Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to Senate Education. I believe it is the 12th of January. Let's see what I got here. Yes, at 1.32 in the afternoon. We are going to take a pause on our work on COVID-19 updates related to schools. We will pick that up again later this afternoon at 2.30. But right now we are going to hear from Senator Taranzini, as well as a number of witnesses, including our Ledge Council on S189 and accruing to the status of Holocaust education in public schools. I want to thank Senator Taranzini for bringing this forward. I also know he has worked with a student, I believe is at the University of Vermont who will also be joining us. But before we have a walkthrough with Senator Taranzini, I mean with Ledge Council, I thought we'd start with the Senator. And Senator Taranzini, if you would just give us a little bit of background as to what decided, what made you decide that this was a bill that was good to put in. Yeah, thanks, Senator Campion. So last summer, myself, Senator Hooker, and a few others from the Rutland legislative delegation were actually contacted by one of our witnesses today on our screen, Ms. Sobel. And she asked to meet with several of us. So we did one afternoon and she really brought it to our attention that we could really do a better job of having a standard in Vermont of educating the next generation in regards to the Holocaust in general. And in a few moments I look forward to hearing what Ms. Sobel has to say, but this bill, which I'll also point out has really tripartisan support in the Senate, including there's four or five of us in this committee alone that have co-sponsored it, which I think speaks to the volume of this bill. But we know the enormous tragedy that the Holocaust was with the loss of over 6 million Jewish followers. We know that anti-Semitism is on the rise in the United States and across the world at this time. And we know that the Nazis killed somewhere between 17 and 20 million people during World War II. And this bill would call for a study basically and then over the next year for the Department of Education to look into is there a standard out there of teaching about the Holocaust in World War II? What can we do to improve upon it? The bill would call for it to be taught in our schools. So I want to personally thank Ms. Sobel for bringing this to the Rutland County delegation's attention. And there also is a very similar bill, if not the same exact bill in the house that Representative Peter Fagan is the lead sponsor on. So I'll kick it back to you, Senator Campion. Okay, thanks, Senator Taranzini. That was very helpful. Appreciate again your advocacy on this issue, as well as your work in pushing us on civic education and these kinds of issues in general. With that, Mr. Demeray, before we get to our witnesses, would you take us through the bill, please? And you're muted, Jim, just so you know. Would you like to on the screen? Yes, please. Okay, great. Okay, so for the record, Jim Demeray, that's console. I have to be enabled first. Right, Daphne. Let me know if. Okay, there is. Yep. Great. Thanks. And this is. Okay. So this is a very short bill. It's adding. It's a special law. It's, it's requiring a report by a way it says on before. January 15 of next year. We should issue a written report to you. On the status of Holocaust education in public schools. And its recommendations to ensure. That Holocaust education is included in the educational programs provided to students in public schools. It says in preparing the report and recommendations, the agency sees shall work with the Vermont Holocaust Memorial to avail themselves of that organization's knowledge of the subject experience in Vermont schools. And the first to date is on passage. My apologies. Ms. Sobel, would you like to jump in at this point. And tell us a little bit about. Your experience in reaching out to the Rutland delegation as well as. A little bit around. Why you think this bill is important. Yes, thank you. I reached out to my local senators representatives and legislators over the summer because I was concerned about. The increasing rise of anti-semitism among young people. And with my own personal experiences, I felt that it was very necessary. I prepared a quick speech. Hello, my name is Maya Sobel, and I'm a Jewish for Monter, who is the granddaughter of Jews who escaped the Holocaust on both sides of my family. Other members of my family were not so lucky. I'm alive by coincidence. In 1941, the United States decided to join the allies for several reasons. None of which really included saving Jews. They won the war and liberated concentration camps from the Nazis. This act stopped the Holocaust. Once again, anti-semitism is rising. And as only 2% of the world's population, we need support. Our country's youth tends to be some of the loudest voices when it comes to fighting against hate and the most tolerant when it comes to respecting minorities. A study from Harvard and Tubbs found the opposite to be true for young people and Jewish allyship as anti-semitic attitudes were consistently higher among younger generations. How did this happen? What went wrong in this country? Did we not learn from the atrocities of the Nazis? I grew up learning stories about the challenges my people faced throughout history. Over thousands of years, we were persecuted by the Babylonians, Romans, Byzantines, Venetians, Assyrians and more. Those empires no longer exist today. But somehow we, the Jewish people, are still here. Learning this history makes me proud of my heritage, culture, and Jewish identity. In reality, most people do not know stories of Jewish history, aside from the limited knowledge about Germans killing Jews during World War II. I am asking for us to start here with this event. Why teach the Holocaust? It was not the largest genocide in history. I believe that the Holocaust is worth teaching because it is the most documented genocide in history. Through historical records, we can clearly see how lies, propaganda, boycotts, and dehumanization made educated, sophisticated, and normal Germans believe that it was necessary to wipe out the entire ethno-religion of Jewish people. In addition, the event shows that hate is never contained to one form, as the Romani people, LGBTQ plus people, disabled people, black people, and Jehovah's Witnesses were also targeted and murdered for the way they were born. The truth is, for Monters, our Jewish people are going to learn about Jews, whether the state wants to teach them or not. Social media is transforming into a new kind of platform where anybody can spread lies through creating professional-looking infographics about any topic and pass them along as facts. Platforms such as Instagram are set up in a way that does not allow for public discourse when a user shares a post to their story. This creates an issue when propaganda about Jews is created online, especially when spread by celebrities and influencers who have millions of followers more than the world's total Jewish population. I am from Rutland, Vermont, and I feel fortunate that Rutland High School included Holocaust education in their world history curriculum. If there's one thing I've learned from my experience with teenage peers, it is that we need to emphasize why over how when it comes to the Holocaust. It is the gas chambers and human experimentation that grabs apathetic students' attention. I believe the focus should be on the human tragedy so each of us can identify with the victims. In addition, we need to teach critical thinking so that people who graduate from our high schools will be able to recognize anti-Semitic propaganda and question its validity. The current situation is that anti-Semitism is allowed to flourish on social media, and that extends to the real world. Schools and universities across the country are breeding grounds for this ideology. Our state university that I attend is not exempt.  Students at the University of Vermont have reported a variety of anti-Semitic incidents. One report was of a student who found a tape decoration of mountains transformed into a swatztika across from their room. Their roommate encouraged them not to report the incident, but they notified their hall's residential advisor anyways. A floor meeting was called, and the RA proceeded to complain about how the students ruined their decorations rather than to call attention to the hate symbol that was created. Another post explained how LGBTQ plus students were told not to carry the star David, I'm sorry, yeah, I'm sorry, to told not to carry the star David to any of the school's pride events because it would look like they support Israel. 