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Would You Ever Go on a Solo Vacation?

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Would You Ever Go on a Solo Vacation?

Do you like to travel? Do you usually go on trips with family or friends? What places in the world are on your bucket list?

Would you ever consider visiting them alone? Why or why not?

For a recent Travel article, “How Much Did You Spend on Your Solo Vacation?,” Christine Chung talked to eight readers about their recent solo travels, including their motivations for traveling alone. The article begins this way:

Solo travel — curating a vacation perfectly suited to you and no one else — is the ultimate idiosyncratic experience.

For some, the goal is to fully test their limits and develop confidence. Others say the allure of traveling alone lies in wholly embracing their desires and their own pace. It can also be about rediscovering joy after a particularly challenging period in one’s life.

Eight readers told Ms. Chung about their recent solo sojourns. Here is what three of them said:

Reader: Meg Christensen, 37, Portland, Ore.

Where she went: Edinburgh and the Isle of Skye, in Scotland, and the Faroe Islands

Tell us about your trip: I got to the Faroe Islands by traveling through Edinburgh, and at the end of my trip I took a three-day tour up to the Isle of Skye. Because there are so few restaurants (and hotels) on the Faroe Islands, I stayed at Airbnbs with kitchens so I could cook for myself. I rented a car to island hop.

Some highlights: kayaking on a big lake and taking in a beautiful waterfall in the sunshine — one of the most beautiful sights I’ve ever seen.

Why did you choose this trip? I wanted to be outside surrounded by natural beauty, and I wanted to enjoy my own company. I chose the Faroe Islands because I love Scandinavia, and they seemed spooky and beautiful. It also seemed safe for solo female travelers.

Was this your first solo vacation? No, but it had been a decade since the last one. It’s important to me to have a good friendship with myself, and being alone on some tiny islands in the North Atlantic felt really powerful in that regard. I had a great time. I took measures to stay safe — really grippy hiking boots, venturing out only in the daylight hours, communicating often with my husband.

___

Reader: Cort Harlow, 29, Brooklyn, N.Y.

Where he went: Buenos Aires

Tell us about your trip: I booked the trip two weeks in advance — it was pretty last minute. I am a software engineer and wanted to see how I felt working remotely in a foreign city. I flew nonstop overnight from New York (I splurged a bit on a premium economy upgrade) and stayed at an Airbnb condo in the Palermo Hollywood neighborhood for seven nights.

Why did you choose this trip? It had been a long time since I spent an extended amount of time alone. I wanted to push myself out of my comfort zone, to flex my autonomy and self motivation. I also wanted to get out of cold and gray New York City, and had been reading about urban development in South American cities.

Was this your first solo vacation? I’m a 29-year-old gay man, and this was my first solo trip. I loved it. I walked away feeling so much more capable — and empowered. I am very keen to try it again.

___

Reader: Alison Heebsh, 49, St. Paul, Minn.

Where she went: El Paso, Texas, and San Lorenzo, N.M.

Tell us about your trip: I volunteered with an organization that provides hospitality to asylum seekers in the United States. I went a couple of days early to see the New Mexico desert, visiting the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument and driving down through the Chihuahuan Desert.

Why did you choose this trip? It was a chance to step out of my daily life, serve alongside interesting and generous people and spend time getting to know migrants on the final stages of difficult journeys. I also loved the chance to explore new places solo. The sunny skies of the New Mexico desert and mountains did not disappoint!

Was this your first solo vacation? No, I’ve done a whole lot of solo backpacking trips, including along the Colorado Trail in 2018.

Students, read the entire article and then tell us:

  • What was your initial reaction to the idea of traveling alone? Does it seem fun? Liberating? Scary? Why?

  • Now that you’ve read about a few solo journeys, including trips to have fun, to work remotely and to volunteer, have you rethought your reaction? Do any of the eight trips in the article sound like ones that you’d like to go on? Why?

  • What seems most appealing to you about traveling alone? What is unappealing? If you were to do it, where would you like to go and what would you like to do? How do you think it would be different from traveling with others? How might it change you?

  • How much time do you spend alone in general? Do you enjoy pushing yourself outside your comfort zone, as some of these travelers did?

