Welcome to life on Planet X. We’ve had a long, lonely interlude since March of 2020. Maybe you never wanted to be an astronaut, reader, but somehow we all got shoved into the pod and shot into space. This new “normal” of masks and social distance still feels alien to many of us as we stand on the little red dots in various lines to get into places that no longer resemble their earlier selves. Getting my real ID license a few weeks back was an adventure in dissonance. No chairs except for a few for people waiting for their road test. Two people guarding the door and shepherding traffic. No lines. And, astoundingly, once I got past the gatekeepers, the whole thing took about 15 minutes.

Some things remain the same. They still wait for the worst moment to take that pic and then anything goes if your eyes happen to be open. Still, I’ve looked blanker and more confused, and my eyes (and unfortunately mouth) are somewhat open.

It’s been especially wild for teachers out here in space. These struggling professionals have kept going in and out of live learning while struggling with remote platforms and more remote students. They are working to the point of exhaustion sometimes, with varying amounts of success to show. The biggest problem with remote learning is a simple one: A kid can wander away, mentally or physically, and you don’t necessarily know the kid has left the ship.

Where is Zeke? Is he hiding in the galley, maybe eating Flamin’ Hot Cheetos? Has he gone to play his Xbox somewhere? Is there any chance mom might be able to get him back to work? Where is his mom? Something about being shot into space makes kids squirrelly (duh) and many “A” students would walk out of their classrooms if they could make their escape with reasonable odds of going unnoticed.

Eduhonesty: Gratitude journals help us keep our spirits up. So can guided meditations. Here’s my tip for this: Start small. You don’t need to plunge right into transcendental meditation. Almost nobody I know has time to commit hours to another self-improvement project. Finding my shoes and car keys can be enough progress on some mornings :-).

But YouTube abounds with short meditations. Fitbit has a meditation section. You can easily find source material. Want an app? 15 Best Meditation and Mindfulness Apps for 2021 (developgoodhabits.com) has a selection. Put meditation into Spotify or your music source.

Five minutes here, ten minutes there, another five minutes before dinner and you may find your stress levels have taken a dive. Some meditations are even designed to ease you into sleep. Some that are not designed for that purpose work well anyway; I love the Body Scan meditation by Jon Kabat-Zinn because I am almost always asleep before we get much past my left leg. Every time, he tells me to stay awake, but my stay-awake success rate is probably less than 1%. Need to sleep? This meditation has been helping me for years.

Kabat-Zinn’s mountain and lake meditations bring me to a better, calmer state of mind. YouTube is a motherlode of possible sources of stress reduction and relaxation. Here’s a sample sitting meditation: Mountain Meditation Exercise, Jon Kabat Zinn – Bing video. Sitting helps greatly when you must stay awake.

Pacing is highly individual in guided meditations. Some are too fast for me. They make me effort to follow, which works against calming. Certain voices also work better for me than others. If at first your attempts at guided meditation don’t work, don’t give up.

Many five to ten minute meditations can be found in cyberspace, mostly focused on breathing. Stress is all about breathing, as breath prepares us to fight or take flight. Breath reflects our state of mind, but it also creates that state. Anxiety feeds anxious breathing which feeds anxiety. Meditation can break that cycle.

Those whose school years are almost over may read this post and say, “Why now?” The answer lies in COVID-crazy school years. The district where I live will be finishing at the start of June. I talked to a friend this morning, however, who still has FIVE WEEKS left. We are making up for lost time all over this country and teachers who customarily are nearing the end of the end game at this point are sometimes now looking at an end in July, Stress is running high in hard-hit geographic pockets, especially for teachers and others who are going to be working outside of the house when their children are released for summer vacation.

Is that you, reader? Depending on the age of your children, a 30 minute meditation may sound like about as feasible as a backyard Mars launch. Sometimes half-hour chunks simply don’t exist. But 5 to 10 minute chunks can usually be carved out, even if you have to bribe the kids to do it. All that stuff about finding a quiet, uninterrupted time and turning off the phone during meditation? Definitely optional! Occasional quick shifts to Plan B come with the territory where children are concerned.

Reader, especially if your mood and energy are sinking, PRIORITIZE YOU. Throw in five meditation minutes when you feel the stress starting to climb. If you wake up first, seize those early moments before the household awakens. If you are fighting to get to sleep, look up meditations for that purpose. And promise yourself at least five minutes before you go to sleep.

Here’s a short meditation by Deepak Chopra to start or get you back into the meditation habit: Deepak Chopra’s Go-To 3-Minute Meditation To Stay Focused – YouTube

Hugs to my readers. The light in the distance really is the end of the tunnel, and not another freight train. Jocelyn Turner

P.S. If meditation always puts you to sleep, you are not getting enough sleep.

