Cycle Three Concluding Post: Of Guardians and Dreamkeepers

Hi everyone, thank you again for your work in cycle three. I very much enjoyed reading your posts. 

While I have to promise you that my intention was not to dismay or dishearten you, I feel that, in some cases, that is what I did. If so, let me say I am sorry. And let me remind you that as teachers, one of our primary responsibilities is to preserve hope--for our profession, for our children, and for our society. We are, as Gloria Ladson-Billings says, “the dreamkeepers.”

Nothing in the world has a singular cause--the day of thinking about the world as a pool table is, hopefully, over (well, our politicians seem to forget that sometimes). Striking Ball A in the hopes that it will get Ball B into the corner pocket--well, the logic maybe works for billiards, but not for educating children. 

We live in a world where each event has multiple causes, as well as multiple effects, some intended, others unforeseen. We also live in a world of feedback loops. Not only are there multiple causes for every event, but the event itself evolves in response to the changing conditions around it. 

Stock markets rise in Wall Street not just because of objective economic conditions, but also because the markets in Tokyo and London rose that day as well. In fact, the stock market will sometimes increase because of a survey that consumers are feeling more confident--and that increase in the market will itself, perhaps, increase consumer confidence even more! We live in an interconnected world.

My reason for this little digression is this? 

Do you know one of the major influences on the Finnish educational system of today?

Yes, the United States.

Our country has a tradition of holistic, child-centered education that we can be proud of. I was reminded of this last night, when I entered the East Lansing Public Library, and saw the plaque stating that the library was founded by members of the East Lansing Child Study Group. Yes, people used to get together and talk about child development! The 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s were a time of great experimentalism in education in our country. Dewey was central, but more important were the teachers--many of them early childhood and elementary educators--who led the way. 

Our schools--with their wood shops, home economics classrooms, playgrounds, gymnasiums, theaters, studios, stadiums and student government councils--were centers of active community life. Indeed, so much so, that for many small towns, the school was the center of the larger community itself! Even in the world’s wealthiest nations, few have made of their schools what we have of ours. 

I think it is helpful to remind ourselves of this, and to take pride in those who went before us. 

When Dewey spoke of a common spirit to animate the schools, I think he meant this: “Only by being true to the full growth of all the individuals who make it up, can society by any chance be true to itself.”

Our schools used to provide lots of venues through which students could participate, demonstrate excellence, and give back to the good of a community. They were showcases of virtue. Virtue, in its Greek roots, refers back to excellence, in its many forms. As we watch the Olympics, we should be quickly reminded of that. 

It is a beautiful thing to watch young people finding themselves through finding their own unique form of virtue--excellence. As teachers, we  are guardians of a place where that excellence is recognized, honed and put to good use. That is our true vocation, though the public currently needs reminding of that.

Dewey lived a long life. As a child, he traveled from his home in Vermont to Virginia, to see his dad, who was fighting in the Civil War. He almost certainly witnessed the carnage of that horrific event. Later, living in Chicago, and then New York, he was witness to the pain and dislocation of immigrant families and displaced farm laborers, living in settlements, adapting to new ways of living, in a new environment.

Yet despite it all, he remained optimistic. He believed that schools could be sites where the good things in our communities could be leveraged so as to critique and improve those things that are bad. He believed that schools should be safe places, but not places hermetically sealed off from the world around them.

It is my hope that the past can provide some clue about the way in which we might move forward, making of our society one that is “worthy, lovely, and harmonious.” 

Thank you for your work in this course! I wish you a wonderful rest of the summer. Please be in touch if I can ever be of assistance to you. If you plan on coming in for graduation at some point, I hope  you will let me take you out for lunch!

Cycle Two Concluding Post: Honoring the Uniqueness of Each Student

Hi everyone. Thank you for your work over this past cycle. I really enjoyed reading your posts and your responses to each other. Given that this is such a mixed class in terms of the age of the children we work with, and the subjects we teach, I always learn an incredible amount. As one of you noted this week, we stand to learn an incredible amount about teaching by dialoguing across the early childhood, elementary, middle and secondary landscape!

