Going to school doesn’t have to entail boring lectures and multiple choice tests. In fact, using humor can be a great way for people to learn.
In the 30 second clip below, a man follows a beautiful woman on the beach. He, with his dark eyes and chiseled features, stares at the woman and tells her seductively, “Persueychon.” No response. He repeats “Persueychon” again and again. Finally, she asks him, “Did you mean, ‘Persuasion?'”
The ad is one of the many humorous videos from Open English, a 24/7 online platform that teaches Latin speakers how to speak English fluently. The online school, which has its headquarters in Miami, launched in 2008 and has already amassed 100,000 students worldwide — including 5,000 in America. While there is already a sea of computer-based language classes such as Rosetta Stone and Babbel, Open English just focuses on one language: English. It’s also more affordable than other programs. For about $80 a month, Open English students listen in on live lectures in small classrooms with native English speakers around the clock.
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“We wanted to create something that was monthly and cheap and allowed you to get started,” Open English CEO Andres Moreno said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “That has been the niche Open English has filled.”
The school has certainly cornered the market — especially since it’s been pegged as something that could help Latin Americans step up the career ladder. The Journal reports that Open English is now valued at $350 million after recently raising $120 million in venture capital. Investors apparently saw the potential of an increasingly tech-savvy Latin American middle class.
According to Education News, half of Latin Americans (around 300 million people) use the Internet. And in the past year, there has been a 17 percent increase of Internet-use within that population.
“The demographics are there,” Cate Ambrose, president of the Latin American Private Equity & Venture Capital Association told the WSJ. “You have a growing middle class and a young demographic with a climbing increase in the consumption of technology.”
If this creates more Latin American success stories, we are all for it.
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Tag: English
A High School That’s Open Late — But Not for the Kids
These days, Hackensack High School in New Jersey stays open long after the kids have gone home. The classrooms are filled by students’ parents, seeking their own education.
“To take ESL classes in the U.S. is very expensive, so when I heard they are giving English class in the high school, I said I want to go,” says Albina Cruz, who came to the U.S. as a teenager, but didn’t feel pressure to learn English until she had children of her own. “I know that it’s very hard when [they] do homework and don’t have anyone to check if it’s right or wrong,” Cruz says.
The mother of two is one of 350 parents who have participated in the new program — launched in 2012 by the Hackensack school district where 60 percent of students are Hispanic — designed to help immigrant parents become more involved in their children’s education. Diana Bermudez, parent outreach facilitator for the school district, spearheaded the program and says parent attendance at school meetings has more than quadrupled since the program began.
A recent study published in the New York Times confirms there is no clear consensus on whether parental involvement does improve a child’s academic performance, but Bermudez says thats not just about academics, its also about building a stronger community. “We try to work as a team where everyone can give back, everyone can do a little something to help us all move on and that’s the culture we’re creating.”
The Surprising Secret to Improving Math Skills
With the emphasis on preparing our youth for careers in science, technology, engineering and math, it seems like reading and writing have fallen by the wayside. But according to the Hechinger Report, there’s hope for lovers of the written word. In a new paper from Stanford University and University of Virginia, “Learning that Lasts: Unpacking Variation in Teachers’ Effects on Students’ Long-Term Knowledge,” researchers studied 700,000 third-through-eighth graders over eight years and found that students with good English teachers had better math skills in the long term. Interestingly, having a good math teacher did not have the same long term benefits on a student’s English skills, the report said. It’s unclear why English helps boost math scores, but it’s suggested that English is necessary for other subjects (word problems in math, for example) whereas you don’t need math to write essays or read books. This news comes shortly after a promising report from the Association of American Colleges and Universities finding that liberal arts majors close the salary and unemployment gap compared with their STEM peers over time. So to educators and policy makers everywhere—if we want a brighter future, let’s have our kids read great books, too.
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