27, and in addition, another post reported concerns from a student who was told by their peers that their identity as a Jewish sexual assault survivor would not be valid unless they renounced their support for the state of Israel. 27% of Vermont UVM students are Vermont residents and have been through the school system of Vermont. What happens to anti-Semitic students when they graduate? They enter the workforce as the world's next generation of teachers, politicians, doctors and lawyers. 92% of graduates from the University of Vermont are employed or continue their education in the state of Vermont. I'm approaching you as senators who are elected to support the people of Vermont to take action and stop all forms of hate. I strongly believe that the most effective way to combat prejudice and hate is through education. We need to start at a high school level to teach students the facts of the Holocaust and train them to critically think about the information they are consuming surrounding ethnic and religious minorities. It is true that anti-Semitism, also known as the world's oldest hatred, was around long before the Holocaust and is stuck around far after its conclusion. But the Holocaust is also the most important event of Jewish history, and it is a baseline example of how lies and stereotyping can bring out the most evil side of humans. I have the graves of over 6 million Jews and hundreds of thousands of Romani, LGBTQ, Black, disabled and Jehovah's Witnesses sitting behind me today. They are urging me to speak out now before it's too late. They are telling me to never let a coincidence such as my existence occur again. Thank you for your time. Thank you very much, Ms. Sobel. Thank you for your very powerful testimony. Credit to you, certainly. The Rutland Public Schools, your family, as well as the heritage that you've referenced. So thank you. I have a few questions, but senators, questions from Ms. Sobel at this point. So one thing I'm just thinking, I think you've allowed, given some of the experiences that you've also referenced at the University of Vermont and perhaps in our other state colleges and public schools, there may be a piece of this that we would want to explore around how to, to make sure our universities and schools know how to, I don't think you have the RA situation that you outline. you know, resident assistants receive around how to deal with anti-semitism, how are teachers perhaps trained to deal with anti-semitism in the classroom. So there's the teaching component, the academic component that we'll hear a little bit about today. There's also that happens always in the classroom or largely, but we also know there are many teaching opportunities outside of the classroom, such as the ones that you referenced at the University of Vermont and in our daily lives. So I think that's something also worth exploring, so I appreciate you raising that. Any questions or comments? Ms. Sobel, did you want to add anything? Oh, no, I was just wondering if you had like any more questions. I think not seeing any, I'm just grateful, I guess the one question would be are you, do you have time right now to stick around as we hear from other witnesses or do you need to get back to class? I have time. Okay, terrific. It'll be good to have you on. Senator Terenzini. Senator Kavyan, a little off subject to the bill, but I think this committee should also recognize Ms. Sobel's, both of her parents, both of her parents are physicians in in Rutland and especially her father is a doctor at Rutland Regional Medical Center.  So her parents, her family is really very instrumental in our community. So I wanted to thank them from all of us. Thank you, Senator. Thank you, Senator. Yeah, no, I appreciate you saying that as well. We're so grateful for everyone that's on the front lines in hospitals and in schools. Those seem to be the two areas, of course, hospitals in particular that this disease is hitting the hardest. So I really appreciate you recognizing the Sobel family. There are also, she's out of curiosity, there's a Jane Sobel in my community. I don't know if there's any relation. Not that I know of, but it is nice to see more of the last name in Vermont. Yeah. Yeah. Great. All right. Well, great. Thank you. Let's see. Jess DeCarolis. Good to see you. Happy New Year. Senators will recall that Ms. DeCarolis is with the Agency of Education. I'll let her reintroduce herself in her involvement with curriculum in the state. Jess. Thank you. Happy New Year. Good to see everybody again for the record. I'm Jess DeCarolis, division director at the Agency of Education of the Student Pathways Division. I am also joined by my colleague, Wendy Geller, who I'm going to pause just so she can put herself on the record. My name is Wendy Geller. I am the division director for the data management and analysis division here at the Agency of Education. Thanks for being with us. Yeah.  I think we came to attend the walkthrough and hear from Ms. Sobel, but also to have the opportunity to maybe ask some questions and maybe collect some questions that might help guide the committee in its decision-making process. And that would allow us to go back and do some legwork. You know, what I did hear and what I've read is I did hear two very clear questions that I think we can take back, but I just want to make sure that we collect as many questions as possible. So I did hear that there is a desire, at least this is the language of the bill, a status of Holocaust education in the state, and this would be in the K-12 public education system. I also heard, though, is there a standard for teaching the Holocaust come up, which I think is an important question to ask. I do know that there have at least been, I think, 21 states who have put forward legislation in looking at some of the, and of course I was, we got this notification pretty late in the day, so I haven't been able to do as much research as I would like to do before coming in front of you. But in looking at some of the states that have adopted legislation and then standards, there's some significant variety. And so I do want to allow for us to maybe do some examination when we're looking at that, because obviously we have a very specific regulatory structure in the state when it comes to our public education system. And certainly when we talk about standards, we do have state adopted standards, content standards, but we don't actually have state level curriculum. And so when we start to get into subject matter, specific content within those content standards, we don't actually have something at the state level in which we can sort of point to directly. And I understand that that might be something that the committee is considering. I just want to sort of put that out there, so there's nothing that we can sort of like quickly turn to or look to. And that would be a departure from our sort of existing regulatory structure. It also sounds like I did hear some references to probably like media literacy and digital literacy. We've been doing a lot of work in the state on equity literacy. And so when we talk about Holocaust education, probably sort of considering things like there's been a number of sort of historical instances of genocide that we could speak to when you're, whether you're looking at Rwanda or Bosnia or the Uighurs. So I think again, coming to, you know, a question around what is the scope of what you might want us to sort of investigate. And then my colleague Wendy is here because certainly we also want to attend to what would be then the data collection mechanism, what would be the involvement and level of interaction with the field in order to collect that information and turn that into a report by next year and what we might need in order to make that happen. So I guess I would sort of echo you, Chair, which is, are there additional questions that maybe people want to pose for my colleague Wendy and I to maybe go back and do some research and come back to the committee? Sure. Yeah. No, I appreciate that. As we make our way through the bill, this is only our first day. We will have additional questions. I'm sure we'll have edits to it. You know, you mentioned the Vermont standards and this is, this is something we've come back to a number of times, I think, in this committee. So for me, it'll be interesting to see where, if there's a way, what percentage of our schools are not teaching the Holocaust. We keep bumping into this in a way. In other words, we find out that schools aren't all offering calculus or just have, possibly have no foreign languages. It's just this regular thing that's frustrating to me and I think to everybody here, to Vermonters, you could move into a community and just not have the same opportunities as are there in other schools for a number of different factors. And