A group of first graders are crouched over sheets of butcher paper in a brightly lit classroom in Northern California, holding crayons like carpenters hold tools. They haven’t started writing yet. They’re not even reading. They are sketching a dog with too many teeth, a flooded street, a dragon, and a grandmother. The pencils are only removed once the painting is complete. Additionally, a recent line of research coming out of Stanford suggests that this minor change in order may be doing something subtly amazing: about doubling these kids’ reading comprehension. The discovery is the type that initially sounds almost…
Author: Janine Heller
You don’t happen upon the road that leads to the small Appalachian town where Google has chosen to locate its newest creative learning lab by chance. It winds past closed shops, a Dollar General that serves as the unofficial town square, and a high school where, until recently, the computers in the computer lab were older than the majority of the students. You wouldn’t think a tech giant would be interested in this kind of location. And yet, here we are. According to Google’s measured language, the company’s decision to support a creative learning lab in rural Appalachia is part…
A nine-year-old is politely but firmly debating the location of her imaginary library’s front door in a Eugene classroom. She has an opinion, a pencil, and a ruler that is a little too large for her hand. According to her partner, the door should be on the east side. She doesn’t agree. Scenes like this give the impression that something more than a craft project is going on. These children are not merely sketching structures. They are learning how to defend a choice. That is the unspoken goal of the long-running Oregon program Architects in Schools, which expands into a…
You might see something that doesn’t quite fit the contemporary picture of early education if you walk into a kindergarten classroom in Cambridge or, increasingly, in a small district in Iowa. No tiny easels with tablets on them. No reward chirping phonics apps. Rather, a young child sits on the floor with a deck of tiny wooden cards and flips them over one by one in an attempt to identify the pattern her teacher has just laid out. The child is unaware that the cards are binary, consisting of ones and zeros. She simply recognizes the intrigue of the game.…
A seven-year-old is adhering bottle caps to a kitchen table-sized piece of cardboard on a muggy Tuesday in late June, off a quiet block in Crown Heights. She refers to it as a “weather machine.” No one has instructed her on what to construct. She is not being timed by anyone. Walking by, a counselor wearing a T-shirt splattered with paint looks at the device and inquires as to whether it controls wind or rain. After giving it some serious thought, much like an adult would with a tax question, the girl responds, “Both. But mostly wind.” Summer at the…
Most people delete a specific type of email without reading it. It arrives with a subject line that is just formal enough to raise suspicions, sandwiched between grocery coupons and shipping confirmations. “Notice of Proposed Class Action Settlement.” Many Dollar General customers received one of those earlier this year, and based on online chatter, an unexpected number thought it was spam and moved on. It wasn’t. The window of opportunity to take action is now closing. The case itself is straightforward, but as usual, patience is rewarded by the fine print. The discount chain was sued in New Jersey for…
This spring, any rural co-op in Iowa or Missouri will still have the recognizable yellow-and-green jugs stacked waist-high behind the seed corn along the back wall. Roundup is still available. Farmers continue to purchase it by the pallet. However, a settlement worth up to $7.25 billion, one of the biggest product-liability agreements in American agricultural history, is still pending approval somewhere in a St. Louis courthouse. The length of time this story has been developing is easily forgotten. When Bayer acquired Monsanto in 2018, it inherited what many analysts at the time described as a good deal. Within a year,…
When a judge discovers that a case being cited just doesn’t exist, a certain kind of silence descends upon the courtroom. No theatrical outrage, no intense legal drama. A brief pause, a thoughtful inquiry, and an exhausting afternoon for the receiving lawyer. Incompetence in the traditional sense is not the cause of the silence that has been occurring more frequently lately. It is more recent, unfamiliar, and challenging to regulate. Due to time constraints and pressure, attorneys have begun to delegate their thinking to chatbots. Silently, the issue surfaced. A solicitor here, a junior barrister there, each silently pasting questions…
The National Association of REALTORS® announced on Friday that it had agreed to pay $52.25 million to settle a homebuyer class-action lawsuit in which it was not even officially named. This announcement was buried in the type of press release that typically goes unnoticed. It’s worth stopping to consider that final detail. NAR’s decision to accept the Tuccori settlement feels more like deliberate triage than a legal retreat. There is a feeling that the trade association would prefer to write a sizable check rather than spend another ten years defending itself in front of juries after suffering two years of…
When the presenter clicked to the slide that everyone had come to see at a recent education conference in Boston, the auditorium was remarkably silent. It has a bar chart on it. Students receiving human tutoring are on one side. Conversely, students are tutored by a laptop-based AI system. The AI bar was higher. Just tall enough to cause the room’s seats to shift, not dramatic or theatrical. The study, which was published this spring, monitored about 2,000 middle school students over the course of an academic term in multiple districts. Particularly in algebra readiness and problem-solving speed, students who…