The truck had rolled onto the passenger side and was blocking the road, while the logs were along the shoulder.

The truck’s driver was uninjured but he appeared shaken. He left the scene with individuals who appeared to be coworkers as the cleanup continued. The CHP said no other vehicles were involved.

A team of Caltrans workers were at the scene clearing the logs from the side of the road and using heavy equipment to place them along the chain link fence bordering Lucerne Elementary on Foothill Drive.

The CHP said the logs had damaged a water main and two utility poles. Power was still on but a Mediacom pole was sheared off. Caltrans signs also were damaged.


Once the logs were moved, the CHP said two heavy duty tow trucks that were on scene will move both the tractor trailer and will deliver the logs to their destination in Ukiah.

Officers said the work was expected to continue for a few hours on Friday afternoon, with traffic control to remain in place.

Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
 

Do you think that creativity is an innate gift? Think again.

Many people believe that creative thinking is difficult – that the ability to come up with ideas in novel and interesting ways graces only some talented individuals and not most others.

The media often portrays creatives as those with quirky personalities and unique talent. Researchers have also identified numerous personality traits that are associated with creativity, such as openness to new experiences, ideas and perspectives.

Together, they seem to paint a dire picture for those who consider themselves conventional thinkers, as well as those who do not work in creative occupations – including roles that are often considered traditional and noncreative, such as accountants and data analysts.

These beliefs miss a key part of how creativity works in your brain: Creative thinking is actually something you engage in every day, whether you realize it or not.

Moreover, creativity is a skill that can be strengthened. This matters even for people who don’t consider themselves creative or who aren’t in creative fields.

In research that I recently published with organization and management scholars Chris Bauman and Maia Young, we found that simply reinterpreting a frustrating situation can enhance the creativity of conventional thinkers.

Using creative thinking to cope with emotions

Creativity is often defined as the generation of ideas or insights that are novel and useful. That is, creative thoughts are original and unexpected, but also feasible and useful.

Everyday examples of creativity are plentiful: combining leftover food to make a tasty new dish, coming up with a new way to accomplish chores, mixing old outfits to create a new look.

Another way you do this is when you practice what’s called “emotional reappraisal” – viewing a situation through another lens to change your feelings. There is an element of creativity to this: You’re breaking away from your existing perspectives and assumptions and coming up with a new way of thinking.

Say you’re frustrated about a parking ticket. To alleviate the bad feelings, you can think of the fine as a learning moment.

If you’re anxious about a presentation for work, you can cope with the anxiety by framing it as an opportunity to share ideas, rather than as a high-stakes performance that could result in demotion if handled poorly.

And if you’re angry that someone seemed unnecessarily combative in a conversation, you might reevaluate the situation, coming to view the behavior as unintentional rather than malicious.

Training your creative muscles

To test the link between creative thinking and emotional reappraisal, we surveyed 279 people. Those who ranked higher on creativity tended to reappraise emotional events more often in their daily life.

Inspired by the link between emotional reappraisal and creative thinking, we wanted to see whether we could use this insight to develop ways to help people be more creative. In other words, could emotional reappraisal be practiced by people in order to train their creative muscles?

We ran two experiments in which two new samples of participants – 512 in total – encountered scenarios designed to provoke an emotional response. We tasked them with using one of three approaches to manage their emotions. We told some participants to suppress their emotional response, others to think about something else to distract themselves and the last group to reappraise the situation by looking at it through a different lens. Some participants were also given no instructions on how to manage their feelings.

In a seemingly unrelated task that followed, we asked the participants to come up with creative ideas to solve a problem at work.

In the experiments, conventional thinkers who tried reappraisal came up with ideas that were more creative than other conventional thinkers who used suppression, distraction or received no instructions at all.

Cultivating flexible thinking

Negative emotions are inevitable in work and life. Yet people often hide their negative feelings from others, or use distraction to avoid thinking about their frustrations.

Our findings have implications for how managers can think about how to best leverage the skills of their workers. Managers commonly slot job candidates into creative and noncreative jobs based on cues that signal creative potential. Not only are these cues shaky predictors of performance, but this hiring practice may also limit managers’ access to employees whose knowledge and experience can play major roles in generating creative outcomes.

The result is that the creative potential of a significant part of the workforce may be underutilized. Our findings suggest that supervisors can develop training and interventions to cultivate creativity in their employees – even for those who might not seem predisposed to creativity.

Our research also indicates that people can practice flexible thinking every day when they experience negative emotions. Although people may not always have control over the external circumstances, they do have the liberty to choose how to cope with emotional situations – and they can do so in ways that facilitate their productivity and well-being.