I really want to encourage you, as well, to keep these dialogues going. Often, in a response, someone will pose a further question, or take you up on an offer to to share more about what you are doing in your classroom. I encourage you to respond to any questions or requests for more information that you receive! Often, the best way to continue these conversations is via email (you can access everyone’s MSU email by going to Angel, and looking it up on the class roster). Sometimes, a further post on your blog might not be seen by a reader. So please do consider following up these specific conversations via email! It’s fun to get responses on your writing.

Let me start this concluding post with a longer quote, from Nel Noddings, an education writer many of you have encountered before:

If the aim is justice--to provide all students with an education that will meet their needs--the solution is likely to involve the provision of considerable variety in school offerings and to include material that might contribute to personal as well as public life. Offering a variety of curricula does not mean putting together a set of courses labeled easy, average and hard and then equating  hard with best. It means cooperatively constructing rigorous and interesting courses centered on students’ interests and talents. It means that the schools should show the society that a democracy honors all of its honest workers, not just those who finish college and make a lot of money

Noddings goes on to ask how fair it is to force kids into learning certain subjects that don’t interest them, and then turn around and evaluate them against kids who are interested in such subject (say, calculus, or AP history). The implication here is that tracking itself is not really the problem--rather, it’s our belief that some subjects are more worthy than others, that the fine and industrial arts are unsuited to a twenty-first century education--when in reality, for a large number of jobs, and a happy and well rounded personal life, the exact opposite may be true!

In the above quote, Noddings seems to be writing for high school teachers. She takes the course as the unit of analysis. She talks, that is, about constructing courses centered on student interest and ability.

Now that is certainly one solution, but it is perhaps not the ideal one in many situations (courses are long in duration, and hard to get on the books). In elementary classrooms, it is not even a feasible solution at all.

It seems, then, that we need to scale down our “tracking” efforts, and differentiate at a more micro level--on the level of the unit, the project, the lesson, or even the activity. This is clearly where differentiated instruction comes in. As many of you noted, DI shares certain uncomfortable associations with tracking, and hence, can make some of us quite nervous.

But I don’t think it need to. Tracking got a justifiably bad rap, in my opinion, because it tried to take the infinite diversity of human beings--we are all unique and irreplaceable--and tried to boil us down to three classes (remedial/vocational, standard/general, honors/college-bound), determined along one questionable measure (general intelligence). In reality, given the typical spread in a typical classroom, I don’t imagine that breaking kids into one of three groups even simplifies teaching all that much--even in a class of “gifted” learners, there is still an incredible diversity of ability, interest, prior knowledge, and life experience as it relates to any one particular topic.

This is where I personally tend towards heterogeneous classrooms, heterogeneously grouped, and differentiatedly instructed. To my mind, this is the highest ideal for both democratic social relations and individual human growth.

I learned at least two important things about DI, I think, by reading our blogs this week. Here is a summary of them.

1) Sometimes, especially in the early elementary grades, we may need to differentiate our instruction based upon ability--and therefore group according to ability. This, of course, is not in itself a bad thing. It allows us to spend more time with students who need it, and provide work that challenges all students. This type of differentiation is most common, it seems, for work on the basic skills of literacy and numeracy.

However, and there was a pretty strong majority opinion here, grouping only by ability carries great risks with it, and may mean we have overly narrowed what we recognize and honor in our students (and in ourselves!). Therefore, there should be times in all classrooms where we differentiate instruction based on interests and strengths. It means providing options for projects and summative assessments that vary quite radically in the skills called to complete said project or assessment. We want to watch out, especially in the upper grades, of differentiating assignments by making them more “watered-down” versions of the “real” assessment we would prefer to give to the whole class. The key here is that we honor and challenge, to the increasing best of our ability, all students at all times.

2) Folks who are good at differentiating instruction--who have walked furthest down this path--are really good at observing kids. They do lots of formative and diagnostic assessments. They don’t make a snap judgement based on one measure, done at one point in time. Remember what Khan said in his video--in all of his studies, he noticed students who took a while in the beginning to get through a concept. If we assessed them only at the beginning of our time together, we risk mis-labeling them. For these very same students will be near the head of the class at the end of the unit or course!

Therefore, I was reminded by many of you, that DI is not something we do in the abstract, prior to meeting our students. We differentiated based on the emerging and evolving needs of our students! It’s when we can’t imagine a lesson that could possibly meet the needs of our whole class that differentiation becomes a natural strategy. Therefore, I think, we needn’t stress about DI--are we doing enough of it?? If we are careful observers of our students, then we will quickly learn how much and in what direction we need to differentiate our instruction (and in what types of groups).