so, and this just raises that concern again. Are you going from one district to another where it might be something that's covered in a history class or not? So that's sort of where my concerns lie a little bit. I don't know if you want to say something to that, Jess. I do. I just, I recognize, Wendy, you raised your hand so I didn't know if you wanted to raise something real quick. Okay. So again, my name is Dr. Wendy Gillar. I am the division director for data management and analysis here at the agency of education. I don't know if I have the ability to share my screen. Okay, do I have permission for that? Brilliant. So what I can help folks to get a sense of is what we do collect and what we do currently display. So easy place to navigate. So I often get questions about, you know, where can I find certain data? So Dr. Gillar, just so you know, we don't see your screen yet. I'm not sharing it. Okay. I don't want you to have to suffer through the navigation. Okay, okay, fair enough. There with me one moment. There we go. And how are we doing now? Beautifully. Okay, super. So in the last three years since data management and analysis divisions inception in late 2018, we've been very focused on paying down the technical debt that has existed here at the agency. And we're not unique in that technical debt, essentially any place you look really public sector, private sector doesn't really matter. And so an area that we've been focused on is the degree to which we have publicly accessible, interactive data visualization platforms that are backed with obviously publicly shareable, which means that these data are have already undergone privacy measures. So data suppression measures to ensure the protection of student data privacy. And then we're on a what we call a quarterly release schedule. So what that means is that we're always developing new content. And we release new functionality and or new data on a roughly quarterly cycle. And so one of the most recent releases that we have pushed where we're in beta at the moment. And what that means is that we're still testing it. It's not final. It's not finished. We in fact, we would really love folks feedback. We have a feedback form here, just on the landing page, if you will. But we do display at the moment, as I said, in beta, interactive. And this is fully exportable. If folks want to like actually get into the data, if you're along click me fully exportable data around course of moment. And so you're, you're absolutely welcome to hop in here and take a look anytime you'd like give us a shout. And again, as I said, we would be very interested in folks feedback through the feedback form. But Senator Campion had mentioned, you know, curiosity around who or which perhaps I should say, which organizations are are providing what types of course taking. So if anybody wants to hop around in here, you're more than welcome to do that. Again, feedback is always welcome. You can take a look at this through disaggregation here on the left hand side. And I would just again call folks attention to that this is a beta, it's unofficial. These data are undergoing review. And we would very much appreciate feedback understanding as we're as we're moving through that work. Now in terms of what we collect. So Miss Geller, do you mind? It's not possible. I'm sorry, Senator Campion. Is it possible to go back and just search under Holocaust? You can use the filter to engage that way. But regardless of whether or not that topic is covered, as that's curriculum content may not be captured in the course title. So I'm getting two titles here. So I would recommend we take a look at the interactive knowledge base. And this will cover essentially what we collect in my division. And this is still under construction. Essentially we're folding in as the collections move through the cycle. We're on an annual cycle, as everybody knows. But you can definitely take a look here to identify elements. Now Vermont uses a combination of the we call them SCED codes. These are federally developed codes. They're standards that are established at the federal level. It's essentially a standard way of naming what your course might be. Now, obviously, there are many, many, many different codes for for how we might capture data around course taking. They may not necessarily have a title specific to a particular content area. But they again, they're geared towards being a standard. So sometimes orgs on the ground. So schools or in this case, we collect these data at the SCED level. They might have to use a more general title for the course to report their data to us. It may cover content that is related to the Holocaust or perhaps other genocide events. But the title of the course itself may not necessarily reflect that specific content. So that's just there for folks to know where to find it. Just wanted to share that. So folks are aware. And I am going to stop the share here now. And Wendy, I guess I want to just reiterate that what you've just shown the the beta, it's still under development. And I will say kudos to this committee. As you will recall, I was pulling down Excel spreadsheets last year as we were trying to delineate the sort of full scope of civics education, US education last year. So Wendy's team really has worked hard to try to build a usable platform. And this is a result of probably them wanting me to stop annoying them. So congratulations. You did it. Thank you, Chair Campion. Dr. Geller, you have numbers about students that are enrolled in courses and courses that may deal with the Holocaust. Is there any data on the content of these courses? And I'm not sure what the course at Rutland High was like. Was it a particular semester course? Was it just a unit on the Holocaust that was incorporated into a civics course? Is there any information that tells us that type of detail? So we do not collect curricula. So for example, in order to kind of drill down, if you will, into what the course content would be, we would have to engage in a collection of things like sell by. So there are certainly definitions for like if you're going to code a course as being civics, for example. In the knowledge base, those code sets would show you or we can actually see if I can pull up the SCED codes for folks so you can like actually see an example. There would be a certain level of definition. This course contains topics like A, B, C, D. But in order for us to determine the course level of content, like specific content areas, that would mean a whole new level of collection for us and therefore a whole new level of reporting for the folks in the field. And by the folks in the field, that essentially means the school personnel and then the SCED personnel. Thank you. I would also add that it would be across multiple content areas as we know that it wouldn't, you know, I think people sort of conceptualize, you know, global citizenship or social studies, but you're also going to find this in a lot of other content areas such as English language arts. So you would really be looking across the scope of content areas. Senator Purslick. Thank you. You're very good, Jared. Intuiting. I can anticipate. I can anticipate. I have a good chair. Thanks for bringing this up. The only question I have is how it may or may not relate to the work that's ongoing from Act 1 of 2019, the social equity studies, because I remember that was the first year I was in this committee and when that was being formed, there was a conscious effort to make sure that the history of the Jewish people were included in that as an ethnic group. And I know that we had them in and there was a lot of work amongst that ethnic studies coalition about including that work, but I don't know. I looked really quick at the report and they're still kind of working on that. So I don't know if either Jess or we folks have a comment on that or if we should have Amanda Garces in to talk about it or if anybody came across that Senator and senior others when they were looking at this bill. Yeah, I would say that was something that immediately jumped to mine for me as well. And again, that would be something as we're collecting these questions. That would be what would be coming back to give a formal testimony on which is, again, you have some work in flight. And so in thinking about how in the context of the pandemic and everything that is sitting on top of schools right now, when we think about what it is that we want to achieve, what's the best road to achieving that, and how do we make sure that we don't add additional complexity through sort of logistical pieces as we're trying to engage in our work and thinking about how we can improve our education system. So that would be something we'd be bringing back and