This graph shows the composition of the unemployed in the United States from January – September 2020.

Well-meaning parents might hope to motivate students by emphasizing the importance of high grades, but that can make it harder for kids to recover from a substantial setback.

in a gentle way

Treatment should always take precedence over schoolwork.

it can feel like an admission that they’ve done something wrong. Normalizing and praising self-advocacy is so important.

teachers are almost always eager to lend support to students who seek it.

Students who are struggling to keep track of what’s expected of them may need to reach out to their teachers, either for clarification about specific assignments or for general guidance on where and when they should be looking for information about homework.

The mental skills that help us stay organized — commonly called executive functioning — are being undermined by psychological stress, which is unusually high among today’s teens.

Some students learning remotely may also have unreliable broadband service; others may miss key information because their attention is split between the teacher on the screen and distractions at home.

not being comfortable with it, and then suddenly getting everything — from Zoom links to assignments — that way.

What students who have fallen behind need most are problem-solving partners who want to understand what they are going through.

The further students fall behind, the more overwhelmed they often become and the less likely they are to feel that they can catch up.

50 percent more kids in high school report feeling disengaged from school this year than last

Pandemic school is taking its toll on students, especially teens

Most private-sector economists now expect rapid economic recovery over the next year, probably combined with a vast sense of relief as the pandemic fades away

Republicans may be paying a price for their past hypocrisy, moving from calling debt an existential threat under Obama to ignoring it under Trump.

71 percent believe that it was stolen from Donald Trump. Yet 39 percent of Republicans favor Biden’s $1.9 trillion spending proposal. A Morning Consult poll puts Republican support for the plan at 60 percent

substantial number of voters don’t believe Biden has the right to be running the country, but effectively approve of the way he’s running it

More than 150 senior executives at major companies have written congressional leaders urging enactment of Biden’s plan.

President Biden’s Covid-19 relief proposal remains incredibly popular; if anything, it’s getting more popular as it barrels through Congress.

What do you notice? What do you wonder? What impact does this have on you and your community?What’s going on in this graph? Write a catchy headline that captures the graph’s main idea.

The New York Times’s research-and-analytics department.

does language, mediating culture and history and memory, connect future generations to past ones.

The language and customs I had hidden and compartmentalized, considering them “weird” as a child, have entered the mainstream.

What was the word for “arm?” I panicked. Had I already reached the boundaries of my knowledge?

bills tucked in crimson envelopes that adults bestow on children for Lunar New Year and consumed my weight in mooncakes during the Moon Festival in autumn, I didn’t feel connected to the culture.

The school administrators wrung their hands, worried that I’d fall behind, but my father shrugged, figuring (correctly) that I’d learn English quickly enough.

I spoke no English until I started preschool

It was better to speak English, exclusively and without an accent; to replace thermoses of dumplings with hamburgers.

What part of your family heritage would you want to share with your own children one day? How will you, in the words of Ms. Chang, “connect future generations to past ones”?

Attacking wind power is a way for both elected officials and free-market ideologues to dodge responsibility for botched deregulation

this was happening to Texas energy sources across the board, with the worst problems involving natural gas.

So Texas is experiencing a natural disaster made significantly worse by major policy errors — and the officials who made those errors should be held accountable.

the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission urged the state to winterize its power plants with insulation, heat pipes and other measures. But Texas, which has deliberately cut its power grid off from the rest of the country precisely to exempt itself from federal regulation, only partially implemented the recommendations.

raw denial of reality, not just to escape accountability, but to demonize one’s opponents.

the claim that wind and solar power caused the collapse of the Texas power grid, and that radical environmentalists are somehow responsible for the fact that millions of people are freezing in the dark, even though conservative Republicans have run the state for a generation.

the politics surrounding the power outages that have spread across Texas looked fairly normal.

Politicians are neither gods nor saints. Because they aren’t gods, they often make bad policy decisions.

reason they hate this proposal is the reason the rest of us should love it.

why is letting parents spend more time with their children a self-evidently bad thing?

Mitt Romney has proposed a similar plan, although he wants to pay for it by cutting other safety net programs.

the real source of the “poverty trap” isn’t lack of incentives, it’s lack of the resources needed for adequate nutrition, health care, housing and more.

Medicaid is available only to families with low enough income, so taking a job that pushes one’s income above that threshold leads to a loss of health benefits.

this policy, far from creating a trap, would offer an escape route.

compassion can be counterproductive

An estimated 27 million children live in families with incomes too low to get the full $2,000.

can claim the full amount only if they have a sufficiently large taxable income.

conservatives seem to be opposed, even though they’re having a notably hard time explaining why.

there’s an overwhelming economic and social case for providing such aid, in addition to the moral case.

won’t be getting $1,400 checks every year, unemployment benefits won’t always be this generous, we won’t constantly be mobilizing for emergency vaccination programs

But the bulk of this spending will clearly be temporary.