Any major dictionary, including Oxford, Collins, Webster’s, and Dictionary.com, will list Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp with the same effective economy: “1848–1929, U.S. frontiersman, law officer, and gunfighter.” A string of three words. It’s the type of definition that describes a person in detail without even attempting to explain why they are still relevant. The Earp definition, as it can be found in online databases and reference books, is both technically correct and in some ways completely inadequate.Born in Monmouth, Illinois, in 1848, Wyatt Earp was part of a large and restless family that would disperse throughout the American frontier in…
Author: Kelsey Myers
Kelsey Myers
Kelsey Myers is a Senior Editor at worldomep.org and a dedicated advocate for early childhood education whose work begins — and ends — with a simple belief: that the earliest years of a child's life matter more than almost anything else we can invest in. Based at a local school, Kelsey works daily alongside the children and families whose experiences inform everything she writes. She doesn't observe early education from a distance. She is inside it — in the classrooms, on the playgrounds, in the conversations between teachers and parents that shape how young children understand the world around them. That proximity gives her writing a warmth and specificity that purely policy-driven commentary rarely achieves. Through her writing at worldomep.org, Kelsey brings that same energy to readers — making the case, clearly and consistently, that early childhood education deserves far more attention than it typically receives. Kelsey shares her personal opinions on: https://x.com/Butterflyboule
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Sixteen weeks have passed. Fiona Donohoe, a mother, watched sixteen weeks of courtroom testimony, expert witnesses, and grainy CCTV footage from the benches of Belfast Coroner’s Court, waiting for someone to finally explain how her fourteen-year-old son died in an underground water tunnel in June 2020. One piece at a time, the lengthy and agonizingly detailed Noah Donohoe inquest has been revealing the details of that night. The basic facts are as follows: On June 21, 2020, Noah, a student at St. Malachy’s College and, by all accounts, an intelligent, typical teenager from Belfast, rode his bicycle out of his…
The fact that Reese Witherspoon, the actress who became known as Elle Woods and the most unlikely brilliant student at Harvard Law, never completed her college education has a subtle poetic quality. In 1994, she enrolled at Stanford University to major in English literature. Growing up in Nashville, she was a self-described bookworm who excelled academically and devoured novels in a focused, almost obsessive manner that she once claimed made her “heart beat hard” in bookstores. After less than a year, she departed. Not because she didn’t succeed. Hollywood called louder. The decision might not have seemed dramatic at the…
Taking the AP Calculus BC exam has an almost theatrical quality. The proctor reads instructions that sound like legal disclaimers, the room falls silent, and a clock that won’t stop for three hours and fifteen minutes begins to run in the back of your mind. That’s the entire duration of the AP Calc BC exam, and that figure doesn’t adequately prepare you for the real experience of high-stakes math under prolonged time pressure. The test is divided into two main sections, each of which is worth half of the final score. The first, which lasts for one hour and forty-five…
Sitting down for a standardized test carries a certain kind of pressure: the stark silence of a gymnasium, the simultaneous click of keyboards, the weight of two hours suddenly feeling very tangible. All of that is covered in the AP Computer Science Principles exam. However, this test is unique in that students have already locked in 30% of their score by the time they sit down for the official exam. sent in. Completed. That isn’t a metaphor; rather, it’s the exam’s format, which alters how students must approach preparation right away. There are two separate parts to the AP Computer…
Imagine a Thursday morning in May in a high school gymnasium. A few hundred students sitting down for an exam that will require them to read real Spanish journalism, listen to podcasts and interviews, write a persuasive essay based on three different sources, respond to emails in the appropriate register, hold a simulated conversation, and then give a brief cultural comparison presentation over the course of three hours and three minutes. There are rows of desks and the low hum of an air conditioner that is either too cold or not cold enough. Aloud. on a recording apparatus. The AP…
When students in New Zealand opened their laptops at some point in early May to access Canvas, the learning platform that the majority of them use on a daily basis to access lectures, turn in assignments, and message their professors, they discovered nothing. The system wasn’t working. Not momentarily, not in a restricted manner, but completely and unexpectedly offline, leaving thousands of students in the middle of the semester with impending deadlines and no idea when things would get back to normal. It’s the type of interruption that initially appears to be a technical annoyance. It wasn’t. The American technology…
Colin Jost is a prime example of the kind of person who enrolls at Harvard with the goal of studying economics and graduates with a dissertation on Vladimir Nabokov. And for some reason, that bizarre academic diversion from spreadsheets to Russian modernism proved to be the ideal prelude to one of the most brilliant comedic careers in American television. Jost enrolled at Harvard in the fall of 2000 after graduating from Manhattan’s Regis High School, a prestigious Jesuit school that typically produces individuals with very serious career goals. Economics made sense. It was a linear, practical major that leads to…
There is something illuminating about the expression “grip this up.” It’s not the language of thoughtful consideration. It is the language of someone who has examined a system, determined that it is ineffective, and made the decision to act swiftly, firmly, and with sufficient political will to overcome opposition. As she guided the Education and Training (System Reform) Amendment Bill through Parliament, Education Minister Erica Stanford is credited with saying this, and it has come to represent how both supporters and detractors view the entire reform endeavor. Quick. structural. Not without controversy, either. On May 14, the bill passed its…
The colleges that most high school counselors talk about are far away from Walla Walla, Washington. The campus of Whitman College sits in a small city that is actually wine country, surrounded by wheat fields and the Blue Mountains. It is difficult to describe the campus’s quiet self-possession without going there. The structures are old and well-maintained. By the second week of classes, professors are familiar with your name due to the small student-teacher ratio. Furthermore, many applicants are unaware of how competitive the admissions process is until they are well into it, despite what the headline acceptance rate might…