obviously that that wouldn't preclude also talking to Amanda. Senator Lange. I'm sorry, Senator Percival. No, thank you. Senator Lange. Okay. Well, thank you. This is really terrific. And I do have a question. I just want to share that I think that it's most powerful when folks can meet and interact with people who have historical knowledge and stories. And so your grandparents, for example, Ms. Sobel probably have enriched you in a way that others have not been enriched. One of the most powerful interactions that I had was to meet and have dinner with Elie Wiesel and talk with him for long period of time. And then even more powerful is when schools can take field trips to Washington, DC and go to the Holocaust Museum, which is a fully amazing experience. So I'm wondering, my question actually relates to, is for the agency of education. And that is, do you do anything like sort of what I would call the spot check of curriculum and maybe pick out some courses that indicate they cover Holocaust issues or discrimination against the Jewish folks or do you do anything like that? Or do you identify courses in various schools that are best practice and share those with others? So I'm thinking there is that benefit once we are fully engaged and understand the importance of these issues on a personal level around anti-discrimination and how discriminatory practices that we see today are creating division. But once we understand those, then we can share the best way to communicate with students. And so I'm just wondering if any of that is part of your work. So I want to, I think there's a couple questions in your question. And I feel like this can also maybe circle back to Senator Campion's initial question around calculus and global languages. We do have our education quality review process. Part of that is our integrated field reviews. Those are built around the education quality standards. And so that sort of evaluation or that review process will be tied very closely to our education quality standards and our accountability system. And because we don't actually examine at that granular level content, we would be looking for things like a coordinated curriculum, that things are tied to state adopted standards. That sort of spot check that you're talking about is not something that we normally do. And I think it would be hard to figure out the line around, well, what else should we be looking for when we're starting to get into that sort of grain size. However, I do think that there is something to be said about that professional learning that I think you're sort of talking about this idea of standards. And I think that when you talk about how we deliver content, we should be thinking about what are all those resources that are available and how can we surface those. And we do on our website and through our various sort of listservs and interactions with the field provide access to different content, professional development providers, best practices, evidence-based practices. Again, this is something I can sort of bring back, but we have recently launched something that we've called Spotlights on Equity, where we have crosswalked that with our sample, proficiency-based graduation requirements and provided links to resources specific to engendering equity literacy across the board. And that's something that we can provide. But again, you're right that you are going to see differences across the state. I think Senator Campion, when you asked, we still have some schools who maybe are not offering calculus or maybe not offering a global language or a foreign language, there's a difference between saying we've got a school that doesn't offer a math curriculum and a school that maybe doesn't offer a calculus class. And I think that that can be hard to parse, but you're right that often that comes down to access to trained professionals, right, resources, that sort of geographic difference as we walk across the state. And so I think a great question that this is giving me to investigate is to say, how might a state legislative initiative or mandate to teach something like Holocaust education resolve those disparities in resources? And also to examine, are there other mechanisms that we have to to review if we want to sort of resolve some of those inequities? Thank you, Senator. Honestly, from the outset, I fully support this bill and makes a lot of sense. I don't see any reason to not support it. One question I have about a possible amendment, and this might be more directed towards Jim Demeray, has to do with it. It's stating education in public schools, connecting with another broad discussion. This committee is tackling this session. I wonder if it might make more sense to ask to us to report back on any school receiving public money. Maybe we can't inquire of private schools that are receiving tuitioning dollars, but I personally as one legislator would like to know if private schools that are receiving public monies are not teaching the Holocaust, or if they're not teaching it in a way that's consistent with accepted historical records. I don't know if you have any reaction to that, Jim, if we don't have purview to inquire of the agency of education of all schools receiving public monies, but I certainly would be interested to know of anybody receiving public money, how they're teaching the Holocaust. Jim? So yeah, so the education strategies have numerous requirements for independent schools, and so it's very common to impose that kind of requirement. So if you want to expand this to cover independent schools receiving public monies, that would be a policy choice. Okay. Senator Taranzini. Hey, Senator Campion. Just a quick question if you don't mind for Jim, and then one more thought. Has the House Education Committee talked at all about this, Jim? Not yet. Not yet. I had one final thought in regards to the bill and the country of Israel, more specifically. When the Holocaust took place, Israel wasn't even a country yet, as it was formed in 1948. And I could see, you know, Israel has become quite a polarizing and political sort of hot potato over recent years. And I think it's really important to separate the two, regardless of someone's individual feelings of support or not so much in favor of Israel's politics or their alignments with different political world leaders and so on. This subject to me has nothing to do with politics in general of either being pro-Israel or maybe not so pro-Israel. This really has to do with, I think, acceptance, tolerance, love, support of different folks and different walks of life. And that's really important to remember when we talk about this bill. Yeah, thank you for that. I think we do need to shift to our next witness, but, and we will have Jess and Wendy, Wendy back and others, but Ms. DeCarolis, how does it feel if you come back in a couple of weeks? You've heard some of our questions. I would also put it out there that, you know, this is a, if ever in the history of this country, this is the time to even broaden it a little bit.  What is, you know, for students to really understand the climate and the history that we're in right now as well. And so I would just throw it, throw that out there that in terms of your thinking to think broadly about, you know, what we're trying to accomplish here. Jess, go ahead. Absolutely. And I can hold my question and resolve when I come back. I had a new question just to sort of guide us is to the senators right now who are here, have you had an opportunity to reach out to some of your local educators? And have you heard that they have not been teaching the Holocaust? As a matter, of course, it's fairly common in US history classes, in English language arts classes, whether you're reading night or, you know, the diary van Frank or the boy in the straight pajamas. Have you heard from your local educators that there has been a concerted effort to prevent them from teaching the Holocaust as a matter of course? Good question. I have not. Okay. Yeah, that's helpful. Thank you. Yeah, Sam Persley. Just I'll take the opportunity from that question to say the opposite of my experience of Montpelier, my daughter had Holocaust content and I think three different classes. I think she had a government class that talked about it. She had a literature class that read some of those books and others and then also history class. So for my experience for my daughter at Montpelier High School, that it definitely was covered pretty well, Sam. And as I just add to that, as is always the case, and I think this is work that you do quite a bit of, Jess, is making certain that where things are successful, those resources are shared, finding ways to, you know, if Montpelier High School is where things are really