Author: Nelson Rosario

You’ll notice something that doesn’t quite fit the definition of “education” when you walk into practically any good preschool classroom on a Tuesday morning. Some kids are using wooden blocks to construct unbalanced towers. Paint is all over the place, even on the elbow of a young boy who doesn’t seem to care. A plastic dinosaur is the subject of a loud negotiation between two girls in the corner. Additionally, if you can see her, the teacher is crouching next to a child and asking questions instead of responding. On the surface, it appears to be well-organized chaos. In actuality,…

Between a child’s first word and their first day of school, a silent decision is made about everything that will happen in the future. The majority of people don’t give that window much thought. Early childhood educators do. They consider it all the time, and the good ones realize that the first twelve years of life are not a time for learning. It is education in its purest and most fundamental form. Based on this knowledge, New Brunswick Community College has developed a two-year diploma program. If you look closely enough, the NBCC Early Childhood Education program feels more like…

A teacher kneeling at eye level, asking the right questions rather than providing answers, a child quietly correcting another’s block tower, and tiny hands pressing shapes into clay are all examples of what the policy debates never quite capture when you walk into almost any pre-K classroom on a Tuesday morning. It doesn’t appear to be education as most people think. However, it is. Furthermore, a growing body of research indicates that it may be the most significant type. Since the Enlightenment, early childhood education has been studied. It is broadly defined as any formal or informal learning that occurs…

In an interview with Pitchfork, Billie Eilish shared a moment that sums up her upbringing. She is discussing math, not standardized tests or quadratic equations, but measuring ingredients in a kitchen with her mother and determining how the numbers change when a recipe is doubled. She remarked, almost casually, “I learned math by cooking with my mom,” as though this were the most obvious thing in the world. And perhaps it was for her. There was never a school hallway where Billie Eilish was. She never sat through a lunch period she didn’t want to and never raised her hand…

A teacher’s browser tabs contain a certain kind of chaos. Typically, there are sixteen of them: one for the gradebook, one for the quiz generator, one for the parent messaging tool, a few more for lesson planning materials, and the curriculum document itself, tucked away somewhere beneath it all. This was simply acknowledged as a necessary expense of contemporary education for many years. Either the mess controlled you or you controlled the mess. Every morning when you stroll through a TDSB school, you feel as though something has subtly changed. It seems less common to switch tabs frantically. Teachers appear…

The fact that one of Food Network’s most recognizable faces, Anne Burrell, started her academic career with a copy of Shakespeare rather than a knife kit is subtly telling. She was sitting in a classroom at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, earning a Bachelor of Arts in English and Communications long before she was breaking down Italian sauces on television or putting inexperienced home cooks through culinary boot camp. In 1991, she received her degree. It’s the kind of biographical detail that is often overlooked when discussing her cooking, but it most likely had a greater influence on her…

Homeschooling parents are familiar with a specific type of Tuesday morning. Three separate notebooks are open, a math lesson is halfway through, coffee is cooling on the counter, and somewhere in the stack is an attendance sheet that hasn’t been touched in two weeks. Mostly, it’s organized chaos. And for a long time, homeschooling was simply accepted. But something has changed. A new class of digital planning systems has emerged to meet the quiet, low-key demands of a generation of homeschooling families. The concept is fairly straightforward: you most likely need real school-level organization if you’re operating a school out…

Arriving on Tuesday morning on West Willow Street in Lafayette, Louisiana, has an almost disarming quality. The gate is still closed. Parents are sipping coffee or checking their phones while their children are pressed up against the back-seat windows of a line of cars parked along the curb. The drop-off starts at 7:50. The gate closes at 8:20. It has a straightforward, nearly unremarkable rhythm until you enter and begin to realize what this place is really trying to accomplish. The Lafayette Parish School System, one of Louisiana’s biggest public school systems, is home to the Truman Early Childhood Education…

The fact that Scarlett Johansson, the actress whose movies have now made over $15 billion worldwide, was once a seven-year-old standing in front of a mirror and staring at herself until she sobbed has an almost poetic quality. She wasn’t acting as dramatic as kids can be at times. She was rehearsing. Carefully. Methodically. She was working toward something she couldn’t quite put her finger on yet, but she wouldn’t give up. In some way, that picture captures the essence of her training in this craft. Johansson, the daughter of a Danish architect and a New York producer, was raised…

The part of Kobe Bryant’s story that took place before the arenas, the championships, and the Black Mamba moniker became popular is one that is rarely discussed. It’s the more subdued tale of a young child who traveled between continents, picked up languages, studied game tape from his grandfather, and made the remarkably clear decision to follow his gut rather than the traditional route that all the other teenagers in his immediate vicinity seemed to be taking. In 1978, Kobe Bean Bryant was born in Philadelphia. His father, Joe Bryant, a journeyman NBA player who had built a respectable career,…