Author: paige laevy

In a scene from the classic Mexican telenovela María la del Barrio, a character calls the heroine “escuincla babosa” (roughly, spoiled brat) with a theatrical rage that can only be found in daytime drama. It’s the kind of moment that makes seasoned viewers applaud and new viewers laugh. Additionally, it turns out that telenovelas are surprisingly effective training materials for artificial intelligence learning to speak Spanish because they contain precisely the kind of unfiltered, emotionally charged, culturally specific dialogue. Lorena Mesa, chair of the Python Software Foundation and a data engineer at GitHub, came up with this concept out of…

When half of the students don’t fully comprehend what the teacher is saying, a certain kind of invisibility descends upon the classroom. It’s not very loud. No one rushes out. The children remain seated, their faces composed into what appears to be comprehension, their pencils moving. It’s possible that the majority of the teachers in these rooms are fully aware of the situation, which is that meaning is being lost somewhere between their English instruction and the Spanish-speaking student in the third row. However, with thirty more pupils to oversee and an unrelenting curriculum, the disparity subtly grows. This is…

In one version of Hailee Steinfeld’s life, she completes middle school, attends prom, and perhaps pursues a career in theater. There is no such version. The one that does includes a swear jar on a Coen brothers movie set, an Academy Award nomination before the age of fifteen, and a gradual but purposeful departure from traditional education that started out as something more intimate and possibly more complex than a Hollywood cliché. Growing up in Agoura Hills and then Thousand Oaks, California, Steinfeld attended Ascension Lutheran School and Conejo Elementary before briefly attending Colina Middle School in the sixth grade.…

Most website owners eventually reach a point where the analytics dashboard subtly reveals something unsettling, usually around the third or fourth month of consistent traffic. Surprisingly, a large portion of tourists come from nations where English is not the official language. After arriving and taking a quick look around, they depart. Not because the product isn’t suitable for them or the design is flawed. just because nothing on the page speaks to them in a way that makes sense. That is the multilingual gap, which is currently present on Elementor websites worldwide. For obvious reasons, Elementor has taken over as…

Being a teenager who is both a student sitting through chemistry class and a globally recognized face causes a certain type of cognitive dissonance. Finn Wolfhard did just that, moving silently and apparently without losing his balance. By Hollywood standards, his educational journey isn’t particularly dramatic. No GED at sixteen, no triumphant TED Talk about self-teaching, no dropout tale. Just a Vancouver child who attended school, completed it, and, in the process, became well-known. In December 2002, Wolfhard was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, into a Catholic family with German and French ancestry. Not exactly the entertainment industry lineage one…

When you follow the early life of Anne Burrell, who passed away in June 2025 at the age of 55, there is something worth stopping to consider. She was an English and Communications major at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, prior to her spiky platinum hair, the Food Network cameras, and her role as a culinary boot camp instructor for desperate home cooks on Worst Cooks in America. In 1991, she received her degree. That particular detail often gets lost in the background of everything louder that follows. But it matters. Anyone who watched Burrell on TV for a…

In Kentwood, Michigan, there is a structure on Breton Road SE that doesn’t appear to be a school to most people. When it first opened in 2025, it catered to kids who were still years away from learning how to do long division or read chapter books. However, the very fact that it exists at all—it is state-of-the-art, purpose-built, and staffed by a full administrative team that includes a director, an assistant principal, and a dean—says something about how at least one Midwest school district has chosen to approach the early years. The Hamilton Early Childhood Center is Kentwood Public…

During an all-Spanish math class at Pueblo Elementary in Scottsdale, Arizona, first graders raise their hands. Both languages are displayed on the walls: an English color chart and a Spanish vocabulary list. The kids don’t appear to be aware of the change. That’s kind of the point. Although dual language immersion programs have been expanding steadily in the US for decades, the rate has accelerated in ways that seem truly noteworthy. Currently, 44 states are home to more than 3,600 programs. Although the model has spread far beyond its coastal strongholds, a significant portion of them are found in California,…

In order to provide Indian expatriates working throughout Asia with a place to send their children without compromising the curriculum they were accustomed to back home, a small school with 48 students opened on Mount Sophia in Singapore in 2002. At that time, nobody was probably considering Tokyo, Abu Dhabi, or Ho Chi Minh City. And yet, here we are. With 64 campuses and approximately 45,000 students enrolled, Global Indian International School, or GIIS as most people refer to it, currently operates in 11 countries. It’s the kind of growth trajectory that is genuinely unexpected up close and appears inevitable…

Most foreign online retailers quietly collapse somewhere between ambition and architecture. A Rotterdam store owner chooses to enter the French and Spanish markets. They assume the difficult part is done after installing WordPress, configuring WooCommerce, and adding a translation plugin. Three months later, Lyon customers are abandoning their carts because the price appears in dollars, product descriptions are only partially translated, and checkout pages are still displayed in English. Intention was never the issue. Infrastructure was involved. WordPress is not multilingual by default. It has never done so. The platform is adaptable enough to accommodate a variety of languages, but…