happening with this, you know, are there ways to share this, these kinds of ideas? I mean, I think back to some of the things that have come out of Brandeis University and I know the Brookline Massachusetts Public Schools teaching history, there were ideas there that I think really took off throughout the country. So any way that we can expand those kinds of educational opportunities for those who are standing before our kids to teach us, I think, the better. Final comment, Dr. Geller. I just wanted to show folks, so really sometimes a visual is easier than talking through. Can folks see now? So I put some links in the chat for Daphne so that those can be distributed if folks want to take a look through some of the pieces that I have talked about, but this is from the federal government. We take, these are the SCED codes, it's the school codes, of course, exchange of data. So there was a question earlier about what level of granularity might the course naming conventions have? So you'll see here that there are quite a number of these. Let me see here, 712, so 720 rows, but you'll get a sense of the level of specificity that you can expect from the course naming conventions through here. It's just a supportive document if folks really want to get in there and take a look. So I did provide a link to that in the chat for folks to use if they would like to get a sense of that. But again, as I said, from a curriculum standpoint, we don't collect any further down into topic area granularity. There was a question about what is collected and is not collected from the independent schools. The independent schools at this point in time do not submit the data that the SCED and SCED submit around course enrollment to us. So if that were to be something that you would want to engage in going forward, that would be quite a large engagement in terms of both a record keeping standpoint and then a mechanism. So like a data and technical infrastructure standpoint to be able to report these data up to the agency of education. And so just to note that that infrastructure doesn't currently exist to speak to that ingestion. Okay, that's good to know. It's great having you here with us, Dr. Geller. It was very helpful to see all the data and I'm wondering if you wouldn't mind emailing all of those links to Daphne. That way, she'll just be able to forward them to us as well as put them on our committee page. And we'll look for it. Daphne will be in touch to schedule some time during the week of the 24th for the two of you to come back. But please feel free to come back and engage us before then if you have any questions. Great. Thank you so much. Thanks for having us. Good to see everybody. Yeah, great to see you. Great to see the two of you. Thank you, Maya. Thank you for having us. Happy new year, everybody. You. Ms. Steinerman, welcome to Senate Education. Where are we finding you today? Hi, thank you, Chair Campion. Thank you for inviting me today to testify in support of Holocaust education in Vermont. Senator Taranzini, thank you for initially sponsoring this essential bill. And Senate committee members, thank you for taking up this important educational issue so promptly. As you said, my name is Deborah Steinerman. I live in Jeffersonville. Great. I'm blessed to be the child of fortunate Holocaust survivors. I'm the relative of at least 23 victims of the Holocaust that I can name. And currently I'm the president and co-founder of the Vermont Holocaust Memorial, a nonprofit established in 2017, whose mission is Holocaust education in our state. A recent survey found that students receiving Holocaust education are more open to differing viewpoints, more comfortable with people of a different race or sexual orientation, have a willingness to challenge incorrect or biased information, are more apt to confront intolerant behavior and are more likely to stand up to negative stereotyping. The rise of extremism and anti-Semitism in the United States and globally, including by those whose mission it is to deny, minimize, sanitize, rewrite, or mock the Holocaust demonstrates why the need for Holocaust education is more urgent than ever before. Based on information from the US government department of justice, 2020 hate crime statistics for Vermont show that the majority are motivated by religion, race, ethnicity, or ancestry bias, and those crimes have been dramatically increasing here in the past year. And according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, one major contributor may be White National's hate group, Patriot Front, which has been tracked as operating in our state. We all know, as you said, anti-Semitism is sharply on the rise worldwide. 79% of Jewish college students are reporting fear of anti-Semitism on campus, not only from their peers, but from their professors. The recent horrible Holocaust reenactment fiasco that you may have heard of that took place in a DC school, that had already happened here in Georgia, Vermont, in a school in 2017. And I'm sure you're aware of other such terribly disturbing instances that have occurred in our schools and neighborhoods. So you see Vermont is not immune to anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. Senators, Vermont needs more than what this bill currently offers. Vermont needs to establish standards of Holocaust education for our school districts. And my organization is standing by ready to help create those standards. The status of Holocaust education in Vermont has already been researched for us. Why spend more time and money on a redundant report? Are you aware of the 2020 state-by-state claims conference report on Holocaust knowledge among millennials and Gen Z? I've submitted the link for that report in the information that I sent, but please allow me to summarize how Vermont students ranked in that survey. 42% of Vermont's youth couldn't name a single concentration camp or ghetto. 29% didn't know what Auschwitz was. 29% believed fewer than 2 million Jews were killed. 65% didn't know that the actual number was 6 million. 43% have seen Holocaust denial or distortion on social media online. 52% have seen Nazi symbols on their social media platforms in the past five years. And 7% think Jews caused the Holocaust. But most importantly, 79% think it is important to teach about the Holocaust in parts so that it doesn't happen again. So as you mentioned, or I believe from the Agency of Education just mentioned that to date there are 23 states already that have enacted Holocaust education requirements. Those are Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin. Well, all over the United States map. Let's add Vermont to that list. However, even in states that have mandates, the results show that it's not enough to just pass a mandate and assume that teachers will get it right. Or in some cases even try to get it right. We must support our educators with Holocaust education standards and make sure the teachers are doing the work and doing it appropriately. When studying the Holocaust, students are engaging with complicated moral questions, many of which do not come with simple answers and cannot be answered very quickly in one class session. Learning about the Holocaust encourages students to promote social justice, human rights and genocide awareness. It supports the effective examination of basic moral issues, provides reflections on the dangers of remaining silent, apathetic and indifferent to the oppression of others. Holocaust education helps students identify danger signals and to know when to take constructive actions. It supports students in understanding the roots and ramifications of prejudice, racism and stereotyping in any society, provides understanding about the responsibility of citizens in any society. Perhaps it has the potential to encourage young people to think about how to make a positive impact through individual and group actions, gives students the opportunity to develop an awareness of the value of diversity in a pluralistic society. Holocaust education encourages sensitivity to the positions of minorities and it helps students to develop an expanded view of humanity. As students gain insight into the Holocaust, they gain awareness of the complexity of the subject and a perspective on how a convergence of factors can contribute to the disintegration of democratic values. Most students demonstrate a high level of interest in studying Holocaust history, precisely because the subject raises questions of fairness, justice, individual identity, peer pressure, conformity, indifference and obedience, issues that adolescents confront in their daily lives. Now the Federal Never End Education Act which was passed in 2020 provides money and resources to states needing help funding mandates. That