I want to end by reminding you that, at bottom, communities are formed when they recognize the multitude of worthy forms of human occupation. We are currently experiencing a crisis in our system, where all kinds of subjects and programs are cut in order to improve test scores in the basics. This, to my mind, is extremely short-sighted. It harms both individual students and our society at large. It sends the message that people who work with their hands are not as worthy as people who manage hedge funds. Reversing this message is something we can start tomorrow, and is a lesson we need to continue to teach administrators, school board members, and politicians who have lost sight of this reality.

Cycle One Concluding Post: Reweaving the Fabric of Life

Hi everyone, and thank you for your work during the course of our first cycle together. There was a lot of wonderful writing--much of it quite personal, quite insightful, and quite moving. Also, there was some excellent blogging. For those of you new to the craft of blogging, I encourage you to pay attention to our peers in class who seamlessly weave their own ideas together with articles and videos from around the web. It makes for fruitful reading and thinking. Again, thank you to you all.

Before I move to a few of my own comments, let me first introduce you to our class. As in most virtual classroom communities, we are an eclectic and diverse bunch in terms of interests and life experiences. We have traveled much. I can’t begin to summarize it all here, but I can give you a brief overview of some of the salient professional characteristics of our class.

We are all teachers.

In terms of geography, we  are currently working in: Webster City, IA; Colorado Springs, CO; Raleigh, NC; Charlotte, NC; Chicago, IL; Houston, TX; and Baltimore, MD. We have several teachers from the east side of the state (with several of you located in central Detroit), and several from the west side. We also have several folks in the East Lansing area, in Battle Creek, and other locales in southern and mid-Michigan. More than a few of you have just finished interning at MSU. Congratulations to you especially!

In terms of subject matter and/or grade, we have: one early childhood teacher; nine elementary teachers; two middle school science teachers, one middle school music teacher, one middle school math teacher, and one middle school social studies teacher; and three high school English teachers, one high school Spanish teacher, one high school science teacher, and one high school math teacher.

Welcome to you all!!

Let’s start with a point that many of you made--success and failure are subjectively-determined. They have to do with the expectations placed upon us, and those that we place upon ourselves. There is nothing essential about failure, nothing inherently successful. It is our expectations and emotional investments that make them so.  As even our most reluctant students seem to implicitly understand, you can’t fail if you don’t care, and if you don’t try.

Nobody goes through life attempting to fail. But what follows from the prior point is that different students are going to define success differently. For some students, especially older ones, making the teacher look like a bumbling fool is success! For some students, especially younger ones, pleasing the teacher is success! However, as we all know, in neither case has anything necessarily educative taken place.

Education, or as John Dewey would call it, transformative growth, is rooted in a type of failure. That is, failure as a source and phase of an enveloping and emergent cycle of inquiry. As creatures, we desire equilibrium, balance, stasis. But we live in a world of change and transformation. We are driven to action--to thought, to communication--by disequilibrium in our environment. A problem or discomfort that is sensed before it is understood or named. Already, some might say, we are in an area of failure--breakdown, decomposition, dysfunction.

Our next moment is the moment of proper viewing. It is, says Dewey, a moment of taking aim. It is a melding of a desired future with life experience from the past, in the name of making sense out of the present. It is the “fusing” of “temporal horizons.” That is, it’s a coming-to-grips. It’s a making-sense. It’s already a step toward the overcoming of failure.

Inquiry is often inauthentic in school settings because this moment is glossed over. Yet this is, as Parker Palmer would note, the moment where fear can most easily creep in, and close down our ability to frame problems in the correct fashion. My fear of others, of the unknown, or of myself--it is those fears that divert a moment of potential growth into one of blind repetition--of an unceasing eternal reoccurrence of the same.

Inquiry is fulfilled when its results are communicated. When we share and listen. When we make meaning together. Where two people are in communion together, when experience becomes shared, I am of the opinion that failure is simply a superfluous concept--it simply is not a part of the picture.

The goal of education, says Dewey, is the ability to extract more joy from future experience. If we live our lives right, if we take failure in stride, and teach our children to do likewise, failure should not only spur us to action in the present, but allow us to live more wisely in the future.

