Author: paige laevy

Many WordPress site owners are familiar with this strange moment: one morning, you open your analytics and discover that an increasing percentage of your visitors are from places where no one speaks English. Almost patiently, the numbers remain silent. And Polylang comes into play somewhere between that insight and the choice to take action. The WP Syntex team created the plugin in 2011, and it currently powers more than 800,000 websites worldwide. That is not a negligible figure. Disney makes use of it. It is used by UNESCO. Rakuten makes use of it. When a company of that size makes…

Nick Nugent still finds it difficult to describe a particular moment. A man wearing a stocking cap slipped discreetly into the back row on the first night of his international marketing course at Boston College’s Carroll School of Management in January 2014. At first, Nugent, a thirty-year college professor who had taught on three continents and written more articles than he could remember, assumed it was just a basketball player who was running late. The hat then fell off. “Jesus Christ, that’s Kobe Bryant,” he thought. It was. Bryant was in Boston with the Lakers, who were playing the Celtics…

A certain type of school doesn’t make a big announcement about itself. Not a billboard. There was no eye-catching postcard about an open house in the mailbox. Nestled in Bellevue, Washington’s Crossroads neighborhood, Bel-Red Bilingual Academy occupies a 6,000-square-foot building with air-conditioned classrooms and a shuttle bus in front. Its address is 15061 Bel-Red Road. Driving past it is simple. Once inside, it’s more difficult to forget. The school operates between a full immersion language program and a Montessori philosophy, which sounds ambitious—possibly even overstuffed—until you see it in action. Toddlers as young as 15 months are navigating learning centers—Practical…

It seems almost paradoxical. In the educational system, educators who work with children during their most formative years—from infancy to age twelve—are frequently the least visible professionals. Convocation ceremonies were not broadcast on television. Not a headline. Just rooms full of tiny people learning how to be human under the guidance of adults who made this conscious decision. The Early Childhood Education diploma program at New Brunswick Community College is one of those options that doesn’t draw much attention. However, it most likely ought to. When you look at the curriculum, which spans two years of full-time study, you’ll notice…

Language researchers discuss a brief incident in which a young child, speaking only the language of her parents’ native country, arrives at a European school for the first time and looks at a chalkboard full of words she is still unable to read. Technically, she speaks multiple languages while she waits. However, decisions made by educators, parents, governments, and time will determine the type of multilingualism she develops. It’s possible that most people are unaware of the variety of ways multilingualism can manifest itself. They believe it just refers to multilingualism. It turns out that nearly everything is missed by…

One aspect of Donald Trump often gets lost in the din of protests, court proceedings, and social media outbursts. He traveled to Wharton. The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, one of the nation’s most competitive business programs, is neither a state institution nor a business certificate program. That specific fact has always sat there silently, demanding to be taken seriously, regardless of your opinion of him. After enrolling in the New York Military Academy as a teenager in Queens, Trump graduated in 1968. On its own, the military school portion is fascinating. It’s a different childhood…

On any weekday morning, you’ll notice something if you stroll through the neighborhoods surrounding Winter Park, Florida. Cars parked outside a small but tidy building, parents bending down to kiss young children’s foreheads before giving them to teachers who greet them, sometimes in Spanish and sometimes in English. Babyland Bilingual Academy doesn’t make a big deal out of itself. No eye-catching billboard is present. Families that find it, however, are more likely to stay and, more significantly, to communicate. The academy is situated in an area that seems planned rather than haphazard. Inside, the arrangement embodies a philosophy that most…

Somewhere in a classroom right now, a three-year-old is effortlessly switching between two languages in the middle of a sentence without even realizing she’s doing something amazing. Her teachers are aware of it. When it’s time for pickup, her parents are silently observing through the window. It’s simple to overlook the fact that her brain is performing a function that scientists have been debating for decades. Raising a child who speaks two languages was thought to cause confusion, a sort of cognitive traffic jam, for a long time. That opinion proved to be incorrect. It was first undermined by Peal…

When most people hear the word “multilingual,” they envision someone sitting confidently at a dinner table and effortlessly switching between Mandarin and French. Despite its flattering appearance, that image is probably deceptive most of the time. Compared to any idealized version, the true multilingual meaning—what it actually describes in practice—is far messier, far more fascinating, and far more human. Since 1992, linguist Vivian Cook has maintained that most multilingual speakers fall between two extremes: someone who can order coffee or ask for directions in a foreign city, and someone who has complete native-level proficiency in multiple languages. Cook refers to…

Around the beginning of each academic year, the IT department of a school experiences a certain level of frustration. There are thousands of students, hundreds of logins, dozens of apps, and somewhere in the middle of it all is a child staring at a screen that won’t let them in. One of the biggest urban districts in Texas, San Antonio Independent School District, was familiar with that annoyance. A collaboration with ClassLink was what altered the situation, at least significantly. The name ClassLink isn’t very eye-catching. It doesn’t receive the same level of attention as larger consumer tech firms. However,…