Author: Nelson Rosario

OMAHA, Nebraska — When a lead feels safe and then gradually stops feeling that way, a ballpark makes a specific sound. On Wednesday night at Charles Schwab Field, North Carolina’s bats created that exact feeling. The Tar Heels had built up a 12-1 lead against West Virginia, but during the seventh and eighth innings, they watched it erode, run by run, until the unc baseball score was 12-7 and nobody in the stadium was completely at ease. In the end, North Carolina prevailed. For the first time since 2007, the Tar Heels will play in the College World Series finals.…

Even decades later, Lawrence Taylor still carries a certain irony with him around Chapel Hill that has nothing to do with Super Bowl rings or sacks. North Carolina has always been a basketball-focused state. You can sense it when you stroll through the Dean Dome on a Saturday afternoon—the banners, the chants, the idea that football is something the university tolerates rather than worships. Nevertheless, the most disruptive defensive player the NFL has ever seen quietly came together on a football field where no one outside of Williamsburg, Virginia, was paying close attention. It wasn’t until he was fifteen that…

Located in Sunbury, Ohio, a sleepy town 25 minutes north of Columbus, Big Walnut High School is the kind of place where Friday night lights still have significance. It’s a strange setting for a controversy that has revealed one of college football’s least talked-about recruiting strategies in less than a week. The five-star wide receiver and Ohio State commit Jamier Brown had no intention of starting anything. He was simply responding to an interview circuit question at the OT7 Finals, where seventeen-year-olds are asked what the most bizarre thing a school has offered them. “A couple schools have offered a…

This story’s plot—a first-grade class, a muddy field outside of Oslo, and a boy named Henrik who happened to look down at the wrong—or perhaps the right—moment—is almost too tidy. Henrik Refsnes Mørtvedt saw something protruding from the ground while Fredheim School students were on a spring outing in the Gran municipality of Norway, close to Brandbu, in late April. It didn’t appear to be a rock. Nor did it appear to be a root. It turned out that he had discovered a sword. It was an actual Viking-era blade that had been lying in that ground for about 1,300…

The photo that was taken outside Wheeler School’s commencement last week is one of those that doesn’t require any background information. A woman wearing dining service blacks had her arms encircled by a boy wearing a black gown and cap, and her face was contorted into a mixture of grief and joy. You can sense the weight of it even if you don’t know their names. However, once you do, the image becomes more complex rather than simpler. The young man is Wheeler senior Philip Spradlin, who will be attending Yale in the fall. The woman is 45-year-old Deon Lucas,…

In the rooms where North African early childhood educators congregate these days, there’s a certain energy that combines long-suppressed frustration with something more akin to cautious hope. The term “rights,” which wasn’t in the local lexicon ten years ago, is now included in discussions that formerly revolved around well-known grievances about underfunded preschools and undertrained caregivers. not the curriculum. not the rates of enrollment. rights. Even though it’s still quiet, a lot of that change is related to the developments surrounding the OMEP World Assembly and Conference in Poznań, Poland, which advocates from Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Egypt are watching…

Something that does not quite fit the typical description of an academic gathering is taking place in Madrid. The chairs quickly fill up. People are positioned along the rear wall. Long after the scheduled sessions are over, conversations continue over coffee and in the hallways. These are the OMEP Spain events, which have recently attracted the kind of enthusiasm you don’t often associate with early childhood education professional development. The World Organization for Early Childhood Education, or OMEP, has been quietly consistent in its operations in Spain for many years. However, something has changed. The number of educators, researchers, kindergarten…

Everybody who has worked in an early childhood setting tends to recall one particular moment. With their hands still and their eyes elsewhere, a child sits a little apart from the group, neither quite present nor distressed. A knowledgeable instructor observes. Not because it’s outlined in a lesson plan, but rather because the task is to observe. OMEP Aotearoa has been arguing for years that education and well-being are not two distinct things that coexist during a child’s first five years of life. This quiet act of observation, reading a child before teaching one, is at the heart of this…

Adorable Bebes is a small daycare located in Kalamazoo County. It lacks both a dedicated arts room and a gymnasium. It lacks both a laminated welcome sign with the school mascot in front of it and a director with a communications team. What it has is Tina Glover, a home-based child care provider who will start providing free, state-funded prekindergarten to four-year-olds inside the kind of setting that most education policy has traditionally ignored sometime this year. Michigan is wagering that establishments such as hers may be precisely what the nation’s early childhood system has been lacking. The PreK for…

When a certain type of policy decision is made, it doesn’t immediately make headlines. Months later, it appears in a pediatrician’s office where the fetal alcohol spectrum disorder pamphlets have subtly vanished from the waiting room rack, or in a rural clinic that no longer provides early autism screenings. The small, unglamorous infrastructure that keeps American children healthy before most people even realize something is wrong is where this story truly resides, not in a congressional chamber. The Department of Health and Human Services has canceled seven federal grants that supported child health programs, according to a recent confirmation from…