Lily Zhu, Assistant Professor of Management, Information Systems and Entrepreneurship, Washington State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Student learning took a big hit during the COVID-19 pandemic. Just how much is only becoming clear nearly three years after the World Health Organization declared the pandemic and nearly all U.S. public schools pivoted to online instruction for at least several months in March 2020.

However, the data guiding the nation’s efforts to help kids catch up does not generally include the students who experienced the most dramatic learning disruptions.

Nationwide testing results released in the fall of 2022 revealed that the reading and math performance on standardized tests of students who were in fourth and eighth grades in the U.S. in the 2021-2022 school year declined by historic amounts.

This dramatic evidence of learning loss has mobilized federal, state and local education leaders. The federal government has allocated US$122 billion to support state and local efforts to help students “catch up in the classroom.”

Public school districts are using these resources to fund tutoring and extended learning time. And researchers are assessing the effects of these investments on standardized test scores.

However, these efforts do little to identify or target support to the children whose learning environments were most disrupted by the pandemic. This is especially so for the youngest students, who aren’t yet old enough for most standardized testing.

Enrollment decline and the ‘streetlight effect’

During the pandemic, public school enrollment in grades K through 12 fell by 1.2 million students. These declines were concentrated among kindergarten students and in schools that offered only remote instruction.

Similarly dramatic enrollment losses among even younger learners erased a decade of progress in boosting preschool education enrollment.

These declines indicate that the pandemic caused students to miss instructional time or undertake disruptive school switches, often in their developmentally critical early years.

However, school officials list early-childhood programs among the least popular use of available federal funds and provide no indication of targeted academic-recovery efforts for younger or truant students.

This is an example of what scholars call the “streetlight effect,” in which people focus their attention on easily visible evidence – such as the test scores available for older, currently enrolled students – rather than other relevant data that are more obscured and harder to identify.

And long lags in national data reporting mean little is yet known about the learning environments of the disproportionately young children whose families avoided public schools during the pandemic. Currently, official federal statistics do not even provide basic data on private school or home-school enrollment beyond 2019.

Where the kids went

My research, done collaboratively with The Associated Press and data journalists at Stanford University’s Big Local News, addresses this issue.

For our analysis, we gathered state-level data on public, private and home-school enrollment for the school years from 2019-20 through 2021-22. We also used U.S. Census Bureau estimates to identify the school-age population in each state over this time period. These combined data provide insights into where the students who avoided public schools went and what it means for the nation’s academic-recovery efforts.

Complete data aren’t available in every state, but we have good data on more than half of the school-age population in the U.S. at the onset of the pandemic. These states also experienced public school enrollment declines that are representative of the national trend.

Some students, particularly the youngest, clearly turned to private schools during the pandemic. In the 34 jurisdictions with available data, private school enrollment grew by over 140,000 students between the 2019-20 and 2021-22 school years. However, this increase only explains a modest amount – roughly 14% – of the corresponding decline in public school enrollment.

A more surprising finding is the robust growth of home-schooling during this period. An early Census Bureau survey reported that home-schooling increased soon after the pandemic began. Our data show this initial increase endured into the 2021-22 school year when most public schools returned to in-person instruction.

In the 22 jurisdictions with data, home-school enrollment increased by over 184,000 students between the 2019-20 and 2021-22 school years – a 30% increase. For every additional student enrolled in private school over this period, nearly two entered home-schooling. This sustained growth in home-schooling explains 26% of the corresponding losses in public school enrollment.

Roughly a quarter of the public school enrollment loss simply reflects the pandemic decline in the number of school-age children in the U.S. However, people moving to new homes during the pandemic means this demographic impact varied considerably by state. In states like California and New York, which saw their overall populations fall dramatically, the percentage declines in public school enrollment were at least six times those in states like Texas and Florida, where populations grew.

New questions for academic recovery

These findings raise several new questions about what help American students will need to get their education back on track. For instance, researchers know little about the learning opportunities available to children who switched to home-schooling, or the effects of this choice on families.

Our data is also unable to locate more than one-third of the students who left public schools. That could mean that some children are not going to school at all – or that even more families started home-schooling but did so without notifying their state.

A third possibility is that the pandemic led more families to have their kids skip kindergarten. Our data indirectly supports this conjecture. The unexplained declines in public school enrollment are concentrated in states that do not require kindergarten attendance, like California and Colorado.

What we do know is the pandemic’s learning disruptions occurred disproportionately among the nation’s youngest learners.

Our work to understand and respond to this situation is just beginning. One possible response is to refocus some federal funding on the broad use of early screening tools to reliably identify – and address – learning setbacks years before students are old enough to take the current battery of standardized tests, which often begins in the third grade. Policymakers can also do more to locate students who are missing and to understand the educational needs of those outside the light of conventional data systems.

Thomas Dee, Barnett Family Professor, Stanford University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.