now removes funding as an obstacle to require Holocaust education here. So we can't let Holocaust education slip through the cracks. The Vermont Holocaust Memorial has heard from hundreds of Vermonters, parents, administrators, teachers, students who want Holocaust education properly taught in their schools. Students at Mount Abraham Union High School even started a petition last year asking to help make Holocaust education required in all Vermont public secondary schools. That petition received close to 1,000 signatures and hundreds of offers to testify and help. Our speakers have presented in schools across the state from elementary through high school since 2017. We have professional development workshops for educators, we offer projects, exhibits and many resources and lesson plans to help our educators teach the invaluable lessons of the Holocaust. The call to us has been great especially lately because of students loss of connection resulting from missed opportunities due to the pandemic. Learning is most impactful with repetition. Repetition at different grade levels and taught by professional educators. Our small volunteer organization cannot continue educating about the Holocaust on our own. Senators please skip the costly and unnecessary status report. The backing of your fellow committee members and senate colleagues in sponsorship of this act is clear and convincing. Aid our teachers and students by establishing the standards needed for this important portion of their curriculum. The resources already exist are educators wanted. That's been proven by the registrations we've received to each of our annual workshops and the many requests to share our family stories of survival in schools. Let's make sure our Vermont students properly learn what it means to be upstanders. Let's educate them now on the lessons learned from the Holocaust to bring about a more tolerant and caring world for them and for the future. In commemoration of international Holocaust remembrance day later this month I urge you to make it your obligation to ensure when we say never again Holocaust history is understood, learned and accomplished and I thank you for your support on this and I'm available to answer questions now or at any moment at any time in the future. Thank you. Thank you. Committee members, any questions for Ms. Steinerman at this point? Yes, Senator Hooker. Could I just ask Ms. Steinerman to send your written comments to our assistant so that we can have them on our webpage? Thank you. I see that you have a number of documents but I'd like to see your written comments as well. Sure. Ms. Steinerman, where is the memorial being proposed, the siting of it? Do you know yet the Holocaust memorial that you're working on? So are you talking about the monument that we? Monument, yeah. So yeah we just started getting design ideas for that monument. Okay. At this time we're looking at placing it in stone. In stone. Well certainly monument memorials as we know are a huge component to education, massive component. So I appreciate your work on that. We will, this is just our first day on this topic so I'm sure we will be engaging both you and Ms. Sobel as we move forward. As you may have heard, we're going to come back to this when the agency comes back to us with some recommendations and some ideas in a couple of weeks. So I hope you'll stay tuned and continue to participate on this. But for now we're going to leave it there. Thank you both. Maya, thank you for your leadership on this and your work with Senator Taranzini. Committee, let's take a 10 minute break and we will come back and pick up our work on COVID-19 and schools.


So the next talk is going to be on The Truth About Adopting a Service Mesh by Lin Sun. Through my session, The Truth About Adopting a Service Mesh. Let me quickly introduce myself. My name is Lin Sun. I am the Director of Open Source with solo.il. I've been working in the ISTO project for four plus years. I have a lot of patents, 200 plus, and I wrote a book about a year ago. ISTO explained to really helpful users to quickly get started with ISTO. Soft process for adopting a service mesh. Many questions to ask yourself. What is service mesh? Do you need a service mesh? What are the service mesh projects available out there? When do I start? What are the surprises and benefits? And what's the next step for you? If you decide service mesh is the right for you. Challenges with microservices. As you all know, as services are moving to be cloud-native, Kubernetes-based, a set of new challenges arise. How do you observe interactions among your services? How do you secure the communication among the services? And how do you increase the resilience of your services? And how do you control traffic as new versions come in? You want to be able to precisely control how the traffic will go out to the new version. What is a service mesh? Fundamentally, service mesh is a programmable framework that allows you to observe, connect, and secure your microservices. Service mesh solves application networking problems for you, so you don't have to solve these problems in your application so you can focus on the business logic of your application. Service mesh provides discovery of your services, secure the communication of your services to allow you to traffic control and shifting and shaping and mirroring a lot of functions around traffic control. Service mesh allows you to apply service-based access control or mesh service. The fact service mesh has the application information allows it to do intelligent things. Service mesh also provides telemetry collection, increase your service resilience, and this is all on the basis of without you needing to write any code in your application. Last but not the least, service mesh provides API programmable interface so that you can program in the service mesh which program the cycle proxy for you. A quick architecture overview of what service mesh is, how does it work? There are two key components, control plane on the top and data plane at the bottom. Control plane is what you interact with the service mesh, the program service mesh, and service mesh in turn to program the cycle proxies in pink. The proxy will start with default configuration which are a little dummy, and then through your intelligence programming, the proxy can be customized to your specific applications. The proxy for instance can upgrade the connection to be secure connection, but with the telemetry data for you, the proxy can control which endpoint the traffic sense too. So a lot of intelligence are built into the proxy to help you mediate that traffic. So do you really need a service mesh? Only you can decide. The reason is you know your organization really well.  Do you have supporting infrastructures? Keep an eye out. If you're not using service mesh today, you don't think you have a need. I do want you to keep an eye out because you know your organization might change for explosion in a number of services and increasing of languages and the complaints about maintaining multiple framework language, library, binaries, libraries and certification or patient every 30 or 90 days. How are you maintaining that? If you are doing in-house certification management for your proxy yourself or your application service yourself or if you ever need to have better observability system to be able to ping out which service has the problem. Also, it's important to check if you have the supporting infrastructure. Do you have metrics, logging and tracing systems? Are you using GitOps? Are you having CICV and Git repository? Are you using Kubernetes and VMs? A lot of things to consider.  