Problemas de champán / Champagne Problems:

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Problemas de champán / Champagne Problems:

The phrase “champagne problems,” recently popularized by the Taylor Swift song of the same name, describes luxury problems that aren’t so bad in the context of everything else going on in the world. So here’s a little “champagne problem”… our efforts and the efforts of our partner, Juarez & Associates in Guatemala to promote the use of the Bloom book-creation software and Bloom Reader have worked spectacularly well, to the point that the team behind the program has had to scramble to manage all the traffic. We are happy to be victims of such success…

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Introducing SIL Africa Learning & Development’s New(ish) Website!

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Introducing SIL Africa Learning & Development’s New(ish) Website!

If you’ve never visited the continent of Africa yourself, you may have some misconceptions about it. Perhaps you didn’t even know it was a continent (not a country)!

Africa is the second largest and second most populous continent on the planet. It’s a place of endless variety and well worth knowing about, filled with not just the pyramids and elephants you’ve seen on television, but also bustling urban centers where innovation and business continue to grow in leaps and bounds.

One great way to explore the many countries of Africa is through their beautiful and varied languages. And there’s no better organization for gaining insight into those languages than our friends over at SIL Africa Learning & Development…

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A River Too Difficult to Swim

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A River Too Difficult to Swim

When Dr. Susan Nyaga started school in rural Tharaka, Kenya, instruction was not offered in her mother tongue of Kitharaka, but in Kimenti, a neighboring language. Not only that, but the school added two more languages to the curriculum—English and Swahili—bringing the total number of languages she had to deal with to four. That’s a lot for any six-year-old to handle, and there was no structure in place to help her make that transition. Susan likens her experience to having a very narrow, weak bridge that she and her classmates had to use across a swelling river…

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From Comix to Comics

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From Comix to Comics

Dr. Fraser Bennett studied French in high school, but may have learned more from the stack of Astérix comics in the back of the classroom than from the actual instruction.

It’s not a condemnation of high school education, as much as an insight into the fact that if you want kids to learn, you’ve got to speak to them in a language that they know and understand. It is also indicative of the fact that there are many, many ways a person can come to have a love of languages.

It might be argued that a love of languages is in Fraser’s blood…

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A Global Education Crisis (and how to resolve it)

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A Global Education Crisis (and how to resolve it)

Humans are in trouble.

We’ve always had our problems, but the exponential acceleration of technology and information has at the same time accelerated the rate at which we, as a species, are hurtling toward a number of crises of our own creation: for example, the growing environmental crisis; and the global issue of expanding income disparity.

A recent World Bank Report on ending educational poverty highlights another growing crisis—the fact that in lower-income countries, as much as 90% of ten-year-old students cannot read a simple book…

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the Imagination to Rise

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the Imagination to Rise

The challenge of any creative journey is that there is always a sense in which you are starting without a map. In the country of Uganda, the Ministry of Education and Sports (MoES) had a policy and commitment to mother tongue instruction. The Uganda MoES understood that a child who can’t understand the language of instruction cannot learn, and that an educated populace is the foundation of a country’s development…

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A Bridge to Other Worlds

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A Bridge to Other Worlds

Imagine for a moment that you’re a small child with a love of books. We may be biased, but we think that makes you pretty much “a small child,” period, because we believe that all children love books! Anyway, imagine we bring you, a small child, into a vast library filled with hundreds or even thousands of brightly colored books.

The colors! The pictures! The beautiful words!

You’ve heard about books. Someone has told you of the worlds these books will open up to you, so you head for the closest shelf and pluck off a promising title with an intriguing cover image of a baby cradling a giant grasshopper. What a mysterious image! …

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Redirecting the Spotlight

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Redirecting the Spotlight

Dr. Susan Malone does not like to talk about herself. Not, she says, when “there are too many much more important things to talk about, such as the children in non-dominant language communities who are discriminated against in formal education systems.”

The strength of an organization is always its people, and SIL LEAD’s strength comes from the fact that its staff and associates always seem to insist on shining the spotlight away from themselves and onto the people with whom they work. In a world grown obsessed with the ephemera of fame, it is good to be reminded that everyone has a voice worth hearing, and that all too often some voices are silenced—either intentionally, or by failing to listen…

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