****
Two years passed and things changed dramatically. In 2016, lower court after lower court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. One of the best known cases is that of 94 year old Rosanell Eaton of North Carolina.*****She had been voting since 1942 when she’d had to ride a mule to town. Once there, she had to pass a Literacy Test before she was allowed to vote. But the new 2013 North Carolina Voter I.D. law disenfranchised her because her birth certificate said Rosanell Eaton and her Driver’s License said Rosanell Johnson Eaton. This whole experience took away her dignity.
In order to keep her right to vote, this 94 year old woman, who had voted in every election since 1942, had to make 11 trips to various government agencies. To do this, she had to travel over 200 miles. At 94, it was very difficult and expensive for her as well as humilating. After all, she had voted in every election since 1942.
At the time, over 300,000 other citizens of North Carolina did not have the correct Voter I.D. and the majority of them were African-American. How many of them wouldn’t be able to do this? This law was taking away their dignity as citizens.
The Fourth Circuit Court in Richmond found the North Carolina law unconstitutional and said that North Carolina had acted with “intentional racial discrimination” and “surgical precision” to deny voters the ability to vote “without hindrance”.
So what’s dignity got to do with it? Because you’re a citizen you have a right to vote. When, because of your color or sex, you’re denied this right, you don’t feel worthy of honor and respect. You feel humiliated and degraded. You realize you’re being told you’re not as good as those other people who are citizens just like you, but they’re entitled to vote.
That’s what dignity has to do with it!
*The 15th Amendment to the Constitution granted African American men the right to vote by declaring that the “right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
**Voting Rights Act – Black History – HISTORY.comThe Voting Rights Act, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson (1908-73) on August 6, 1965, aimed to overcome legal barriers at the state and local levels that prevented African Americans from exercising their right to vote under the 15th Amendment (1870) to the Constitution of the United States.
