Teaching & Learning
Education propels change. Stay up to date on the latest educational developments near you and around the world from preschool to post-grad. Here, you'll find out why equitable quality education is essential for fostering healthy and resilient societies.
WasteBar turns cigarette butt waste into food currency in the Netherlands
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM There is a small mobile cart somewhere in the Netherlands right now, and if you bring it a handful of cigarette butts, it will give you poffertjes. Those are Dutch mini pancakes, in case you were wondering, and yes, the exchange is real. WasteBar is the Read More...
How the act of learning to read rewires the brain and changes the way you hear
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Learning to read does something to the brain beyond teaching it to decode text. A new study in Cortex found that adults with formal reading education recruit a distinct region on the right side of the brain when processing unfamiliar spoken sounds. Adults who Read More...
Pro parenting tips to spark your children's life-long love for the great outdoors
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM In today's digital world, the pull of screens can be difficult to overcome, particularly for kids. However, the dangers of spending too much time indoors are serious. Carlene Fider, Ph.D., a core faculty member at Pacific Oaks College, emphasizes the Read More...
Gaza sisters turn rubble into bricks to rebuild their community
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM The house Tala and Farah Mousa were living in was bombed. So they looked at the rubble and started asking what it could become. Their answer is Build Hope, Palestine: a way to turn debris from damaged buildings into reusable blocks. Crushed and sieved Read More...
Chicago public school IDs now double as library cards
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Getting a library card should be easy. For many children, it isn’t. The process can require documentation that not every family has: a fixed address, proof of residency, or a guardian’s signature. For students who are unhoused, in foster care, or Read More...
6 ways to get more comfortable with risk and reinvention
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM After two years of conversations with founders, executives, and leaders across industries, Liz Tran kept noticing the same thing: the most successful and fulfilled among them were not the ones who knew the most. They were the ones who had made peace with not Read More...
The sensory superpower that lets seals hunt in total darkness
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM When a fish moves through water, it doesn’t simply pass through and vanish. It leaves a trail of disturbed water behind it, something like the contrail of a plane across a clear sky. That trail is invisible to human eyes and fades within seconds, but to a Read More...
Why Western scientists are turning to Indigenous knowledge
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Marco Hatch describes his own work with characteristic dry humor: "I'm a glorified clam counter." What he's actually doing is more complicated. As a marine ecologist at Western Washington University and an enrolled member of the Samish Indian Nation, Hatch is Read More...
Navigating digital dating and modern relationships
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Digital dating has changed the way we connect, creating a new vocabulary of phrases such as ghosting, orbiting, and breadcrumbing. While these activities may appear fairly innocent on the surface, they can have serious consequences for our mental health and Read More...
Naples lets blind visitors feel the Veiled Christ
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM On a Tuesday morning in the Sansevero Chapel Museum (Museo Cappella Sansevero) in Naples, a guide named Chiara Locovardi ran her gloved fingers across a marble surface that has baffled art historians for more than two centuries. She was describing what she Read More...