  • The woman who traveled alone to the Faroe Islands said it was important to her to “have a good friendship with myself.” Would you say the same? If so, how do you do that?

Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public and may appear in print.

Find more Student Opinion questions here. Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate these prompts into your classroom.

World Day for Safety and Health at Work

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World Day for Safety and Health at Work

No one who wakes up in the morning dreams or imagines that they will come home with an illness or injury. Or that they won’t make it home. Everyone has the fundamental right to work in a safe and healthy environment. From this starting point, the International Labor Organization (ILO) launched World Day in 2003 with a focus on the avoidance of accidents and diseases at work.

World Day for Safety and Health at Work

World Day for Safety and Health at Work is celebrated annually on the 28th of April to highlight, bring into focus, and promote the circumvention of diseases and occupational accidents in the workplace. This year’s theme, ‘A safe and healthy working environment is a fundamental principle and right at work’, helps us recognise and remember the importance of health and safety at work to prevent workplace injuries and fatalities.

This global awareness campaign aims to draw the world’s attention to the big problems experienced in the workplace. It also hopes to emphasise how advancing a safe and healthy workplace culture can reduce the number of injuries and deaths that do occur at the workplace.

The burden of workplace

Poor working conditions aren’t just about bad PR or how your organisation looks on social media. It’s about real life. Real people. It’s about assessing the physical and mental risks that workers face when they clock in and putting measures in place to combat these.  

Unsafe working conditions have life-altering effects on the people affected. According to the ILO, there are 340 million occupational accidents and 160 million individuals who fall victim to work-related diseases annually. They estimate that every year, 2.3 million experience workplace-related fatalities around the world. Most worker fatalities are caused by occupational diseases. They add that hazardous substances alone result in an estimated 651,279 fatalities annually.

The consequences of illness and injuries are extended absences from work, financial expenses around medical bills, therapy and recovery and time away from work costs the family, company, and at a larger scale, the global GDP.

Despite the progress being made in these areas, these numbers still call for focus and special consideration to continue being given. This responsibility falls on all of us to ensure we can all return to our homes at the end of the workday in the same manner we left.

Who’s responsible for safety and health at work?

Sometimes we can be complacent in matters of health and safety. Be it shirking off the responsibility to our doctors, leaving it for those in the field, or saying everyone else must take responsibility. But workplace health and safety falls on three parties to make it work.

  • Individuals: We are individually responsible for our health and safety. This means not coming to work inebriated, making sure you know how to operate all machinery you work with, wearing the correct PPE (personal protective equipment and attire), leaving your workstation in a manner that won’t endanger your colleagues and more.
  • Employees: As colleagues, we are duty-bound to ensure we don’t put our team in any danger by being irresponsible, overlooking, or not reporting dangers or hazards we see while we work.
  • Employers: The third contributor to ensuring workplace health and safety falls on the employer to provide the environment, tools, knowledge, and resources to ensure the environment does not infringe on the rights and principles every individual is legally entitled to.
  • Governments: Governments and organisations need to introduce legislation and national policies to enforce corporations to change systems to provide safe and healthy environments for their staff.

Creating a prevention culture

In as much as we are responsible for best practices at work in whatever capacity we hold, this doesn’t just happen without intention.

  • Organisations need to ensure that they remain compliant with the necessary legal obligations to create a safe and healthy working environment.
  • However, both employees and employers should encourage good practices and have a dialogue about health and safety about rules, constraints, rules, responsibilities, and conditions necessary to create the environment.
  • Make health and safety a priority.
  • Raise awareness and ensure everyone understands the concept of health and safety, the risks, hazards, and measures to control workplace injuries.

How to get involved

Workplace health and safety is everyone’s responsibility. Here are a few ways you can get involved in celebrating World Health and Safety Day.

  • Educate yourself on your company’s health and safety policies and procedures.
  • Share and post your awareness and knowledge on your social media platforms using the hashtags #WorldWHSDay2023 #SafeDay2023 #IWMD2023.
  • Enrol for a course or two on occupational health and safety.
  • As an employer: host sessions and workshops, provide resources, make sure your policies are up to date, and invite an occupational health and safety (OHS) expert to give talks to your employees.
  • Check your mental health. Take our free mental well-being test below to assess and help you develop a happier, healthier, and more productive life tomorrow.