Dewey reminds us that thoughtful inquiry always has a social dimension. It is done with and for others, as well as for ourselves. This is an important point for us as teachers to keep in mind.

Success might ultimately be measured by the consequences of our actions--do they make the world a better place?

So the challenge for us as teachers becomes:

• Can we imagine assessments and assignments that contribute value to society?
• Can we help students to see that their success is tied up in the healthy maintenance of the social and ecological fabric of life? That no one wins when the Earth is damaged, that there is no victor when others are hurt by our actions?
• Can we help students to develop the ability to see that the consequences of their actions may be quite far-reaching, and therefore they best approach their own accomplishments in a spirit of humility and grace?

Currently, as many of you have noted, the larger public, and in particular, politicians and policy-makers, are woefully out of touch with these existential realities of life--with the pain, the struggle and the joy. Our job, as teachers, on one level, is simply this: to remind them all of the way life really is.

Thank you for your work, and good luck on cycle two!

Cycle Three: Schools as “Embryonic Communities”

Welcome to Cycle 3!

In what ways can schools be considered communities? And what do I mean by calling them, “embryonic?”

We have a diverse set of readings this week--readings that cover the ground of professional learning communities for teachers, and small learning communities for students. We consider green schools and Finnish schools. Yet we also come across that most classic of texts by John Dewey, The School and Society. It is from Dewey that I borrow the phrase, “embryonic communities”--it is embedded in the quote that I used to launch the course syllabus and my own blog.

I talked in my last blog post about communities as tools for the management and organization of classroom life, as means through which we learn, and as desirable ends in their own right. This week, I’d like to extend that thinking by hi-liting for you some of the exciting work that is happening across the U.S., and globally, in terms of transforming schools into “embryonic communities.”

When Dewey talks about schools as communities, he is talking about making the school a site of production. Right now, many of our students live a life of consumption: They consume not only the products they are sold through the media, but the knowledge that is handed to them in textbooks and other formal curricular materials.

Consuming is not bad. But even a basic economics course will show you the need to produce as well--goods, service, and knowledge. Consumption without the ability to produce leads to bankruptcy, both financial and spiritual.

Dewey’s insight, developed at the University of Chicago Lab School--which he founded and helped run, with his wife, Alice, as the principal--was that “occupations” are the place where the needs of society and the talents of individuals come together. As such, they are important sites of authentic learning.

Now, Dewey was against the division of technical and liberal learning. He saw the two as intimately related, and best learned in tandem. So I don’t want you to think just about shop or home economics (as valuable as those classes are) or other forms of vocational or life-adjustment education. No, Dewey viewed these courses as sites for the most rigorous liberal education one could acquire.

The insight comes from the realization that all knowledge was once an experience had by someone, somewhere. What inquiry does (both scientific and humanistic) is record the conditions under which the experience was had, in hopes of making it understandable, even replicable. If we view knowledge as potential experiences, ones that are shorn from their context, and given a logical organization, then it becomes our jobs as teachers to re-integrate that knowledge back into the everyday contexts of the world. Children can come to see the roots of knowledge in the everyday world.

Now good teachers have always done this. But Dewey tried to take this to a wholly other level. Look at this picture. Even today, this looks quite radical to me. I encourage you to read up on the Dewey Lab School at some point, or even just to search for pictures of the classroom on the web.

Dewey thought about the school as a site of production. Students learned French in the kitchen, biology in the garden, and mathematics in the shop. They learned history as they attempted to shear sheep and use the wool to weave clothing (history, for Dewey, was the study of how people supported themselves and their communities).

This is a quick sketch, and, of course, not completely accurate. The students in Dewey’s school spent time on subjects in isolation, and with a practice or drill approach. But the point was always, as much as possible, to return knowledge to its life roots, and to put it into an authentic context. It was to have students engage in the activities of the community, (re)solve the problems that the community faced--but all in simplified conditions, under the direction of adults. It was this simplification and guidance that led Dewey to call the school “embryonic.”

There is much exciting work today that draws upon this heritage. Indeed, the projects of Emily Pilloton, discussed in cycle 2, fit this mold well. Additionally, I would like to call attention to the work of garden educators all over the world, but in particular, to the amazing work of Alice Waters and the Edible Schoolyard project--where students grow and prepare food for the Berkeley School District. To my mind, this is a model of what the future of schooling can and should look like. Such projects enrich the child, the teacher, the school district, and the Earth. In this time of rising concern about childhood obesity and food safety, we could not ask for more.

