Author: Nelson Rosario

The word “whit” has a subtle stubbornness to it. It won’t die. It can be found sitting there like a little stone that no one bothered to move, first in a novel from the 19th century and then again in a magazine column written last week. The majority of people ignore it. A few hesitate. And almost everyone has mistaken it for wit at some point—that funnier, sharper cousin that gets all the attention. A whit is tiny. Really, very little. It refers to a very small, barely perceptible quantity of something, typically something that is too small to hold…

I saw an all-boys school with a banner that read “Breaking Barriers, Building Bridges” stretched across its chain-link fence on the way to the gala. It had the familiar, slightly worn-out aspirational feel of school slogans. That slogan began to seem insignificant by the time I sat across from Dr. Liz Hicks an hour later. She was still wearing the green polo T-shirt with the Associated Administrators of Los Angeles logo from the strike that had been avoided earlier in the day. The school she founded in 2016, GALA, has overcome obstacles and bridges. These girls are creating their own…

The term “Abraham Accords” sounds more significant than the actual documents. Scripture, history, and a certain theatrical weight that the text itself, which is brief, technical, and nearly dry, falls short of. However, it was difficult to ignore the fact that something truly out of the ordinary was taking place during the September 2020 signing ceremony on the White House’s South Lawn, where ministers from Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel shook hands in front of cameras while flags stood erect in the late summer breeze. Israel was being openly recognized by Arab nations. Not a coded language. Back-channel…

It’s odd to notice, but once you do, it’s impossible to ignore. Every time a bank counter employee murmurs, “enter your PIN number,” a minor linguistic crime occurs. The acronym already includes the word “number.” Technically speaking, repeating it means saying “personal identification number number.” But hardly anyone recoils. Even the people who create these systems use the phrase because it has become so subtle in everyday speech. The acronym is fairly straightforward. PINs, or personal identification numbers, are brief numerical codes that are used to confirm identity when conducting electronic transactions. It is typically four to six digits long…

Three dots at the end of a sentence have a subtle allure. They don’t yell. They don’t press the issue. They simply linger, much like a friend might stop in the middle of a sentence in a café and glance out the window before completing a thought. Even though the ellipsis is arguably the most expressive punctuation mark in English, most people who use it frequently have never given it much thought. Formally, an ellipsis is a set of three consecutive dots that indicates something has been omitted, trailed off, or held back. It is mainly treated as a marker…

Nowadays, the first thing you notice when you walk through a mid-sized Oregon machine shop is the calm, not the sound or the smell of cutting oil. Cycle times are written in dry-erase marker on a whiteboard close to the loading bay by a group of workers. A foreman frowns, nods, and points to a number. A program that, a year ago, hardly anyone outside the state had heard of can be found somewhere in that subdued choreography. Governors from Tennessee to Ohio are now wondering how Oregon managed to pull it off. For those who have worked with it,…

When something horrible occurs in the early hours of a Monday, a certain silence descends upon a small Southern high school. You can sense it on the sidewalks outside Pendleton High, in the way teachers approach the front desk a little more slowly, and in the way the parking lot fills up with people carrying cards and flowers instead of the commotion of a typical school day, as well as in the kind of quiet that doesn’t really need to be translated. Situated in a peaceful area of Anderson County, South Carolina, Pendleton High School is the kind of place…

It began with a screen and a long period of empty afternoons, just like so many bizarre educational journeys these days. Vivan Mirchandani was 11, locked inside his home in India during the worst weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic, scrolling through physics videos when most kids his age were burning hours on mobile games. The image, which shows a boy in a quiet room with the nation shut down outside and a professor from halfway around the world giving a lecture, has an almost cinematic quality. He was going to stray from the path his classmates were taking, even though…

With folders on the table, courteous handshakes, and photographers moving around to get the ideal angle, the signing ceremony in Tashkent this April carried the quiet weight that sometimes accompanies government events. However, there was something less ordinary going on behind the formality. Uzbekistan recently joined the Global Platform for Access to Childhood Cancer Medicines, a collaboration between WHO and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, as one of just six pilot nations. The agreement is more than just a paper milestone for the 3,500 children in the nation who receive cancer diagnoses every year. It’s a line of supply. FieldDetailsCountry…

When you walk through practically any school today, the first thing you notice is how much the furniture hasn’t changed. There are still rows of desks. The whiteboards continue to creak. The laptops are newer, but the architecture of the time—bell, lesson, bell, lesson—hasn’t really changed. There’s also a slightly worn-out smell of disinfectant that wasn’t present before 2020. It appears as though a different building was affected by the pandemic. Profile: Cambridge Perspective on Post-Pandemic PedagogyDetailsInstitutionUniversity of Cambridge, Faculty of EducationField of FocusPedagogy, education in emergencies, digital learning equityGeographic ReachPartnerships with over 25 governments worldwidePeriod of InquiryThree decades of…