And remember, in as much as World Work Health and Safety Day is celebrated on 28th April, it’s a day to be remembered and practised every day of the year.

Plastic Head

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Plastic Head

What do you think this image is saying? How does it relate to or comment on society? Can you relate to it personally? What is your opinion of its message?

Tell us in the comments, then read the related Opinion essay to learn more.

Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public and may appear in print.

Find more Picture Prompts here.

Word of the Day: curio

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Word of the Day: curio

The word curio has appeared in 14 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on Jan. 22 in “4 Indie Makers to Watch in the High Jewelry Scene” by Tina Isaac-Goizé:

For Marc Auclert, modernity goes hand-in-hand with the past. Twelve years ago, armed with 15 years of experience in the high jewelry department at Chanel, as well as stints at De Beers in Tokyo and Sotheby’s gem department in Paris, he set about turning the antique curios he loves — ancient coins, prehistoric beads, delicate intaglios — into one-of-a-kind jewels.

In his tiny, tidy boutique on Rue de Castiglione, recent arrivals included a ring mounted with a broken coin dating to the third century B.C. and bearing the profile of the Macedonian general Lysimachus, an heir to Alexander the Great. Mr. Auclert worked with his jewelry atelier — drawing on the traditional Japanese technique of kintsugi, which accentuates the fractures in cracked pottery with powdered gold or other precious metals — to fill a missing section of the coin with white gold and diamonds.

Can you correctly use the word curio in a sentence?

Based on the definition and example provided, write a sentence using today’s Word of the Day and share it as a comment on this article. It is most important that your sentence makes sense and demonstrates that you understand the word’s definition, but we also encourage you to be creative and have fun.

Then, read some of the other sentences students have submitted and use the “Recommend” button to vote for two original sentences that stand out to you.

If you want a better idea of how curio can be used in a sentence, read these usage examples on Vocabulary.com.

Students ages 13 and older in the United States and the United Kingdom, and 16 and older elsewhere, can comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff.

The Word of the Day is provided by Vocabulary.com. Learn more and see usage examples across a range of subjects in the Vocabulary.com Dictionary. See every Word of the Day in this column.

Teenagers on the Best Thing About Being Their Age

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Teenagers on the Best Thing About Being Their Age

Though I am on the cusp of adulthood and leaving the safety of my childhood, I would never wish my age away. I am a 16-year-old teenage girl. I have slumber parties with my friends where we eat snacks and talk about boys and post embarrassing photos. I go to bed late and wake up tired on Monday mornings. I wear small clothing — I wear obscenely oversized clothes. I put glitter on my face and shout cheers with kids I barely know at sports games and pep rallies. I look back at nostalgic memories and coo at old baby photos. I spend the weekend hunched over an essay, worrying about my grades. I debate over the problems in the world. I share tampons with strangers in the bathroom — I buy cheap makeup at the drugstore. I have so much ahead of me and I’m leaving a lot behind too. I am happy, ecstatic, afraid, brave, quiet, and loud. At sixteen years old, I feel unrestrained and uncontrolled by rules of adulthood. I wouldn’t trade the time I have now, the time to laugh and cry and do everything in between, for anything.

— Caroline, New Hampshire

For me, being a teen is amazing. It presents responsibilities while also allowing for great memories to be formed. Nothing beats biking around in the summer, Saturday night hangouts and swimming at the pool. Being a kid is a ride that keeps on getting better as more opportunities unfold as you age in your teen years. Although being an adult sounds fun at times, being a kid wins the battle 1000-1. If I had the choice I would not change to be an adult now because of all the fun I am having. You hear from people that are adults talking about things like taxes and bills. As a kid you don’t have to worry about that. All you have to do is live your life.

— Holden, Glenbard West High School, Glen Ellyn

I’m 13 years old and the best thing about being my age is definitely exploring and just being adventurous. This is the age where my parents actually trust me enough to go outside in my neighborhood alone and I absolutely love it. Abandoned places, skateboarding, “our spots,” sunsets, the wind blowing in your face. All of those things I get to experience at this age. The age where I can explore the outside world with complete freedom but still being a kid, which means basically no responsibilities, no jobs, nowhere to be, nowhere to go. I love taking 30 minute walks around the same plaza outside my house with my best friend and I love playing volleyball at the park I’ve been to 20,000 times. In my opinion, being a kid is amazing.