We want you to make sure you think wisely and pick it wisely because the fact the proxy is done. It will take down your data plan. It will take down your services. Now let's get to the next topic. How do you select a service mesh? If you do decide your organization where meets a service mesh? The first thing I want you to think through, remember that PsyCOP proxy is on the data plan. Is it you going with Envoy or something else? The industry can just set Envoy as the default proxy for service mesh. Maybe because Envoy is really bad for test and production environments like Lyft. And also Envoy is very mature, very diverse community so as you can see ECO, Console Connect, Enflash, Kuma, Open Service Mesh, all these great projects landed with Envoy. There are certain exceptions though, so you want to check that first. You want to also think about maturity, production deployment, how many users are deployed, the service mesh in production, because that's battle test. Is there somebody else to do the testing for you? ECO, LinkedIn, Console Connect, I think they are the three top adaptive service mesh in production today. Production support and multi-vendor, right? If that vendor fail, do you have somebody else to go to? Are also extremely important. In this case, ECO is multi-vendor. It was founded by three big companies and now it has a growing ecosystem. More vendors coming into ECO and providing production support of many to ECO solutions. Certainly some of your workloads are probably on Kubernetes, so you want to watch out for Kubernetes supports. ECO and LinkedIn are certainly ahead of the game in this scenario. VM support, you want to make sure if you have workloads on VM, you want to make sure it can continue support your workloads. Maybe you don't have any plan to move them to Kubernetes. Or maybe you want to enjoy the benefit of the service mesh while they are running on VM. So check out the service mesh that has decent VM support. CNCF did a survey last year. If you haven't seen it, ECO is about 45-ish most dominant service mesh in production towards the end of 2020. Sorry, my slides turning are not quite working. Okay, there we go. Where do I start? If you do decide ECO is the service mesh you want to go with, I would say definitely start with the edge because that's the easiest way to adopt a service mesh. As you can see, you can have envoy proxy at the edge and then gradually add your services to the mesh. You don't have to add them to day one. In fact, most common cases just don't add them yet. After you move to envoy-based API gateway, which is issue ingress gateway or blue edge, you can then start looking at adopting other services to service mesh. I want you to pick a specific user case and iterate. There's no magic. Check out your business needs, not the password, right? So a lot of the users I work with, they adopt ECO for mutual TLS. They want to use ECO to upgrade the connection to mutual TLS among their services. They want to do authorization authentication among their services at the edge. So that's the most common case in my opinion. And then we also have users about ECO wanting better telemetry collection, wanting better resilience. So they can do global failure and do that securely, right? Do that in a better performance way. So you can always default local and the local fails. The traffic would automatically route to the remote cluster or the cluster in a different data center but running the same service. Canary release for a specific service. It's also a very common cases, but I think it's less likely because you could potentially work around with a different service. So having more work with ECO is a lot easy. So you don't have to do actual canary versions and everything. You could potentially just using ECO resources to ship that traffic automatically for you. And the next thing I want to also think about is how your team going to integrate with ECO. What are your teams? Who owns resources and functions? And how much your team needs to learn? Ideally you want to minimize their learning to the service team and your platform team should be able to understand ECO, ECO's resources and be able to hide that complexity from the service team so that your service team can potentially leverage the mesh without much learning at all. Just inject the ECO and maybe use the default policy from the platform team. What consumption pattern are you going to provide to your service team? Ideally I want them to be self-service so that you can enable them easily and how do you enforce the policy at the global level and maybe at the team level and namespace level but still allow them to override as needed. What are the surprises? Of course as every journey there are surprises for service mesh. I think some of these are actually general to all the service mesh. The proxy and the application container at start time it could be a surprise for you. The proxy actually may start after your application container starts. This is a problem because the traffic is not secure and the traffic may not be able to reach any services outside of Kubernetes so your application container is not going to function until the proxy gets fully started. Similar problem at start time your application continues to start first I'm sorry your proxy could start first which after disconnect your application container and it would end traffic send 502 to your user so these are not desired. Fortunately there are work runs for this for the first one there's annotation you can apply at the part level called hold application until your proxy ready the second one there's a pre-stop quote which we highly recommend all the users to use especially on the issue ingress gateway so make sure you use those I had to pull into production debugging call and turned out there was no pre-stop books if you're using state for set I want to encourage you to use issue 1.10 the reason is the container networking behavior has changed and it was different than Kubernetes container networking behavior prior to 1.10 so it was super confusing if you're running with state for sets so check out 1.10 and then the last now the list of many of our user find out the default for timeout and retries was a huge shock for example we had retries 2 and actually has no timeout so sometimes that's not what user wanted thankfully it still provide easy way for you to override that either globally or at the round level you just have to know the surprises ahead of time to help you troubleshooting and debugging sometimes the issue API a bit very rich it may be a little hard to navigate some of these key resources at the edge I want you to think through gateway and virtual services when you're adopting is still for security purposes check out peer authentication policy they're using is still for authorization or request based authentication check out authorization policy and request authorization authentication policy they're using is still for like routing traffic traffic shifting or resiliency check out virtual services destination rule if you are importing external service into the mesh having both those running on VM check out workload entry service entry what are the benefits the most important thing I actually really use slides from our friend a T-mobile the reason is it's much easier for a user to say the benefit than me for work on the projects and interest for me as you can see he said 50% reduction in MTTR and most importantly savings of engineering our world 100K that is huge but thanks for the T-mobile team willing to try is still and I believe they have 100 clusters with is still in production what are the next step if you are convinced right is still you need service mesh is still is the right way to go I highly recommend you to check out solo and sign up for workshop I actually wrote solely on the first workshop and co-authored with Christian poster on the second workshop so the foundation for is still is the first shop allow you to get started with is still easily the second workshop teaches you how to deploy is still to production environment so very helpful wheels and badges and also check out blue mesh if you have a need is still production support all opinionated layer on top of is still another services mesh check out blue mesh we support is still long term support and minus 4 now it was in license 3 when I first made the charts and we have this bill and different upstream bills available to so definitely check it out next that's all I have thank you so much to come to my session and let me know if you have any questions follow me on Twitter and follow is still and solo I want to it up thank you okay that was the end of the presentation drop any questions in the Q&A for Lynn how are you doing today I'm doing great let me know if you guys have any questions I'll be here is there anything in addition you want to say other than the presentation so if you're really interested in is still in 60 minutes I'm actually going to give a workshop how do you get started with is still so you can find my workshop in the tracks just go to tracks workshop and then you should be able to get to my workshop I think pre-registration may be required so if there's a space you should be able to get to all right great we'll just wait for a couple of minutes to see if there's any questions okay I don't think anyone has any questions that was a very comprehensive presentation thank you so much well thank you I appreciate all the feedback so far really appreciate it thanks for having me take care bye


