Author: paige laevy

Barrio Guayaney is located in the northern part of Manatí, a municipality on the north coast of Puerto Rico, where the karst hills give way to a flatter, greener terrain as the Río Grande de Manatí flows into the Atlantic. Piaget Bilingual Academy, located off the main Route 2 corridor along Ramal 686, has been one of the municipality’s private school options for decades. It is a PK–ninth grade institution whose name carries a philosophical debt that most schools named after famous thinkers do not bother to explain or honor. This one does, or attempts to do so. The name…

A thirteen-year-old from Ljubljana relocated to Madrid in the fall of 2012 to train with Real Madrid’s basketball junior academy. In exchange for a training environment that was both the best basketball development pathway in Europe and a huge personal bet, he was leaving his country, his family’s daily proximity, and any normal adolescence that might have been available to him. This was not an easy or obvious decision. His name was Luka Dončić, and the academic and athletic education he received in Madrid over the following six years produced a professional basketball player who was already a professional by…

There are two types of persons wearing earphones on their morning commute, wherever that may be. Listening to music or podcasts in their mother tongue is the first type. The second involves listening to a conversation in Portuguese, Mandarin, or German while periodically making nearly imperceptible mouth movements to correspond with the syllables. The second type typically consists of people who have already made the decision to learn many languages and have discovered—usually via trial and error—that a day’s dead time is not truly dead. While everyone else is waiting for a designated study block that never happens, committed language…

Many of the most serious JEE and NEET candidates quietly make a decision in the coaching hubs of Kota, Rajasthan, where the streets surrounding the exam preparation institutes are crowded with students carrying heavy textbooks and the stress of entrance exam season is evident in the faces of teenagers who have frequently left home for the first time. Instead of attending a traditional school, they enroll in NIOS for their Class XI and XII certification. There is no daily class schedule or attendance requirement to compete with the twelve to fourteen-hour study days required for competitive exam preparation. In the…

Anyone who has attempted to translate a WordPress website into multiple languages is aware of how quickly the process gets complicated. For years, the most frustrating aspects of multilingual WordPress work have been the standard methods: navigating between admin panels, searching through string translation interfaces, and watching a plugin translate your meticulously crafted copy into something that sounds like it went through three languages before arriving at the target. TranslatePress was created as a direct response to that annoyance. It is based on a single design choice that, although it seems apparent at first, the majority of rival plugins have…

There are a few books that successfully define the discourse in the conference rooms and classrooms where language policy is decided. One of these is Ofelia García’s Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective, which significantly altered the nature of the debate itself rather than resolving every disagreement over teaching children in two languages. The book, which was published by Wiley-Blackwell and is used in teacher education programs all over the United States, Europe, and beyond, explores bilingualism as a social and political phenomenon as well as a personal cognitive experience. It addresses issues that policy documents frequently…

Imagine a classroom in Sindh, Pakistan, where a group of seven-year-olds who speak Sindhi at home and have no exposure to any other language outside of their immediate family are being taught mathematics in English by the teacher. The kids are seated in silence. They’re not studying math. They are attempting to decipher the teacher’s noises, and the two tasks—mathematics and language acquisition—are vying for the same cognitive bandwidth in a brain that hasn’t yet fully developed either ability. The instructor, who has received training in a second language herself, is following instructions. Because the medium of education expected a…

Teachers at Toronto District School Board schools were attempting to instruct an entire class of students through a screen in the winter of 2020—something that most of them had never done before—without any prior notice, training, or tools that were either too familiar to be helpful or too unfamiliar to function well under pressure. With over 236,000 students spread across almost 600 schools, the TDSB was Canada’s largest English-language public school board. Brightspace, a learning management system created by D2L Corporation and provided to Ontario school boards at no cost by the Ministry of Education, was the platform that took…

The school day is divided in half in a dual-language classroom in San Jose, California: academic blocks in English in the morning and Spanish in the afternoon. The same pupils are in both halves, traversing both languages with ease and often with no effort. Visitors frequently start by seeing how effortlessly the kids transition between the two—not the halting, self-conscious switching of someone learning a new language, but the fluid alternation of someone who naturally operates in many registers. The cognitive process that underlies this is known as executive function, according to researchers who study it in lab settings. Working…

The school is located in a section of Urban María Santa Ana in Vega Alta, on the north coast of Puerto Rico, where Colegio de la Vega had stood. By the standards of organizations that claim to be among the best in the nation, the facility is not very big, but NW Bilingual Academy has always been more concerned with what goes on inside than with size. Four years after starting as a sports project, the school and its athletic department have received national prominence, according to the school’s own assessment of its trajectory. Such a claim is simple to…