— Shwe, Julia R. Masterman, Philadelphia, PA

The best thing about being my age is the chaos. I like the hustle and rhythm of a typical busy day as a high schooler. Everything is so fast paced and I love it. I know most would see this as exhausting, but you must take advantage of the time in your youth, for it is the most valuable thing in life.

— Everett, New Jersey

What’s Going On in This Graph? | May 3, 2023

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What’s Going On in This Graph? | May 3, 2023

Note: This is the final “What’s Going On in This Graph?” for the 2022-23 school year.

This graph was previously published in The New York Times. It includes data through the first three weeks of each Major League Baseball (M.L.B.) season since 1980. How has the duration of baseball games changed this year, and how might this affect the popularity of the sport?

This season, M.L.B. introduced major rule changes: a pitch clock limiting the time that a pitcher has to throw a pitch and a hitter has to be ready for pitches, a ban on the infield shift where outfielders had moved around the field to be in better position to field hits, and a limit on pickoff throws for outs by the pitcher. In addition, bases are bigger (18 inches square, from 15) and pitchers and catchers may wear PitchCom transmitters to communicate secretly while on the field.

On Wednesday, May 3, we will moderate your responses live online. By Friday morning, May 5, we will provide the “Reveal” — the graphs’ free online link, additional questions, shout outs for student headlines and Stat Nuggets.

1. After looking closely at the graph above (or at this full-size image), answer these four questions:

The questions are intended to build on one another, so try to answer them in order.

2. Next, join the conversation online by clicking on the comment button and posting in the box. (Teachers of students younger than 13 are welcome to post their students’ responses.)

3. Below the response box, there is an option to click on “Email me when my comment is published.” This sends the link to your response which you can share with your teacher.

4. After you have posted, read what others have said, then respond to someone else by posting a comment. Use the “Reply” button to address that student directly.

On Wednesday, May 3, teachers from our collaborator, the American Statistical Association, will facilitate this discussion from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Eastern time.

5. By Friday morning, May 5, we will reveal more information about the graph, including a free link to the article that includes this graph, at the bottom of this post. We encourage you to post additional comments based on the article, possibly using statistical terms defined in the Stat Nuggets.

We’ll post more information here on Thursday afternoon. Stay tuned!

More?

• See all graphs in this series or collections of 60 of our favorite graphs, 28 graphs that teach about inequality and 24 graphs about climate change.

• View our archives that link to all past releases, organized by topic, graph type and Stat Nugget.

• Learn more about the notice and wonder teaching strategy from this 5-minute video and how and why other teachers are using this strategy from our on-demand webinar.

• Sign up for our free weekly Learning Network newsletter so you never miss a graph. Graphs are always released by the Friday before the Wednesday live moderation to give teachers time to plan ahead.

• Go to the American Statistical Association K-12 website, which includes teacher statistics resources, Census in the Schools student-generated data, professional development opportunities, and more.

Students 13 and older in the United States and the Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

Our 14th Annual Summer Reading Contest

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Our 14th Annual Summer Reading Contest

And, too, at a time when some educators are alarmed by the ability of chatbots to do students’ work for them, this is a contest that rewards the human touch. As our step-by-step guide to participating shows, what we’re looking for is meaningful personal connections to the news, explored with voice, style and personality — something A.I. can’t (yet?) do with anywhere near the verve of the teenagers we hear from.

Another reason? For some teachers, assigning the contest over the summer helps them to quickly get to know their new students when school starts. In our related webinar, Karen Gold, English department chair at The Governor’s Academy in Byfield, Mass., details how she uses the contest in this way.

But maybe the most compelling reason to assign this contest is what students themselves say about it. At the end of the summer of 2020, many teenagers told us that the weekly reading and writing helped them through a difficult time. For instance, a participant named Ava wrote:

This year’s summer reading contest has helped me learn not only about the world around me, but about myself. After seeing other students’ responses on race, the teenage experience, and the coronavirus, I felt a little less alone about my complicated feelings during this tumultuous year. After all, there has never been a time in my life during which it’s been easier to fall into social isolation. However, because the articles I chose to write about were those that I could easily relate to and express my opinion on, I found comfort in my weekly submissions.

