An April 2 Washington County School Board meeting in Tennessee took an uncomfortable turn after high school student Hannah Campbell finished delivering her remarks. Seated with the board and directly next to the superintendent, Campbell confidently participated in a discussion with members after presenting research she had conducted on other schools.

That’s when the board member seated next to her, Keith Ervin, reached over, put his arm around her, and said, “God, you’re hot, you know that? Where do you go to school at?”

The comment is not a baseless allegation. The interaction was caught on video. A few people in the room laughed, Campbell herself quickly brushed off the comment, and the meeting continued as scheduled. Any viewer watching the meeting in person or on YouTube could clearly see what happened.

To many, it was clear that a line had been crossed, and the mood in the room was tense afterward.

The board chair, Annette Buchanan, called an emergency meeting the following week, where members voted to censure Ervin—a public rebuke meant to show that they did not support his comments. But otherwise, as an elected official, Ervin would keep his position on the board.

For his part, Ervin issued a statement apologizing for the incident but insisting that he had not meant any harm.

“I understand why people are reacting the way they are. But that’s not the full conversation, not even close,” he wrote. “When I mentioned she was hot, I meant she was on a roll. It was nothing to do with her appearance.”

The board’s response was not good enough for Campbell, who was also unconvinced by the apology statement.

Student boldly appears at another board meeting to speak up for herself

Campbell refused to shrink or hide. Instead, she returned to a school board meeting on May 7 and confronted not just Ervin, but the entire board, in a courageous four-minute speech.

“I do not forgive you,” she said to Ervin, adding, “The failure to act on the board’s behalf was and is equivalent to his actions, and it has hurt me just as much. To watch the chairperson be so quick to bang her gavel, to control the public, yet not use it once to control her own peer was disgusting … I believe that you are all cowards.”

She sarcastically thanked the board at the end of her speech for showing her that she would do well not to trust adults and authority figures to stand up for her—that she would have to do it herself.

The student’s brave stand earned the support of the community

Campbell was wrong about one thing: There were others in the community who were willing to stand up for her.

One irate father vowed to raise enough money to oust every single board member should they fail to act. “Would you want your kid around that guy without a camera around? I wouldn’t,” he said.

Meanwhile, an online petition calling for Ervin’s removal from the board, along with Superintendent Jerry Boyd’s, has collected nearly 7,000 signatures.

Even more enraging to parents, students, and community members is the fact that Ervin has been accused of inappropriate conduct before. According to WCYB-TV, records show that in 2009, Ervin made a “lewd, juvenile gesture of a sexual nature” in front of students and teachers at a school. He was censured then and barred from school property unless accompanied.

Campbell’s willingness to use her voice may be the difference between a censure and something that makes a real difference for all the students who come before the board after her.

While a bottle of bubbles might seem out of place in a hospital setting, you might be surprised to learn that, for thousands of children around the world born with cleft lip and palate, they can be a helpful tool in comprehensive cleft care. Lilia, who was born with cleft lip and palate in 2020, is one of the many patients who received this care. 

As a toddler, Lilia underwent two surgeries to treat cleft lip and palate with Operation Smile’s surgical program in Puebla, Mexico. Because of Operation Smile’s comprehensive care, it wasn’t long before her personality transformed: Lilia went from a quiet and withdrawn toddler to an exuberant, curious explorer, babbling, expressing herself with a variety of sounds, and engaging with others like any child her age. 

Lilia is now a healthy five-year-old, with the same cheerful attitude and boundless energy. Her progress is the result of care at every level, from surgery to speech therapy to ongoing support at home—but it’s also evidence that small, sustained interventions throughout it all can make a meaningful difference. 

Cleft Conditions: A Global Problem

Since 1982, Operation Smile has provided cleft lip and cleft palate surgeries to more than 500,000 patients worldwide with the help of generous volunteers and donors. Cleft conditions are congenital conditions, meaning they are present at birth. With cleft lip and palate, the lip or the roof of the mouth do not form fully during fetal development. Cleft conditions put children at risk for malnutrition and poor weight gain, since their facial structure can make feeding challenging. But cleft conditions can have an enormous social impact as well: Common difficulties with speech can leave kids socially isolated and unable to meet the same developmental milestones as their peers. 

Surgery is a vital step in treating cleft conditions, but it’s also just one part of a much larger solution. Organizations like Operation Smile emphasize the importance of multi-disciplinary teams that provide comprehensive, long-term care to patients across many years. This approach, which includes oral care, speech therapy, nutritional support, and psychosocial care, not only aids in physical recovery from surgery but also helps children develop the skills and confidence to eat easily, speak clearly, and engage in everyday life. This ensures that each patient receives the full range of support they need to thrive. 

A Playful (and Powerful) Solution

Throughout a patient’s care, simple tools like bubbles can play a meaningful role from start to finish. 

Immediately before surgery, children are often in a new and unfamiliar environment far from home, some of them experiencing a hospital setting for the first time. When care providers or loved ones blow bubbles, it’s a simple yet effective technique: Not only are the children soothed and distracted, the bubbles also help create a sense of joy and playfulness that eases their anxiety. 

In speech therapy, bubbles can take on an even more important role. Blowing bubbles requires controlled airflow, as well as the ability to form a rounded “O” shape with the lips, which are skills that children with cleft conditions may struggle to develop. Practicing these skills with bubbles allows children to gently strengthen their facial muscles, improve breath control, and support the motor skills needed for speech development. Beyond that, blowing bubbles can help kids connect with their parents or providers in a way that’s playful, comforting, and accessible even for very young patients. 