Eduhonesty: Are you tired, reader? Maybe even anxious or depressed? Evidence suggests gratitude journals can help. Gratitude and well-being: A review and theoretical integration (berkeley.edu), Gratitude Journaling Is Good For Your Mental Health And Maybe Physical Health To : Shots – Health News : NPR

Exhausted teachers and anyone else who wants off this spaceship — I suggest you make a gratitude journal. It doesn’t have to be all gratitude. It’s YOUR journal, a one and only. Random art and self-exploration can make the day better too.

But throw in the “Today I am thankful for… stuff along the way. The improved speed and efficiency of the DMV made up for its weirdness, for example. What’s good? What worked? Did Zeke produce a few great metaphors for his latest assignment? Are the kids adapting well to in-person learning? If not enough is working, I suggest finding a recipe and making a success, like triple ginger cookies or breakfast pumpkin bars.

Gratitude journals help us frame and reframe our reality. Those journals can be easy, too. If you are too swamped to even think about cutting up paper and pulling out the paints, then a few quick lines with a pen work fine. I like physical journals but this could easily be done as a Word or even Excel document.

Hugs from the Blue Room, Jocelyn

A follower asked me to address vaccination hesitancy. Where is the proof that someone should let Walgreens or CVS loose with a needle of Pfizer, Moderna or Johnson and Johnson vaccine? That’s a question that gets dismissed often by the pro-vaxxers, and I’d say we are doing a poor job of responding to people’s concerns. What should be a teachable moment has turned into a riot of finger pointing.

The questions are mostly legitimate: Can you prove vaccination is beneficial? What about the people with side effects? How can we know this is safe?

Eduhonesty: At first I thought the benefits of vaccination might be too far off-topic for this education blog but, upon reflection, I realized my questions are actually all about education. The vaccination debate has been steeped in math from the beginning. We are playing vaccination five-card draw poker and a crazy number of people are throwing away their pairs or even three of a kind to draw four cards. Why is this happening?

Teachers often start instruction by using analogies to help connect ideas. I think I will start with dogs. Can I prove that dog ownership is beneficial to human health? If we use longevity as our measure of the benefit of dog ownership, yes, I can, despite the guy who fell down the hill chasing his dachshund and broke his ankle in several places. Check out Do dog owners live longer? | American Heart Association.

To make my case, I have to spend some time looking up studies online. I have to understand that SOURCES MATTER and more sources are better. I’ll take something from the American Heart Association without much concern about its trustworthiness — although anything from the internet merits concern. On paper or from cyberspace, I should be suspicious of a source like “Puppies R Us.” When I find a Puppies R Us article about longer-lived pet owners, I should keep in mind that Puppies R Us is making its corporate profits selling puppies.

Also part of the picture:

1. Anecdotes are not evidence. In the larger scheme of things, the guy who broke his ankle rushing down a tree and bush-studded hill to rescue his dog does not count. The guy who felt sick after his shot may not count either. It all comes down to numbers. We ignore numbers at our peril.
2. Sometimes no option is perfect or even good.
3. In any choice, the weight of the factors going into the decision has to be estimated, and then later sometimes reevaluated. Life’s not simple. If it was, everyone who wanted to live longer would simply get a dog.

Proof can admittedly be hard to nail down. That guy with the dachshund might well have been better off in the long-run if he had chosen to collect iguanas instead of sausage dogs. Yet his life is likely to include future dachshunds, more Kongs, tug toys and games of fetch. Asked about that ankle, he’ll say, “s*** happens,” while helping his short-legged dog onto the couch.

S*** happens.

The future is undiscovered country, and life involves endless choices that test our ability to measure risk against reward.

Reader, please vaccinate. Vaccinations shut down the US polio and small pox threat. True, I spent a summer unable to swim or bathe when I had an oozy, doctor-visit-worthy reaction to a smallpox vaccination. I still have vestiges of the ancient scar. And polio remains active, if rare, in Central and South America, Africa and Asia. See Smallpox – Our World in Data for information on the one disease that was entirely wiped out by vaccinations. It’s true: You can entirely or almost entirely eliminate a disease if enough people become immune to it.

It’s like playing a monster game of foosball. A piece can only move when a peg strikes it. Once you vaccinate, though, almost everybody ceases to be a peg in this game. That peg disappears off the bar and it can’t move the COVID particles ball anymore. (Notice I said “almost everybody.” Right now, COVID is everywhere and even a few of the vaccinated are kicking that germ around.) If enough pegs disappear, that game becomes lame or even unplayable.

