MSI Press Blog

  This year, something rare and quietly beautiful is happening: Ramadan and Lent fall at the same time . For Muslims and Christians alike, it creates a moment of parallel devotion—two ancient traditions, two different calendars, one shared season of reflection. They don’t usually coincide. Ramadan follows a lunar calendar , moving earlier by about 10–11 days each year. Lent follows a solar‑based liturgical calendar , anchored to Easter. So their overlap is cyclical but infrequent, like two migrating birds whose paths cross only occasionally. Yet when they do meet, the resonance is unmistakable. Shared Themes: Why These Seasons Feel Spiritually Related Even though Ramadan and Lent arise from different theologies and histories, they share a deep moral and emotional vocabulary. 1. Fasting as a Path to Compassion Both traditions use fasting not as punishment, but as a way to sharpen empathy. Ramadan: Fasting from dawn to sunset is a way of sharing, in a small embodied way,...

  High School I did not see Latin again until I reached high school. Well, actually, that is not quite true I recognized the Latin influences on the French around me in the community. I recognized it again when in junior high I taught myself some Spanish in order to communicate better with a penpal in Mexico. My freshman year in high school, I tool Latin I. Most of the students in the class struggled with it, especially since the teacher was a grammarian and the course taught in the grammar-translation mode. But then, how does on teach Latin if not through the traditional approach of translation texts. After all, there is not a population  of Latin-speaking people today where students can be sent for immersion. Italy? Well, the language has evolved quite some distance from Latin though again one recognizes the Latin roots in the modern language. After Latin I, I took Latin II. The class was pretty small. Students were tired of the struggle, but a few of us did not find it a st...

  Foreign language education has long struggled with a structural problem: curricula are often built like closed systems. They are carefully sequenced, tightly controlled, and designed to move every learner through the same pathway at the same pace. While such systems provide clarity and administrative simplicity, they rarely reflect the reality of language learning. Language acquisition is not linear. It is uneven, individual, emotional, contextual, and often unpredictable. This is where open architecture curricular design represents an important advance. What Is Open Architecture in a Curriculum? Borrowed from the language of engineering and computing, open architecture refers to systems designed to be modular, flexible, and expandable. Components can be added, replaced, or reorganized without dismantling the entire structure. Applied to foreign language education, an open architecture curriculum does not lock teachers and learners into a rigid sequence of lessons or a single i...