Another project I’d like to hi-lite, and there are many exciting ones I could point you to, is Youthville Detroit. Unfortunately, this is not a public school, but is rather a space viewed as “enrichment.” Perhaps this type of learning space is too radical for some?

In any case, the idea is simple. Bring talented adults from the community together with kids, and let them work on socially-valuable projects in a safe and caring space. Consider this partial list of projects for the kids:

Robotics & Engineering
Introduces students to real-world engineering challenges by building and programming robots.

Peace Project
Leadership group that engages youth in anti-violence initiatives, community service projects, media projects and events that promote peace and community building.

Broadcast and print journalism
Members learn to write and produce stories that are aired on local TV, radio and YouTube.

Computer technology (graphics, animation, cartooning, game strategy and website design)

Working independently and in small groups, youth develop skills in graphic design, create web sites and personal web pages using Macromedia Dreamweaver and learn how to modify computer games using strategies, game development, and computer gaming skills.  In addition, participants learn how to draw anime\manga using Wacom tablets to develop their own comic book series and short animated film for play on DVD and CD-ROM formats. 

Digital photography
Participants learn to use Adobe® Photoshop® Elements software for Windows® and Mac to edit, enhance, organize, and share photographic images. 

Entertainment production (Video and TV)
Members work in a state-of-the-art production studio learning about writing, producing, interviewing, on-camera talent development, directing, lighting, studio and field camera use, video editing, audio production and more using the same equipment as industry professionals.

Music technology
Youth learn to create music using professional software programs.

Ceramics
Hands-on instruction in a ceramics lab learning ceramic techniques and creating various projects.

Fashion Design and Runway Modeling
Aspiring fashion designers and models explore their talents and creativity, learn about trends in the fashion industry and are introduced to careers in fashion, entrepreneurship, and retail marketing.

Mosaic First Stage Acting
Young artists are introduced to Mosaic Youth Theatre's brand of high-energy, high-standards, empowering and inspiring acting training.

Spoken Word Performance
An in house collective of aspiring poets, storytellers, and song writers.

Archery
Instruction on shooting techniques, safety, points of archery, and information about the history of archery and how to compete in tournament play. Youth have the opportunity to compete on a Junior Olympic Archery Team.

Our schools do already provide many of these same opportunities. So the point is not that most elementary or high schools are doing a bad job. No!! My point is simply that we have the means within our grasp to make schools into spaces that more resemble true communities, if one or two teachers can come together, with an inspiring principal, and a few community members. That’s all it took to start the Edible Garden!

So I hope, when you return to school in the fall, you will devote some time to thinking about how you can mine your community as a site for the learning of your students.

Cycle Two: Challenges and opportunities in building classroom communities

Welcome to Cycle 2!

Classroom community. It’s a word often on our lips, but what does it really mean? What makes a community a community? And is this possible in a classroom setting?

In the first place, I think we, as teachers, need to look inwardly and ask ourselves what we really imagine when we say the word, “community.” Too often, I find myself as a teacher thinking about community instrumentally--as a way to forward the teacher’s agenda; really, as a codeword for classroom management.

Some of our readings this week should help us be aware of the danger of organizing communities around what we perceive to be as the most convenient manner for us, the teacher, to teach. Tracking--as a form of classroom organization that posits it is easier to teach students who are all at the same level--is a practice that can have unintended consequences that are difficult to undo.

There is an organic coming-together in every community, one that cannot be forced. Tracking, when it assigns fixed levels of ability to students, and bases curriculum decisions on such assignations, becomes a tool too crude for the job. It seeks to eliminate the problem of human diversity by positing a single trait by which people can be grouped--intelligence. Yet the problem remains: for intelligence is fluid and contextual. Someone good at reading needs help in art; someone good at mechanics struggles in the study of civics; someone with a lot of interpersonal skills has a hard time reading expository text silently. Tracking, at its worst, simply ignores everything that a person is good at, and instead reduces the world to math and reading scores.

If learning communities are to flower, students certainly need to be able to come together based on their interests, their hopes, and yes, their abilities. They should be able to come together with their friends and their neighbors. As teachers, we should hope to provide differentiated opportunities in our classroom. This means that we seek to provide learning experiences, for as many of our students as possible, where that golden sweet spot arises--where the child’s interests, abilities, prior knowledge merge with the resources available in both the classroom context and the formal curricular materials. This rarely happens in a one-size-fits-all approach.

