Update: April 29
1. After looking closely at the image above (or at the full-size image), think about these three questions:
- What’s going on in this picture?
- What do you see that makes you say that?
- What more can you find?
Do you have your students revise their essays? If so, is their process mostly a matter of adding some commas and correcting spelling errors — or are they actually rethinking their writing to make it clearer and stronger?
In this post our guest blogger Lionel Anderson, assistant director of the Office of Academic Resources at Haverford College and a board member of TeenSHARP, offers advice to bridge the gap between the demands of high school and college writing by teaching students the importance of a rigorous revision process.
How do you teach students this skill? Tell us below.
– The Learning Network
Overview | The news can sometimes seem as if it is full of conflicting reports on the connection between diet and health: Are fats good for you, or bad for you? What about sugar, chocolate and caffeine? And what kinds of evidence do scientists use in making dietary recommendations? In this lesson, students can explore the science behind nutrition and disease — how strong are the connections between diet and conditions such as heart disease, obesity and even cancer?
Update: May, 2014: All of the Top 10 winners have now been published. You can find them here.
When we announced our first-ever Student Editorial Contest earlier this year, we expected a thousand or so entries — 2,000, maybe, if we were really lucky.
But when your impassioned essays started pouring at the rate of 200 per hour the last day of the contest — faster than we could approve them — we and our partners at The Center for News Literacy knew we would need at least a month to choose the best.
You dazzled us in many ways, but perhaps most in your range of topics. Sure, we expected pieces on bullying, body image, stereotyping, standardized testing and the dangers of social media; teenagers confront these complex issues every day. We also knew from our long-running Summer Reading Contest that — despite the stereotype — young people care very much about international news, whether climate change, rape in India or unrest in Ukraine.
Over all, we were delighted to find that most essays grew out of a real personal passion, whether an enthusiasm for N.B.A. basketball or the Beatles, or a desire to right injustices you encountered in your own families, schools or neighborhoods.
Like many school districts around the country, we’re taking next week off to celebrate Passover, Easter and the return of weather that no longer requires outfits like this.
All our regular content, including What’s Going On in This Picture, the Weekly News Quiz, and daily features like our Student Opinion questions, lesson plans and Word of the Day will be back beginning Monday, April 21.
But, as always, we leave you with plenty to do. The list below, with ideas for teaching everything from baseball season to Earth Day to the history of spring break itself, should provide at least a week’s worth of curricular inspiration.
The powerful novella, which Steinbeck saw as “a kind of playable novel, written in novel form but so scened and set that it can be played as it stands,” explores themes of friendship, power, dreams, and the responsibility we have to look out for one another in a sometimes unkind world.
The characters at the heart of the story, George and Lennie, work against all odds to earn enough money to build their dream – to own a place of their own, with alfalfa and rabbits. Their friendship sets them apart from the other men in the world of the book and fuels their aspirations, until the book’s violent conclusion.
For this Text to Text, we aim to have students explore the role of true friendship in a world defined by transactional relationships. We pair the opening exchanges between George and Lennie in John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” with a piece from The Times’s philosophy blog, The Stone, on “Friendship in an Age of Economics.”
Occasionally we publish ideas from readers in lieu of our own lesson plans, and, as with the simple, versatile activity we feature below, they often make us wish we were still in the classroom ourselves so we could try them out “IRL,” as the kids say.
You probably have some wonderful ideas for teaching with The Times, too. Please write in and tell us about them.
Can disasters make life better for future generations?
As the world notes the first anniversary this month of the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse outside Dhaka, Bangladesh, which killed 1,129 workers, we offer a historical parallel. Some 102 years earlier in New York City, a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory killed 146 low-wage garment workers.
In both cases, inspectors visited and filed critical safety reports, but scores of people still died while making clothes for others. The American disaster is now hailed as a turning point that led to safer workplaces and broad support for a minimum standard of workers’ rights, while the Bangladeshi disaster’s impact is less certain.