And by designing the whole system together hardware and software we're able to make the things you love about your Mac even better. Your Mac now instantly wakes from sleep just like the iPhone and iPad. Let me show you but first let's set the mood. How cool is that? Last week Apple released all of their new line of M1 Macs but alongside that they also had the public release of the new macOS Big Sur. Now there's a lot of videos currently online highlighting all the great features of this new macOS update. It ranges from things like a massive design overhaul, it makes it feel a little bit more like the iPad and a little bit like the iPhone. Right down to the tiny details like for example the sound effects have now also changed. When I mean sound effects I mean things like when you move something to the trash or you drag something from one folder to another folder you hear a little notification sound. Those have all changed and it's been a massive complete upgrade to any of the previous macOS's. Now I've been using macOS Big Sur ever since launch day and this video is going to be slightly different. I'm going to be highlighting the five key things which may or may not detail you from upgrading and these are the things that are very common. I've come across users online saying the same things as well. It's mainly for your benefit to understand if this is the right upgrade for you. Just before I begin these are the specs on my MacBook Pro that I have in front of me which is incredibly fast and is capable of handling any OS upgrades. So just bear this in mind when I discuss anything about performance. A lot of the things that I will be talking about performance wise are things that the users have reported online. I've come across various different articles that are reporting the same thing and how to fix them. So although I can basically handle any types of performance capabilities not everyone might. So just bear that in mind whilst you're watching this video. Without further ado let's dive in. Number one it is a very large file size. To upgrade to macOS Big Sur you need at least 12 to 15 gigabytes of storage space and a lot of people that I've come across they really use the max amount of storage that they possibly can on their hard drives. I have friends that have MacBook Air's 256 gigabyte max and they're pretty much on 200 gigabytes already. So as you get closer to maxing out your storage space you will get performance problems.  Number two is the incompatibility. The first thing to note is is your MacBook or your Mac compatible with this upgrade. Here's a list of all the devices that macOS Big Sur is compatible with. If any of your devices fall outside of this the upgrade will not work or it might not even be available for you guys to upgrade. So just make sure you're aware that you have a device that can upgrade to this. Secondly what I've noticed is about the app updates. So once I have installed macOS Big Sur I was expecting a couple of apps here and there to be incompatible with the new OS and I was correct. So as you can see here as soon as I logged in I immediately saw a couple of pop-ups requiring app updates which were not compatible with the OS and they wouldn't function properly until I had updated those specific apps. So you may have a lot of third-party apps that you've downloaded which would require specifically a new version of the app which might not be available at the time the new OS is out. So that might take a month, it could take a couple of weeks, it could take much longer. So just be aware if there's anything else that you think might not be available check with the app developers to see if they are macOS Big Sur ready. If not you might have to wait and that app might be unusable but then there's also things where you can have plugins inside apps that don't work.  So as I was using a color grading application called Cinema Grade if I drag this onto the clip it will be incompatible. I contacted Cinema Grade they said they haven't updated their plugins specifically for Big Sur just yet. So right now I will be able to use this plugin to color grade my footage. So number three is performance. As I mentioned earlier on in the video my MacBook Pro is pretty fast and it can handle the performance pretty well. However there has been a lot of users reporting their macOS slowing down considerably once they upgraded. So take a look at some of these articles. There's been reports of it slowing down when the disk space has started to run out. There's been advice to run specific cleaning applications to delete all of the chunk files in your system. There's also recommendations to disable certain things that open up once you log in in case they are taking up a lot of processing power. But generally these are all common practices that you would need to do to speed up any MacBook on any OS. So if you are getting slow performance then these are the things that you would diagnose with. You will trial it. You will troubleshoot doing it this way. Specifically with macOS Big Sur there's been a lot of reports possibly because a lot of people don't have a fast processor on their devices or possibly because they're just running out of storage space. Something as simple as that. So just be aware. Check those things first before you upgrade because you may get your MacBook or your Mac to slow down slightly. Number four, battery life. Now based on everything that I've just spoken about in terms of performance it using up a lot of your space all of that kind of stuff contributes to how much battery life you can run off on your device especially your MacBooks without having your external power connected to it. So here's a clip of me using my MacBook Pro once it hits a 100% battery. I double checked to see how much remaining battery time there was left. At 100% on Catalina before I upgraded it said there was 4 hours and 19 minutes that I can use it for. I ran the same test on a Big Sur. I charged everything to 100%. I calculated it and it gave me a battery life remaining of two hours and nine minutes which is less than half. So something definitely happened there. Now although this is a very fast spec MacBook Pro I didn't believe that it would be two hours so I tested it. I carried on working without opening any additional intensive applications. Those two battery lives by the way had the exact same applications open so I only had Chrome and a couple of other things open. I didn't have anything else running in the background so it was a like for like comparison. It didn't last two hours.  So I felt like the battery reduction was slightly less and a lot of people that are reporting their battery life has reduced drastically maybe correct in some ways. However once I've used this a couple of days later I felt like the battery life was absolutely fine. It was back up to more than four hours and if I wasn't doing anything heavy if I just leave it there I maybe step away. I've gone to get a coffee for example then I can probably get the same or even more than it was before but initially once I had upgraded I did notice that initial drop in battery life. And finally number five I wanted to highlight this. This might be a small thing but for me the small things make a biggest difference and even till today I experienced this issue which is around the widgets panel. Now this is a complete design overhaul. The widgets panel does look more like the iOS on iPhones and on iPads which is absolutely fine but when I used to use the widgets panel on Catalina and all of my previous OSs before this I used to use the calculator widget on this. So I used to just swipe left on the trackpad. The calculator was there and I was able to do quick calculations because I used that very frequently. Now however the calculator widget is gone. When I now swipe left the widgets panel you can add more widgets you can get them from the app store as well however there's no calculator ones so I find myself continually swiping to open the widgets panel not seeing the calculator there then I have to open the calculator app separately. I've been doing that almost every day for a week and it's something I still need to get used to so if you're like me and you did use the calculator on the widgets panel from previously if you upgrade forget about it it's gone and most likely if they don't do an update to bring it back it's never coming back. So that's a shame and there is other tiny little things that I've noticed here and there but things I can just get used to. Those are my top five things that I've noticed with some of the reasons why you may or may not upgrade to macOS Big Sur. So let me know what you guys think if you have upgraded and you found other problems then do drop a comment down below I'd like to hear from you and finally I'd just like to thank the sponsors of this video ExpressVPN. If you want the ultimate solution for private browsing and accessing content outside of your own countries this is the app to get. It works perfectly with macOS Big Sur I've tested it. 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