A final way to think about community--one that goes beyond community as management tool, and community as learning tool--is as an affective bond that creates a feeling of inclusion. In such a community, students and teachers come to care about each other, and in that caring, they begin to see their own well being tied up in the well being of others. In my mind, this is the most expansive and lovely way for us to think about community. It integrates the notions of community as management tool, and community as learning tool, but into a higher and greater good. It makes of community an end in itself, and the most educative force that our classrooms might invoke.

Such a community, ideally, moves beyond the formation of groups around similarities--whether those be of race, social class, gender, ability, or any of the many other ways we as humans deny love and respect to each other. In such a community, true hospitality begins to emerge, as we open ourselves up to living with and learning from those who have been strangers to us.

As Jim Garrison writes about Tony, a student who had come to be marginalized by a classroom reality focused only on his inabilities, rather than his strengths:

We do know this much, though: There is only one Tony, he has unique potential, and only moral perception recognizes the unique, irreplaceable, and one-time-only characteristics of persons and contexts. In the end, only moral perception can see beyond the actual into Tony’s best possibilities. It is a prophetic art.

As teachers, we must seek a form of prophecy, one based on the conviction that each child is absolutely unique and irreplaceable--the view that each child has something to give to the world that no other person is capable of giving, and that it is our job, along with the community we create within our classrooms--to teach the Tonys of the world to find within them what their true vocation is.

Cycle One: Interpretations of the meaning and causes of failure

Welcome to Cycle 1!

What does it mean to fail? We use that question to open the course.

Now, despite the potential to start us off on a depressing note, I think it is important that we do so.

To begin with, this course asks us to think about equity. To my mind, this means confronting failure. It means exploring why things don’t always go so well. It means confronting, I think, our own limits as teachers, as well as the limits of children and parents. It means exploring what is possible, what is reasonable, and what is to be hoped for.

The last ten years have taught us, more than ever before, to be scared of failure. We have been taught to expect punishment, of some sort, to come along with the various euphemisms we have now invented as codes for failure--AYP, VAM, ACT.

Failure is a natural part of life. Indeed, one day our bodies will “fail,” and we will pass from this Earth. To speak of this type of failure should invoke no shame. Only a confrontation with ourselves. Some of our readings in this first cycle will take, therefore, what I will call an “existential perspective” on failure--that is, failure as part and parcel of living, learning and loving.

However, there is another, darker side to failure--failure as it is produced within and through institutions. Our readings will also explore this, to varying degrees.

A big part of my research involves asking people to recount the most significant moments in their schooling careers. I sometimes get stories of unadulterated joy and pleasure. More often, I hear stories of struggle, conflict, and even tragedy. Very few of these stories involve the actual learnings of the curriculum. Rather, they are about the implicit, unintended learnings that kids can, if we are not extremely careful, take away from school--

•  “No one likes me.”
• “I’m ugly.”
•  “I’m stupid.”

These unintended learnings are tricky matters. As teachers and parents, we work as hard as we can to prevent such messages from going through. But, inevitably, I think, some of them do.

The question then becomes: What can we do to prevent such messages from entering into our children’s mind? Because, we know as teachers and parents--damaging labels are hard to undo. My hope is that the cycle’s readings will help you in this regard as well.

Finally, I want to acknowledge that there are a whole set of issues about why kids fail that I leave untouched here. Here are just a few of them: extreme poverty, unequal resources for schools, physical abuse, mental illness. While I do not want you to forget about these issues, I do not think they can dominate the conversation, either. I encourage you to explore the tricky line between the material and the spiritual throughout this course.

In conclusion, I want to remind you that, as you construct your post for this cycle, you may reference any (or all) of the articles or videos listed on our syllabus. But mostly, I want you to write about your own experiences relating to the guiding questions for the cycle!! Help us see how you have lived out the question of failure in your own living, learning and teaching, the complexities and paradoxes you see in this topic, and ultimately, how you tend to act in the world to resolve them.

So, I wish you enjoyable learning. Please have your posts up by July 7. Please read over and comment upon another person’s blog by July 8. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

All the best,

Kyle