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Newsletter | 2024 Referendum | Gell-Man Amnesia Effect
Your Kid’s Classroom Now Has Better Decor Than Your Living Room
Kayleigh Sloan’s students are years from drinking coffee. But every day, when the first and second-graders burst into class, they get a taste of cafe culture: Sloan has meticulously renovated the room to channel a 1970s coffee shop.
Her classroom in Northern Idaho is now bathed in brown, cream and beige, for a “homey, cozy feeling,” as the 27-year-old teacher puts it. Thrifted bohemian rugs, groovy flower pillows, wicker baskets and a mod green armchair round out the ambience.
“I have been in a boring classroom where you can’t wait to leave,” she says, “but a decorated classroom that’s outside the norm is fun and inspiring.” And, “It can affect the way they learn.”
Teachers have long poured energy into enhancing their learning spaces. But now, some are crafting spaces that could grace Architectural Digest.
Award-winning Japanese mathematician Kenji Fukaya has left Stony Brook University in the US to join China’s Tsinghua University as a full-time professor.
Fukaya, previously a permanent member of the Simons Centre for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook, delivered his first lecture at Tsinghua on September 11, according to the university’s Yau Mathematical Sciences Centre.
The widely-used wordfreq database of English word frequencies will no longer be updated
Another microschool owner, Shiren Rattigan, referring to the absenteeism, low pay, and culture wars in public schools, told me, “We see all these different things in societies and how it comes into the school. We’re so done with it.”
“Teachers are really wanting a space where they can express themselves,” added Rattigan, whose company, Colossal Academy, operates four microschools in the Sunshine State. “And in Florida, it’s really about being able to run a sustainable business that can be out of the red in three years, so you can make a good living for yourself doing your calling.”
The four microschool owners and handful of microschool teachers I spoke to told me parents like the fact they can be more involved in their children’s education. “Families want to understand what’s going on,” Rattigan said. “They might not understand all the education stuff, but they want to be a part of the education of their child.”
Notes on the $2,400,000,000 in redistributed federal taxpayer funds sent to Wisconsin K-12 systems
Bookmobiles. Online mental health. Reading coaches. Robots. Therapy dogs.
These are all things Wisconsin school districts have been able to bring to students because of the $2.4 billion in federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, or ESSER, funding.
ESSER dollars were meant to help students make up for learning loss brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether that’s been accomplished is hard to measure. But there’s no question the millions of dollars that went to schools over the last three years provided educators with an opportunity to hire staff and create programs they wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.