In 2017, Emma Weber, a student from London, posted that, thanks to the contest, “I feel grounded in my views and understand what’s going on in the world. It’s amazing what a change 1,500 characters a week make.” In 2020 we invited Emma to help judge the entries, and here is what she had to say after Week 10:

I know firsthand that the Summer Reading Contest has the ability to change the way one engages in the news — I went from passively reading to actively thinking and questioning. The more you reflect on what is going on in the world and what interests you about it, the more you will understand your place within it. I urge all those who enjoyed participating this summer to continue reading, reflecting and writing.

Thank you for making this contest a hit year after year, and please spread the word that it’s back for its 14th season.

Good luck!

How To Talk About Your Professional Accomplishments (& Not Feel Awkward)

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How To Talk About Your Professional Accomplishments (& Not Feel Awkward)

It’s a simple prompt that can make even the most talented people sweat: Tell me about yourself. Whether you’re interviewing for your dream job or attending your first team stand-up meeting, introducing yourself and talking about your own achievements can be stressful. 

How can you possibly distill the nuances of your professional story and accomplishments into a concise statement that sounds confident and charming, but not braggadocious? With a few tricks, you can get better at talking about yourself and communicating your value, according to Louis Melendez, a communication coach and the founder of Have Better Conversations.

Learn something new for free

For starters, there’s a big difference between boasting and bragging. “Boasting is talking about ourselves from a place of pride and eloquence,” Louis said in a recent virtual workshop for the Codecademy community. “Bragging is when we get nasty, competitive, and contrasting.” There’s a time and a place for professional boasting, like during a job interview or heading into a performance review. But bragging, criticizing others, and over-exaggerating your accomplishments tends to be off-putting no matter the scenario.

If you missed the workshop, we got you! Here are Louis’ tips for telling your professional story, being your own hype person, and making a lasting impression. Be sure to sign up for upcoming Codecademy community events to get more career advice and coding tips, plus connect with other learners around the world. 

Be specific

When talking about your accomplishments, look for places to articulate the specific impact you made. “Specificity breeds credibility,” Louis says. Pointing to a particular time when you identified a challenge and came up with a solution is much more effective than saying something vague, like, “I did a good job” or “I worked really hard and met my goals.” 

It helps to have a running document where you keep track of what you’re doing, that way you can reference your recent quantifiable and quantitative achievements, Louis says. For example, which projects did you lead? Did you help make your team’s process more efficient? Did you mentor a junior dev? Having these wins down on paper makes it easy to recite them the next time you need to advocate for yourself. (You can learn more about how to make a “hype doc” in this blog.)

Emphasize (and contextualize) your impact 

Lots of people struggle with making their individual contributions visible. Your hard work will not necessarily speak for itself, so you have to let people know what you’re doing, and take credit for your work, Louis says. You can do that by sharing weekly wins with your team leader and teammates, or bringing your hype doc to your performance review. 

Depending on who you’re talking to, people may not grasp the scope or significance of your work right away. That’s why it’s important to immediately talk about the business impact of your work, Louis says. Think about the effect your project or expertise had on the team or organization as a whole. 

Try to use language that’s approachable for people so that they can really understand what your output means for their day-to-day life, Louis says. (A non-technical person at your organization may not be able to contextualize your impact without some additional explanation.) For example, maybe a design decision you made led to an increase in sales. Or perhaps you took initiative to automate a task that saved everyone hours of time. 

Make it positive

As you’re talking up your successes, avoid comparing or contrasting your work to your teammates’, Louis says. For example, saying something like, “I spent way more time debugging other people’s code because nobody else on my team takes the time to do it,” is not the vibe. Keep the focus on your own work, stay positive and forward-thinking, and don’t get distracted by how other people are advancing. 

“When we’re boasting, we’re not putting other people down, and we’re not lifting ourselves up relative to others,” Louis says. “We’re simply lifting ourselves up.” In other words: Don’t get distracted comparing yourself to others. 

