Author: Nelson Rosario

A version of the Ozzy Osbourne tale starts with Black Sabbath, featuring Randy Rhoads, bat-biting, stadium-filling, and reality TV. However, the true story, which explains nearly everything, starts much earlier, in a small two-bedroom home on Lodge Road in Aston, Birmingham, where a dyslexic boy with a nervous energy and no clear future was silently attempting to figure out where he fit. Growing up in working-class Birmingham in the late 1940s and early 1950s, John Michael Osbourne—nicknamed Ozzy since he was a young boy—was surrounded by factory shifts, limited resources, and low expectations. His father was a toolmaker who worked…

There was a Tom Brady who was virtually nonexistent. Not the seven-time Super Bowl champion, not the man with more rings than fingers on one hand, but the one who was so defeated by two years of spectating from the sidelines that he almost left Michigan to transfer to California. The most crucial chapter in comprehending Brady’s development is likely that version of him—the irritated, disregarded backup on one of the top programs in the country. Brady was raised in San Mateo, California, a suburb of Northern California where 49ers fans were fervent. He went to Junípero Serra High School,…

It’s difficult to imagine the effects of such instability on a child—the frequent relocation, new schools, unfamiliar faces, and lack of a solid foundation. It was more than a gift when his mother gave him a guitar when he was twelve. It was most likely the first thing he felt like. Depp had made up his mind by the time he was sixteen. Depending on who you ask, his decision to leave Miramar High School in 1979 to pursue music was either bold or reckless. The next event, which sounds almost too dramatic to be true, is that he returned…

Nowadays, you can find a Google Doc open on a teacher’s screen in practically every school office, which has a printer that jams twice a week and a whiteboard covered in sticky notes. Perhaps the lesson plan is only partially completed. Perhaps someone created the quiz at eleven o’clock at night before realizing they had yard duty in the morning. Google has so subtly integrated itself into education that most people have forgotten about it. Much of that subtle change is being driven by Google Workspace for Education. Gmail, Docs, Classroom, Drive, Meet, Sheets, Forms, and more are among the…

When Indian families move overseas, a certain type of anxiety takes hold. Paperwork, housing, and acclimating to a new time zone are not the only issues. The kids are the main focus. Which educational institution? Which curriculum? In the midst of all this change, will my child lose something, a connection to their past? Seeing how Global Indian International School has positioned itself throughout Asia provides a genuine response to that anxiety. Founded in 2002 in Singapore, GIIS now operates campuses across Japan, Malaysia, UAE, Thailand, and India. There are about 4,000 students and 300 teachers on the Singapore campus…

In late 2021, a picture went viral among those who work in the field of early childhood policy. It depicted a rural Tennessee preschool classroom with tiny chairs, alphabet posters, and a teacher hunched over a four-year-old with a crayon. The caption stated that funding for the classroom would end the following year. Nothing particularly noteworthy occurred. The picture vanished. Congress moved on. On the surface, that moment seems insignificant, but it is at the heart of something much bigger and more obstinate. The US Congress hasn’t passed a universal pre-K bill for six straight legislative sessions. Not once was…

For many years, California has referred to itself as a national model for early childhood education, and in a limited sense, that assertion is true. The state promised hundreds of thousands of new subsidized child care spots, invested billions to build out transitional kindergarten, and changed the way it pays providers. When combined, the scope of California’s efforts is unmatched in the entire nation. On paper, it appears to be a true turning point, the kind of policy change that could be examined in graduate programs twenty years from now as the turning point in American early education. As usual,…

On the surface, this moment seems unremarkable, but researchers now think it has a great deal of significance. A parent picks up a sobbing baby, looks them in the eye, and speaks in a gentle, meaningless tone. The infant falls silent. One of over a million connections in the brain will fire in a single day. Perhaps four seconds pass. Furthermore, decades of scientific research have shown that it is far more important than nearly anything else that will occur in that child’s career, education, or health. The first five years of a child’s life have traditionally been viewed as…

Anyone who has ever dropped a toddler off at a new preschool will recognize this moment: the brief pause at the door of the classroom, the slow scan of unfamiliar faces, the lip that begins to tremble before the crying starts. Adults often perceive this as transient. a stage. Something to endure. After a few weeks, everything will be alright as the child adjusts and the reasoning takes hold. As it happens, that assumption merits closer examination. A more complex picture of what truly occurs inside a young child’s brain during times of repeated transition is being painted by research…

A four-year-old may confidently explain why the soil by the window grows plants more quickly than the soil by the door if you walk into the correct preschool classroom on any given Tuesday morning. For the past two weeks, she has been monitoring it. She created a chart. She has views on sunlight. She was not told to give a damn about this. She simply does. That is project-based learning operating as it should. Furthermore, despite decades of debate in the education sector over curriculum standards, testing benchmarks, and structured learning frameworks, an increasing amount of data indicates that this…