We have to go by probabilities where public health is concerned. About those clots: Birth control pills and COVID itself have a much greater chance of causing a blood clot than the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. The numbers are rather ludicrous, given that 15 out of 7 million comes out to odds of 0.000002142. The odds of being hit by lightning are 1 in 15,300 or 0.00006535. The odds of being killed by a venomous plant or animal are 1 in 44,459 or 0.00002249. (Odds of winning the Powerball jackpot: 13 things more likely to happen (usatoday.com)) In other words, we have a lot more to fear from lightning and bad snakes than we do from vaccines. Can I trust Kaitlyn Kanzler who wrote this article in 2019? Other sources appear to have similar numbers.

Numbers should not always be trusted because someone took time to write them down, I admit. But let’s say our 15 in 7,000,000 is actually 30 in 7,000,000 instead. Those odds only amount to a 0.000004285 chance of that clot. Those zeroes matter a lot. The odds of getting struck by lightning — still far higher than the odds of a vaccination clot. It’s worth noting that almost every person who suffered that particular side effect was female. If I were a guy, I wouldn’t break a sweat about that side effect for a nanosecond.

Currently about 44% of the United states has had at least one shot of vaccine and 31% is fully vaccinated. The test cases have been tested. The shots have been given. Most people I know had trivial reactions. A few had fevers and more serious discomfort. But they are all fine now.

That is not true for all my friends who had COVID. I just talked to a friend who had this virus about five months ago now. She hallucinated for three days. She struggled with brain fog for weeks afterward. Back then, she sounded so breathless it scared me just to talk with her on the phone. When she called a few days ago, she started by saying that she was walking, and that was why she sounded breathless. But she never sounded breathless when we used to walk the track before COVID. And she still struggles to smell or taste food. She relied on family members to taste dishes and help her prepare their family Easter dinner.

Reader, please vaccinate. I wrote this in September and I strongly recommend it to everyone on the fence about that shot: When I Could No Longer Walk Up the Hill — And Amber Is Still Sick, Six Months Later | Notes from the Educational Trenches (eduhonesty.com) You don’t want this disease ever. A few days of arm pain with or without fever is a tiny, tiny price to pay to avoid what can go wrong if you skip that shot.

The likelihood of dying from COVID has been falling, true. But try to imagine not being able to enjoy the taste of food for four months and counting. So far, the consensus is that those people who lost their sense of taste or smell last year will probably eventually recover. Most recover in a few weeks or months, but others are still waiting. Try to imagine going to rehab to regain your ability to breathe. You don’t have to get violently sick to become a long hauler. Some people with mild cases back in 2020 are still dealing with body aches, joint pain, brain fog, chills, sweats, fatigue, headaches, heart palpitations and chest pain or pressure, exercise intolerance, dizziness, plus numerous other ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties of symptoms that are not resolving. A recent poll of a long hauler group on Facebook found 98 symptoms of this disorder.

P.S. I look at my friend as she pushes herself to regain her strength and I think I’d happily let Bill Gates track me to avoid what she is going through. Except Bill Gates isn’t tracking anybody and anybody who is worried about being tracked needs to surrender their cell phone RIGHT NOW. A student once stole my phone. I stood in a police station in one town and watched my phone being transported to another town after the cops had tried to get it back for me. The cops gave up as the phone left their city limits, but the next day, I retrieved my phone from a snow drift some twenty miles from home using standard software and my husband’s tablet. I put it in a plastic container of dry rice at home and the phone came out fine.

A message for those people who are afraid of being tracked: Oh, my. No one needs to chip us, guys. All they need to do today is hand us a Samsung or iPhone. Heck, I wouldn’t be stunned to discover they can track us through the chips in our cars or even our dachshunds. And to anyone afraid that the Democrats are running porno rings and trafficking children out of pizza parlors, I apologize. Somewhere we failed to teach critical thinking skills to a lot of lost souls.

What Representing Men in Divorce Taught Me About Fatherhood | Marilyn York | TEDxUniversityofNevada – YouTube

Absent, part-part-time, and cast-off dads matter hugely in today’s academic results. They are one of many disparate factors that get eclipsed by endless discussions of standardized test results. We don’t use those tests to make any useful recommendations related to this topic — or any topic as it applies to an individual student.

These tests are big data. They are mostly meant for government bureaucrats, not teachers, parents or students. Schools may pick up some ancillary benefit as they compare results to those of other locations, but those benefits are microscopically tiny when compared to the costs of testing. Parents may learn areas where tutoring might be useful — but they will get little information on exactly what tutoring is needed. And you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. When Mack is struggling in mathematics, his parents likely don’t require multi-day tests to find that out. A quick email to his teacher will work much better, and should result in helpful information weeks or even months sooner.

Here are a few interesting stats:

Children of divorce are less likely to earn a four-year or graduate degree, according to recent research from Iowa State University. They have lower GPAs and are statistically 24% less likely to receive a high school degree. (See Link between divorce and graduate education a concern as more jobs require advanced degree • News Service • Iowa State University (iastate.edu) and 8 Ways Divorce Can Impact a Child’s Academic Pursuits – Divorce Magazine.)

