Finding Good News

There's lots of bad news that's easy to find.  What about looking for good news?  I found some right away at Lifevestinside.com.  They have an impressive set of projects and ways to get involved in spreading kindness and hope.  They are action-oriented with clear initiatives.  For example, you can open a Life Vest Inside branch in your town. To bring kindness to children, their LVI Kindness Curriculum "provides a framework for scaffolding immersive experiences using critical thinking skills focused on kindness with the goal of benefiting not only the student and teacher, but also the community."  They reference Bloom's Taxonomy for 'growing skills.'  I checked it out.  The Vanderbilt University Centre for Teaching provides an overview: "In 1956, Benjamin Bloom with collaborators Max Englehart, Edward Furst, Walter Hill, and David Krathwohl published a framework for categorizing educational goals: Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Familiarly known as Bloom’s Taxonomy, this framework has been applied by generations of K-12 teachers and college instructors in their teaching. The framework elaborated by Bloom and his collaborators consisted of six major categories: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation." I worked at Ryerson from 1985 - 1995 and went to many teaching seminars and workshops. Somehow the Bloom's Taxonomy got missed out in all this education about education. I've reproduced it below for you - a great pyramid of learning, and one we will apply right away. That's because here in Niagara, there is a big shift in the weather - a little dusting of snow on the ground.  The weather report says it is -5 and feels like -13 Celsius. The 3 day severe weather outlook says no severe weather expected.  This means we 'understand' in the Bloom's Taxonomy - we 'recognize' this is normal weather.  We next 'analyze' by looking at the historical record low -8.8 in 1991 and the record high 20.5 in 1999.  So we are experiencing normal weather. Finally with today's picture we 'blur out' on the weather and end our trip through the hierarchy at 'evaluate' - justifying, arguing, and defending 'blurring out' as a valid approach to the weather.