🙋♀️ Raise your hand if you’ve ever been victimized by a green owl.
Duolingo’s mascot Duo has spent a decade guilt-tripping adults into four minutes of Portuguese a day. Results vary. Nobody has ever cleared a graduation requirement with a streak.
A credit recovery teacher needed something sturdier. Her state had a requirement to provide support in up to 23 languages, and as luck would have it, her staff spoke only a few of them.
She brought the list to Marco Huerta, our Head of Engineering, who still writes code, runs a seven-person team and sits in real classrooms up to six times a month.
"Nobody speaks 23 languages," Marco says.
The requirement stood anyway. What saved her was something she could set up in an afternoon, without learning a new language or filing a hiring request.
More on that below.
Here’s what’s on the dashboard this week:
Today’s Deep Dive: When the teacher and student speak different languages
Reading Rainbow: Is this the end for grammar worksheets?
From Our Desk: Subject’s big move
Watch of the Week: Masters of the
UniverseClassroom
The settings every roster leaves out
Every student walks in with a few settings already flipped. Language is the one everybody notices, mostly because states write memos about it. The other three rarely make it onto a roster at all.
Marco sits in real classrooms up to six times a month. He watched a teacher turn the first setting and assume the rest came along for the ride. They did not.
"There is such a thing as reading levels."
— Marco Huerta, Head of Engineering, Subject
Three settings
Language: The supporting-more-langages problem had an answer that involved hiring nobody, thanks to the way Marco and his team have built the Subject platform.
Reading level: A student can follow a lesson in their own language and still read a few grades different from where that lesson sits. Language got handled. Comprehension did not.
Format: Some students need the material read out loud, or explained a second way, before it sticks.
Turning one setting and calling it handled is how a student ends up technically served and functionally stuck. The other three take an afternoon to set, which is less time than most of us spend hunting for the good stapler. Trust us, an afternoon is worth the lifelong impact you’ll make in your students’ lives.
Read how Subject helps teachers set each of the four settings before the semester gets away from them.
Parent conferences finally get a dress rehearsal: Researchers at Australia's La Trobe University built a talking robot named Fletch that plays an upset parent, so new teachers can practice keeping their cool before a real conference goes sideways. The team fed it 176 real parent encounters collected from veteran educators, which makes Fletch the first coworker whose entire job description is being mad at you on purpose.
Nashville doubles up on teachers: At Mt. View Elementary in Nashville, English learners make up about 60% of roughly 900 students, so general-ed and EL teachers now lead classrooms side by side. Think buddy-cop movie where both partners actually did the reading.
Grammar worksheets, meet your replacement: Literacy educators Sarah D. Cordova and Whitney La Rocca picked six picture books that teach grammar through read-alouds, where students study one great sentence and talk about what the writer pulled off. Prepositional phrases go down a lot easier coming from a school bus with feelings than from worksheet #47.
The paper notebook is on a comeback tour: Edutopia rounded up research on getting more out of paper notebooks, like having students sketch tough concepts and write their own review questions. It's the only classroom tech that has never once asked to restart for an update in the middle of first period.
Every great class project needs an origin story: Suzie Boss collected the backstories behind projects students truly cared about, including one class that turned storm-downed trees into chainsaw art and auctioned it off to pay for new ones. Proof that the best project ideas start with a real problem and end with somebody holding a chainsaw.
We outgrew our first Austin office in less than a year — and tomorrow, we open our new one. Sneak peek here.
Fort Worth, we loved hanging out with you. It’s all in the details…
Our Head of People just did the unthinkable — she shared the questions she asks in every candidate interview. Save them for the next time you’re hiring or interviewing for a new gig (and learn a bit about our culture in the process).
Watch of the Week: Masters of the Universe
Why we’re obsessed: A $170 million movie about a man who leaves a desk job to go swing a glowing sword at Jared Leto is exactly the kind of thing we want playing at 3:15 on a Friday. Travis Knight, who spent years at Laika moving puppets one frame at a time, made a very loud live-action Mattel adventure, and the tonal whiplash alone is worth the runtime.
Recommended lesson integrations:
Exploring the hero's journey: Prince Adam spends 15 years at a desk before a sword ruins his morning. Map the stages and argue about which one the desk job counts as.
Searching through the skeletal system: Skeletor has no lungs and a great many opinions. Label the bones he's missing, then let the class fight about how he keeps talking.
The math of a box office flop: $170 million to make, roughly $114 million back. Students find the gap, estimate marketing spend and work out what it needed to break even.
Dubbing and word choice: Play one scene dubbed, then the same scene subtitled. Students track what shifts. Same problem Marco's team builds for, minus Eternia.
Toy first, story second: Mattel sold the figure in 1982 and invented the myth later. Hand students a classroom object and 10 minutes to build its origin story and its nemesis.
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Thank you for joining us for another edition of On The Subject. We’ll see you again in a week, with more stories from the hallways.
The Subject Team
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