With that in mind, you could reframe the previous example, saying, “I debugged hundreds of lines of code this quarter, which gave me fascinating insight into our code base and allowed me to forge relationships with more senior engineers on our team.” 

Practice using this script

Here is an easy-to-remember script Louis wrote that you can use the next time you need to talk about yourself. It’s set up so you can mention a few of your professional achievements and goals, and sprinkle in a bit of information about your personal interests and passions that will make you stand out.

Hi my name is… 

A fun fact about me is…

I’m proud to say…

In the future, I hope to… 

Want to keep developing core communication skills? Louis offers coaching and courses that can help you with job interviews, salary negotiations, public speaking, giving and receiving feedback, and any other time you need to communicate confidently. (BTW, you can enter the promo code CODE at checkout to receive a discount on Louis’ courses.)

We’re always hosting free events for folks in the Codecademy community to learn these important job-readiness skills, connect with other code enthusiasts, and hear from inspiring thought leaders. Sign up for an upcoming community event, or join the discussions in our Discord server and forums.

The Need For Flexible and Nuanced Recommendations

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The Need For Flexible and Nuanced Recommendations

Here is an example she gives in the newsletter: baby sleep location. The first best is that babies sleep alone in a crib, on their back with no loose blankets or toys, in their parents’ room, for at least the first six months of life. This is what the AAP recommends and is considered the gold standard in the United States.

However, what should a parent do when this simply isn’t possible or feasible? Emily Oster points out that if you’re in a situation where the best isn’t working for you, it can be difficult to figure out what the second best really is. For example, co-sleeping on a couch is much more dangerous than co-sleeping on an adult-sized bed with no blankets or pillows. Here’s one I’ve also wondered about: Is there really a safety difference between putting your baby to sleep in their own room with a video monitor and putting them to sleep in your room? Surely both of these are safer than sleeping together on the couch… right? This information can be difficult to find, as the recommendations tend to stick very closely to the gold standard, and not provide any other “second best” options or nuance.

Emily Oster’s overarching message in this newsletter really resonated with me (and not just because I love Emily Oster). The newsletter calls for more information about second-best options so that parents can make informed decisions, even when the first best does not work for them. It calls for recognizing reality and including more nuance within the advice that is given. I love this because in many ways this is what we are trying to do with The Learning Scientists.

If you’re a frequent reader of our blog, you know that we are big fans of describing flexible guiding principles rather than giving more specific prescriptions. Why? Because the specific prescriptions would not work for everybody and would not work in every situation! The science of learning is nuanced, and so the recommendations also need to be nuanced. Further, we feel strongly that it is important for students, teachers, and other educators applying the science of learning to understand the underlying principle driving the effective learning strategy. When the underlying principle is understood, then adjustments can be made to how the learning strategies are used in practice to best fit the given situation while remaining effective.

Take an example: retrieval practice. A very concise and specific recommendation, based on centuries of data on retrieval practice, could be to test more in school. There was a time when most research on retrieval was labeled “the testing effect” and recommendations focused on testing as a way to promote learning. This recommendation is not bad, per se. Saying “test more” is simple and clear, and when done well would likely lead to effective and efficient learning. But if all we say about retrieval practice is that students should “take more tests”, then when this doesn’t happen retrieval practice will be pushed aside entirely. Testing has a lot of negative associations, and when we say “testing” a lot of students, teachers, and other educators think of standardized testing. By and large most do not want more standardized testing. Further, high-stakes tests might not produce as much learning as low-stakes or no-stakes retrieval opportunities due to test anxiety. Without even knowing it, people end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.

Instead of going for the simple yet stripped-down recommendation, we feel strongly that those engaged in science communication should present the nuance. We think it is much better to describe a flexible guiding principle, bringing information to mind from memory (retrieval practice), along with a number of concrete examples (like these blog posts: retrieval mapping, quizzing format, reflective class feedback, and optimizing learning with retrieval practice). The nuance here is that testing is not the only way to implement retrieval practice. There are plenty of ways that retrieval can be infused into learning activities that don’t look at all like tests. There are also ways to reduce the pressure during tests or quizzes, and this type of low-stakes or no-stakes practice can help alleviate test anxiety (I talk about why it is a good idea to still include some tests/quizzes here).

