Author: Kelsey Myers

Every wall in Ryan Nelson’s kindergarten classroom at Jenny Lind Elementary has a timer. Every wall, not just one. He divides the day into these brief, intentional blocks because he thinks kids this age concentrate best in fifteen-minute increments. Most of his students pause in the middle of their sentences, look up, and move when the timer goes off. Observing five-year-olds who are already learning that time is structured and that things have an order is strangely touching. Knowing what many of them missed in the years prior to coming here is what makes it so moving. The kids who…

Between the holiday break and the start of regular business hours on January 3, 2024, Cambridge University Press & Assessment and Cognizant discreetly announced that they had extended a multi-year collaboration, this time with an increased emphasis on artificial intelligence. As is always the case, the announcement was made through a press release that was easy to scroll past due to its measured corporate language. However, the scope of what was described merits a closer examination. Cambridge is not your typical publisher. It is a part of the University of Cambridge, one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious academic…

Somewhere in the course materials is a quote from an Australian girl that makes you stop cold: “It means saving the world for later.” She was attempting to define sustainability. She is most likely five or six years old. And for some reason, she got it exactly right without the need for a lecture, a worksheet, or a standardized test. Even though it’s a tiny moment, it conveys a significant aspect of what “Sustainability from the Start” is trying to accomplish and explains why it has reached over 80,000 early childhood educators since its debut. With funding from the European…

Making a scientific case for something that kids do instinctively, without guidance, from the moment they can reach for an object seems almost counterintuitive. However, that is precisely what researchers affiliated with OMEP—the World Organization for Early Childhood Education—have been working on for years, building a patient, methodical, and subtly convincing body of evidence.When you walk into a preschool classroom that uses OMEP-informed practices, you might not realize right away that you are witnessing research in action. Kids arrange stones according to color. They transfer water between variously shaped containers. When a child fails at carefully balancing a block on…

The majority of people have at some point in their lives sat at a desk—at home, at work, or at school—and typed the ^ symbol without second thought. On almost all QWERTY keyboards, it sits silently above the 6 key, making it simple to ignore and forget. However, for well over three centuries, the caret, as it is officially called, has been quietly performing significant work in writing, mathematics, and computing. For something that most people couldn’t name on a good day, that’s a long run. The word itself is derived from the Latin caret, which means “it is lacking”…

The weight that a single word can carry is almost unfair. Volare. One of the most well-known songs in recorded music history is somehow the result of four syllables with Italian origins and Latin roots. The majority of people are familiar with it. Fewer people have taken the time to consider its true meaning or why it appears to go deeper than language typically can. In its most basic form, volare means “to fly.” That’s the neat, dictionary response. It simply appears as an infinitive verb, the kind you conjugate and move past, in travel phrase books and Italian grammar…

A certain type of podcast develops a small, devoted following of people who genuinely care about the topic, but it doesn’t follow trends, doesn’t employ a production company, and never quite makes it into the mainstream. That type of podcast was the BacktoFrontShow. From 2013 to 2020, it was hosted by Keir Whitaker and Kieran Masterton and produced 54 episodes with a focus on startup culture, web design, and web development. With some self-awareness, the hosts referred to themselves as “Kings of Silicon Gorge”—a lighthearted jab at the exaggerated mythology of Silicon Valley, delivered by two web veterans who obviously…

On Friday afternoon, a group of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, college baseball players were doing something no one had anticipated in the visiting dugout at Auburn’s Plainsman Park. They were triumphing. Loudly, comfortably, and with the kind of conviction that makes you question whether the outcome was truly that unexpected or if everyone else was simply not paying attention. In the first round of the NCAA Tournament, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Panthers defeated No. 4 national seed Auburn 13-8, their first tournament victory since 1999 and only the second in program history. They had a 25-31 record going into the game. Midway…

This week, something significant occurred in Frisco, Texas, and it had nothing to do with a single play on the field. After four days of annual spring meetings at its North Texas headquarters, the Big 12 Conference became the first Power Four conference to have all sixteen of its member schools sign participation agreements with the College Sports Commission. The College Sports Commission is a regulatory body that was established to bring some order to the name, image, and likeness landscape that has changed college athletics since the House v. NCAA settlement last summer. On paper, this milestone sounds bureaucratic,…

Pipe is one of the few English words with such quiet weight. It’s one of those words you use without giving it much thought, like “calling a plumber,” “watching a bagpiper at a wedding,” or “telling someone to shut up in a crowded room,” but the word itself has many meanings. A hollow metal tube buried beneath a city street, a carved wooden object a grandfather once smoked on the porch, a musical instrument with a sound that travels across open hills, or a channel through which digital data moves at speeds measured in fractions of a second are all…