While it left very little time for personal processing, I'm proud that our leadership team worked for hours last night to prepare guidance for staff today. These are a few of the points. (LPS educators, your building teams have shared/will be sharing more specifics!)

Name what happened. The events of January 6, 2021 were violent and unlawful. This is not an opportunity for exploring "both sides."
Follow your students' lead. They will tell you how much or how little they want to process. Always make allowance for individuals who differ from their peers; make space for those who aren't ready to talk or those who want to continue talking.
Acknowledge this was a traumatic event. We all react differently to trauma. Individuals process in different ways, and there is no one correct way to respond; therefore, it is important to acknowledge individual reactions and feelings.
Be aware of your own reactions to events. Children of all ages take their cues from the adults around them. Staff members should seek support for themselves to process events if needed.
Make time and space to process events. It is appropriate and necessary to create time and space during class to process troubling events.
Acknowledge you may not be ready to discuss the events yourself. As a staff member. if you don’t feel ready to address these events, you should still address it in some way. Silence is not an act of neutrality; it can negate the validity of children’s feelings.
It’s okay to say, “I don’t know.” We may not all feel sure of how best to respond when students express worry or have difficult questions. Just know that sometimes what your students need the most is knowing that you are listening and that you care.
Clearly distinguish between peaceful protest and violence. There should be no celebration in what happened on January 6, 2021. While we encourage respecting differing views, we also must remember that free speech is not absolute.
Think heart, not head. Well-intended civic discourse can cause events to be re-lived, resulting in further trauma for some. For some, it is not possible to avoid challenging emotions like fear and grief in discussing these events.
Suggest limiting news consumption. We live in a 24/7 news cycle, especially when major events occur. Encourage students to moderate their media watching and encourage critical thinking when reading, watching or listening to news.
Help students identify coping strategies. Give students concrete ideas for working through their thoughts and emotions and time to do them.

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The outrage is not that she fit better. The outrage is that she stated very firmly on national television with no caveat, that there are no conditions not improved by exercise. Many people with viral sequelae have been saying for years that exercise has made them more disabled 1/


And the new draft NICE guidelines for ME/CFS which often has a viral onset specifically say that ME/CFS patients shouldn't do graded exercise. Clare is fully aware of this but still made a sweeping and very firm statement that all conditions are improved by exercise. This 2/

was an active dismissal of the lived experience of hundreds of thousands of patients with viral sequelae. Yes, exercise does help so many conditions. Yes, a very small number of people with an ME/CFS diagnosis are helped by exercise. But the vast majority of people with ME, a 3/

a quintessential post-viral condition, are made worse by exercise. Many have been left wheelchair dependent of bedbound by graded exercise therapy when they could walk before. To dismiss the lived experience of these patients with such a sweeping statement is unethical and 4/

unsafe. Clare has every right to her lived experience. But she can't, and you can't justifiably speak out on favour of listening to lived experience but cherry pick the lived experiences you are going to listen to. Why are the lived experiences of most people with ME dismissed?

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I just finished Eric Adler's The Battle of the Classics, and wanted to say something about Joel Christiansen's review linked below. I am not sure what motivates the review (I speculate a bit below), but it gives a very misleading impression of the book. 1/x


The meat of the criticism is that the history Adler gives is insufficiently critical. Adler describes a few figures who had a great influence on how the modern US university was formed. It's certainly critical: it focuses on the social Darwinism of these figures. 2/x

Other insinuations and suggestions in the review seem wildly off the mark, distorted, or inappropriate-- for example, that the book is clickbaity (it is scholarly) or conservative (hardly) or connected to the events at the Capitol (give me a break). 3/x

The core question: in what sense is classics inherently racist? Classics is old. On Adler's account, it begins in ancient Rome and is revived in the Renaissance. Slavery (Christiansen's primary concern) is also very old. Let's say classics is an education for slaveowners. 4/x

It's worth remembering that literacy itself is elite throughout most of this history. Literacy is, then, also the education of slaveowners. We can honor oral and musical traditions without denying that literacy is, generally, good. 5/x