Above Grade Level Canada

The CDC & Dr. Fauci now project that child-ready COVID-19 vaccine variations will only be available for children as young as age 5 in 2022, pushing back the original September 2021 target date. However, thanks to active, on-going clinical trials focused on adolescents, vaccines should be available for high schoolers by this September. https://www.mercedsunstar.com//calif/article249315095.html

Most infectious diseases experts believe COVID is here to stay BUT that it'll circulate in a much tamer, less disruptive way "once people develop some immunity to it either through natural infection or vaccination." According to this theory, it'll become "a foe first encountered in early childhood, when it typically causes mild infection or none at all" because that's how "four endemic coronaviruses, called OC43, 229E, NL63 and HKU1, behave," three of which have been circul...ating in humans for HUNDREDS of YEARS. In those cases, "most children first come down with these viruses before the age of 6 and develop immunity to them." Some expect a similar scenario to play out with COVID-19, with COVID-19 becoming a seasonal flu-like disease with a much tamer mortality rate. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00396-2

Even within the highly fractious US political environment, where Dems and Republicans cannot even agree on whether UP is DOWN or DOWN is UP, shockingly, there IS "near unanimous, bipartisan agreement that TUTORING is among the most promising, evidence-based strategies to help students struggling with learning loss," one that Biden has embraced as a potential key to stemming the tide of COVID learning loss! Of course, this is not surprising to those in the know: "Decades of r...igorous evaluations have consistently found that tutoring programs yield large, positive effects on math and reading achievement, and can even lead to greater social and motivational outcomes." Decades of rigorous studies have even revealed the characteristics of ideal tutoring programs. These ideal characteristics include (i) a dosage level of at least 3 tutoring sessions per week, (ii) having a consistent tutor over time, and (iii) having instructional materials that align with the curriculum and classroom instruction of the student. Here's to TUTORING - one surefire way to transform a student's abilities. https://www.the74million.org//analysis-high-quality-high-/

When Amazon founder Bezos looks for the smartest people in the world to join his various enterprises, he looks for people who constantly revise their understanding of things and reconsider problems they thought they had already solved. Bezos sees such people as "open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking" which he views as a sign of intellectual humility. Bezos knows what Socrates knew and what famed... Canadian music artist, K'naan, paraphrased in song lyrics some time ago, "Any [person] who knows a thing knows, he knows not a . . . thing at all!" Paradoxically, the smartest people around know they know nothing at all: that's why their insatiable quest to learn, grow, and improve never ends. Now that is something we can all learn from. https://www.inc.com//this-is-number-1-sign-of-high-intelli

"The United Nations says the pandemic has caused the largest disruption in education in history, with more than a billion students affected since July last year." Now that's a profoundly sad showstopper of a statement. But perhaps we can find some succor for the soul in the results of "recent peer-reviewed research published in the American Institute of Physics" which found that "closing schools only slightly reduced by four per cent the number of infections among the population aged 25 and under." This was based on data from hard hit New York City. https://globalnews.ca//school-closures-covid-19-spread-st/

In a world in which social media platforms' algorithms help spread FAKE stories and information SIX TIMES as fast as TRUE stories, at least according to one recent MIT study*, it's vital we raise our kids with the critical-thinking and news literacy skills they need to survive in a world filled with misinformation. Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world. - Nelson Mandela *A 2018 study by scholars at the Massachusetts Institute of Techno...logy found that it takes true stories about six times as long to reach 1,500 people as it does for false stories to reach the same number of people on Twitter. https://www.fastcompany.com//why-news-literacy-is-just-the