Finally, bubbles often follow patients with cleft conditions home in the “smile bags” that each patient receives when the surgical procedure is finished. Smile bags, which help continue speech therapy outside of the hospital setting, can contain language enrichment booklets, a mirror, oxygen tubing, and bubbles. While regular practice with motor skills can help with physical recovery, small acts of play help as well, giving kids space to simply enjoy themselves and join in on what peers are able to do.

Bubbles at Home and Beyond

Today, because of Operation Smile’s dedication to comprehensive cleft care, Lilia is now able to make friends and speak clearly, all things that could have been difficult or impossible before. Instead of a childhood defined by limitation, Lilia—and others around the world—can look forward to a childhood filled with joy, learning, discovery, friends, and new possibilities.  

CTA: Lilia’s life was changed for the better with the care she received through Operation Smile. Find out how you can make an impact in other children’s lives by visiting operationsmile.org today. 

Many people delight in logic puzzles and the brain challenge they offer. But one of the most studied logic tests has proven persistently befuddling for people across the board.

Developed in 1966, the Wason Selection Task has a high failure rate despite its seeming simplicity. According to Michael Stevens of VSauce, studies have shown that somewhere between 90% and 96% of people are unable to come up with the correct answer.

What exactly is this test? There are various versions of it, but let’s look at the original one that Peter Wason created.

You have four cards in front of you labeled A, G, 7, and 8, like this:

Each card has a letter on one side and a number on the other. Your task is to determine which cards you would need to turn over to judge whether the following rule is true: If there is an A on one side, there is a 7 on the other.

That’s it. Sounds simple enough, right? Then you start working your way through the reasoning, and your brain starts to feel a bit sticky.

Even a Cambridge math professor had to backtrack on the test

Hannah Fry, a British mathematician and University of Cambridge professor, went through this task with Stevens on their joint YouTube channel, The Rest Is Science. Fry said she had encountered a version of the test before and gotten it wrong the first time, but she didn’t remember what trap she had fallen into or why.

This time, she walked through the logic aloud and figured it out. (If you want to try solving it yourself, go for it. Spoilers are below.)

Here’s how Fry worked through the problem in real time:

“So, right, you know that these four cards, a letter on one side, a number on the other, which means that there is a number hiding behind the A, there’s a number hiding behind the G. There’s also a letter behind the 7, and there’s a letter behind the 8.

The rule says if there is (this is what I’m trying to test) if there is an A on one side, there is a 7 on the other. Right? So, turning over the 8 doesn’t tell me anything. I mean, I don’t really care what’s on the other side of the 8 because even if it’s an A…”

Then Fry stopped herself.

“Uh oh, no, wait. That’s not true. Oh, hold on. I’ve got it wrong already.”

“Immediately, the first thing you want to do is check whether there’s a 7 on the reverse of the A. To see if there’s a 7. Turning over the G, I don’t think tells me anything because I don’t really care what’s on the reverse of the G. The rule doesn’t involve G’s. It says if there is an A on one side, which there isn’t, so I don’t care. So, I can ignore the G card.

@therestisscience The Wason selection task #tris #science #reasoning #wason ♬ original sound – The Rest Is Science

The Wason selection task #tris #science #reasoning #wason

The 7 card I’d be really tempted to turn over to see if there was an A on the other side, because then that would be another instance of the rule. But the way the rule is phrased is that it says if there is an A on one side, there is a 7 on the other. It doesn’t say you can only have sevens where A’s exist. So actually, you could have a J on the other side of the 7, and it wouldn’t violate the rule. That would be fine.

So, even though my temptation is to say turn over A and 7, actually, I think you need to turn over A and 8. Because if you turn over 8 and it’s got an A on the other side, that would violate the rule, right?”

Bingo. You would turn over the A and 8. Fry was correct. But even this Cambridge math professor, who had seen a version of the logic test before, stumbled through it a bit.

Changing the letters and numbers to a story about drinking changes the failure rate

Stevens then asked Fry how she would approach a different version of the task. Instead of letters and numbers, the cards show the ages of different people on one side and what they are drinking at a bar on the other. This version of the task includes a “human” storytelling element.

“Once again, you have four cards,” said Stevens. “And you are a police officer, and it’s your job to make sure that no one is drinking underage. On some of these cards, you can only see their age. You’re going to have to turn them over to see what they’re drinking. On others, you only see what they’re drinking. You’ll have to turn them over to get their age.

This is what you see in front of you, these four cards: The age 12, the age 35, the drink soda, and the drink beer. Which ones do you need to turn over to determine whether or not the rule is being obeyed that you cannot drink underage?”

The answer is the same as before: the first and last cards. But this task feels much easier than the first. As Stevens and Fry said, “It’s instinctive.”

Making the test about people and a potentially broken social rule makes the task much less abstract. But it also makes it clear that the puzzler needs to do something key to solving the letters-and-numbers version as well: look for a counterexample.

A counterexample is something that would disprove the rule. In the first task example above, if the 8 has the letter A behind it, the “If A, then 7” rule would be disproven. And that’s the only card that could possibly disprove the rule.

In the drinking-age version, we instinctively look for the counterexample, most likely because it’s socially ingrained in us to look for someone breaking the rule. It’s the same logic, but we have a better natural sense of how to figure it out when it involves a human story that taps into the way we naturally think. Few of us naturally think as abstractly as the first version requires without some training in logical deduction.

If you’re........

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