Eduhonesty: I picked this issue out of a basketful of factors that are almost never addressed within our schools. Those state standardized tests are DISTRACTING us from many elements that matter in our children’s educations. They are also documenting and redocumenting facts we already know. We identified our struggling zip codes decades ago. With rare exceptions, those zip codes are still struggling. We connected low socio-economic status (SES) to low test results decades ago. Has this country done anything meaningful to address this challenge? I’d have to say that No Child Left Behind amounted to ten giant steps backwards in terms of solving that problem of low-SES skewing of test results downward. In fact, NCLB might just have been a rocket ride in the wrong direction.

Big data hasn’t helped us. Big data is hurting us, in fact, as I have documented throughout this blog. In the meantime, we are so busy sorting data and putting it into spreadsheets that the meeting about support for fatherless children or children in the middle of life-changing events such as divorce — well, that meeting probably never happens. The discussion about possibly adding another counselor or social worker? Another meeting that never happens.

Eduhonesty: I want to repeat that I am not anti-test. But every test creates opportunity costs. The most obvious cost is the material that we cannot teach because we are testing yet again. I lost about 1/5th of my last school year to testing preparation and testing before I retired. Honestly, that year’s testing schedule (2 benchmark tests times 3, added on to the year of two PARCC tests, not including “practice” tests) was close to INSANE.

But this post is intended to highlight one more underexplored cost of testing. What about the fatherless children? And that’s only a small start. We have identified many factors that affect educational success.

What about the homeless children? Homelessness has been exploding lately according to some sources. Anecdotal sources talk about growing tent cities within cities. “The nation has experienced three straight years of increases in homelessness…” according to COVID-19 and the State of Homelessness – National Alliance to End Homelessness. The article notes that, “as unemployment rapidly increases, so do predictions for homelessness, with one expert estimating that nearly 250,000 new people could join this already growing population over the course of the year.”

Missing fathers and lost homes are urgent problems that schools should be addressing. Counselors and social workers are sometimes thin on the ground, though, especially in cash-strapped districts. I don’t want to bog down in the absurdity of property-tax-based school funding. I do want to highlight critical absences — the discussions that never take place because we are too busy manipulating numbers.

One more problem with testing run amok: We end up ignoring problems that cry out for action while we dissect late-arriving tests instead. I have already pointed out in my last post that the tests almost always come back after the school year is effectively over, and sometimes well into summer or even the next fall. Then the PowerPoints start being created to share the data. (Or worse, they don’t get created and that data never informs any important decisions despite the time loss it generated.) The professional developments start being crafted to try to teach that Common Core math that didn’t work for the last few years, but maybe if we… or we… or… a lot of brainstorming happens in curriculum meetings that points directly at that test or the standards that built the test.

In the meantime, does anyone attack the problem of fathers or nonexistent housing? Some of our children might benefit enormously from extra support that never arrives because we never even start talking about their problem. Unless those students begin breaking down into tears regularly in school, no one may recognize they are facing any new or unusual challenges at all.

We only have so much time. I understand that we cannot solve the world’s problems and we must tread lightly when addressing students’ home lives. But aspects of life outside the classroom manifest in performance struggles within the classroom. Those aspects keep getting ignored as we myopically try to push test scores up by looking only at those tests themselves, usually shortly before we begin the meetings to prepare for the next test.

I believe we would benefit greatly from taking standardized tests off the table for a few years, giving ourselves time to take a good look around at what is happening in American education — at what has been happening with America’s students. Because our students should not be seen as sources of data. They are children, and a great deal has been happening in their lives lately. They absolutely do not require more stress — especially since we are unlikely to learn much of anything new from the testing that is stressing them.

I AM SO SICK OF ARTICLES THAT TELL ME — SHOCK!! — HOW POVERTY AND LOW TEST SCORES GO HAND IN HAND. Yes, and water is wet, there are too many shootings in Chicago, and our kids waste too much time on their phones. We know that already. Can we go on to the next step? That step is not another test or test-preparation session.

I strongly suspect a review of demographic and socioeconomic correlations from the year 2000 — or even 1970 — would show the same racial and economic divides we see today. See The Racist Consideration in Testing that Does Not Hit the News | Notes from the Educational Trenches (eduhonesty.com) for an example. Certainly the last decade or two has kept hitting the same nails on the head over and over again.

No Child Left Behind has failed. The Common Core is failing. Our toxic testing culture has not put a dent into the achievement gap. Maybe freeing time and funds to help individual children navigate their complicated times could help. But we will never manage to help individual children unless we can free up and commit time, energy and conversations to identifying possible solutions for the problems holding our students back.

The massive time suck from standardized testing prevents those conversations from ever taking place.

Thanks to all my readers, Jocelyn Turner