It takes a bit more time, and it means that the advice that we give is sometimes not the most prescriptive that it could be. But, by explaining the nuance and describing flexible guiding principles, students, teachers, and other educators can make informed decisions about what is best for them/their students.

What Is Your Reaction to the Recent Wave of Anti-Transgender Legislation?

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What Is Your Reaction to the Recent Wave of Anti-Transgender Legislation?

In her piece, published Jan. 25, she reported that there were more than 150 anti-transgender bills proposed in at least 25 state legislatures. By mid-April, that number had increased to over 400 bills in at least 45 states. At least 29 of those bills have become law.

Do those numbers surprise you? Have you recently noticed more people talking about transgender issues, whether on the news or in your own family, friend groups, sports leagues or schools? Have you heard of any laws related to transgender rights that have been proposed or passed in your own state or around the country?

In “G.O.P. State Lawmakers Push a Growing Wave of Anti-Transgender Bills,” Ms. Astor describes some of these bills:

The flood of legislation is part of a long-term campaign by national groups that see transgender rights as an issue on which they can harness voter anger — as with the campaigns against remote learning and critical race theory that reshaped many school boards and lifted Republicans in Virginia’s elections in 2021 — though the midterm elections provided little evidence of it.

“This is a political winner,” said Terry Schilling, the president of the conservative American Principles Project, arguing that more voters would have been swayed had many Republicans not “shied away” from the subject.

The potential consequences for transgender people, for whom harassment and threats have become common and suicide rates are high, are profound. Many express a sense that the power of their government is being turned against them as they try to live their lives.

“We have shifted this conversation so incredibly far in the direction of restrictions on trans people’s autonomy and rights in a way that was completely unfathomable to many of us even just three or four years ago,” said Chase Strangio, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Legislation in Oklahoma and South Carolina would make it a felony to provide hormonal or surgical transition treatment to transgender people younger than 26 — an uncharted incursion into adults’ health care. Other bills in both states, and in Kansas and Mississippi, would ban such care up to age 21. And bills in more than a dozen states would ban it for minors, which Arkansas was the first to do in 2021, against the consensus of major medical organizations.

A bill in Mississippi — declaring that “separate is not inherently unequal,” an allusion to Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 ruling in which the Supreme Court upheld segregation — would define sex as immutably set at birth, denying transgender identities under state law. A measure in West Virginia would define “any transvestite and/or transgender exposure, performances or display” as obscene, potentially outlawing transgender people’s presence around children.

The article continues:

Conservative activists have emphasized parental control and child protection, calling transition care harmful, an assertion rejected by the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and other medical groups. Transgender people have higher rates of depression and suicide, and research shows that transition care — which can involve puberty blockers, hormones or surgery, though minors rarely receive surgery — can improve mental health.

Some activists and politicians also say exposing young people to transgender identities, whether through a book reading by a drag performer or a classroom discussion, “sexualizes” them — an echo of anti-gay campaigns dating to the 1970s, which cast gay people as preying on children.

But the bills arriving in legislatures show a movement expanding beyond what it pitched itself as.

The 25-year-olds who would be unable to receive transition care in Oklahoma and South Carolina are not, after all, children. An Arizona bill would ban drag shows on Sunday mornings whether or not minors were around. (The lawmakers who introduced those bills did not respond to requests for comment.)

Students, read the entire article and then tell us:

  • What is your reaction to the growing wave of anti-transgender legislation across the United States? Did any particular passage in the article catch your attention?

  • How have these issues surfaced in the places you spend time, whether at school, among your friends, at home or elsewhere in your community? What effect, if any, have they had on you?

  • What arguments have you heard in favor of or against these bills? Do you agree with any of those arguments?

  • Many of these bills focus on young people, including determining what sports teams they can play on, what medical care they can receive, and what can be said about gender and sexuality in schools. What message do these laws send to teenagers? What do you wish lawmakers knew about how this legislation could affect you or others your age?

  • Is it important to have laws determining the medical care transgender youth receive or the sports teams young people can play on? Or should those decisions be left to others — such as families, schools, doctors or young people themselves? Why do you think the way you do?

  • Why do you think this flood of anti-transgender legislation is happening right now? What do you think it says about the United States today? What questions do you have?

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