Last weekend, I talked about the benefits for Black students of having a Black teacher, benefits that were proven in a long-term study of students in Tennessee. This weekend’s read is a result from another valuable long-term study, this time on children’s brain development. Called the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, it recruited 11,880 children ages 9–10 from 21 sites across the United States and will look at how those kids’ experiences and their bodies’ changing biology affects their brain development over the following several years. Like the study on students, this one is likely to produce dozens, if not hundreds, of research papers with new discoveries.
When Drew Hobson got the opportunity to audition for a video game in 2012, he was thrilled. A self-described comic nerd, he was working with a children’s touring company when the theater’s director heard a video game company was having a hard time finding an African American voice for the lead character in a new game. The director immediately thought of Hobson. So Hobson recorded the audition on his home equipment and sent it in.
“And I got the lead role. And it was amazing ’cause the lead role, where you start out at the first part of the game, and you can play all the way through the game, is African American.”
Imagine yourself in a cathedral-sized classroom. You are surrounded by thousands of classmates from all over the world — Europe, Africa, Asia, South America, and beyond. There is a multitude of languages — a cornucopia of cultures. Now imagine an instructor standing at the helm of the class, her pen racing across a whiteboard. She speaks French or Spanish or Mandarin. Imagine that what language she speaks doesn’t matter because everything she writes and everything she says is instantaneously translated into the language you speak and the language that your classmates speak. And THAT is the future of technology according to Evie Powell, PH.D.
