Teaching With 'Teenagers in The Times' - NYTimes.com
In July we started a new feature, Teenagers in The Times, which collects recent articles, slide shows and videos about young people published on NYTimes.com.
Our latest edition was just published and, beginning in December, you can find a new collection on the first Friday of every month.
Here are some suggestions for how to use the feature with your students, but we?re hoping you have ideas, too. Write in and tell us, and we?ll add yours to the list.
Teaching With Teenagers in The Times
1. Heroes Among Us: Whether it is a Olympic dreamer, rebel musician or budding entrepreneur, students can find a teenager to admire and inspire in The Times.
Ask students to identify someone they admire among the teenagers profiled in this series. Then, either write a letter to this person commending him or her; create a profile to contribute to a class wall of inspiration; or learn more about this person?s cause and create a plan to pitch in.
2. Mentor Texts for Writing: Students love to read about one of their own. Use one of the profiles of a teenager in The Times as a model for writing about an interesting teenager in your school or community.
Ask students to examine how Times writers introduce and build a portrait of their subjects. In this piece about a female high school football player, for example, the lead is descriptive and blind. How might students use that technique to introduce their subjects?
Or, point out how Juliet Macur uses quotations to build her portrait of the gymnast Danell Leyva. How might students use quotations similarly to tell a story about a local teenager? Once they have examined the models, have students identify subjects, draft interview questions, conduct interviews and write their own profiles. Encourage students to keep an eye out, too, for stories about teenagers in local newspapers, perhaps to create a class collection.
3. A Hook for Deeper Digging: Use topics that appeal to student audiences to engage them in further research or to teach them about another part of the world.
The feature on Malala Yousafza, for example, could be a starting point for investigating Pakistan and the role of women there. After students read this piece, they can learn more by looking at the Times Topics page about this young activist.
Other subjects can be explored in the same way: Begin with an attention-grabbing article based on a teenager, then zoom out to the bigger picture using Times Topics pages. Because these pages aggregate articles, videos and photographs, as well as often suggesting outside Web site, they are a useful starting point for research. To share what they?ve learned, students can use Times resources to create a multimedia presentation using free Web-based presentation tools like Prezi or Popplet.
4. Think Local: Perennial news subjects like school lunches, cheating scandals or identity and school culture always inspire strong feelings among students.
Have them examine local news about issues or trends they learn about via Teenagers in The Times, then write pieces for their school newspaper or letters to the editors of community or local papers.
5. Exercise Your Core: Pieces in this series offer ample opportunities to read high-interest and sophisticated nonfiction, then practice informative, argumentative and narrative writing.
Students might read and summarize any of the articles as a start, practicing grounding their summaries in textual evidence by using graphic organizers like this one on identifying the different points of view (PDF), or this one that asks for facts, questions and responses (PDF) ? or any of the others in our Teaching With Any Day?s Times collection.
Then, use the other ideas we list here to go further with argumentative or narrative writing. ?That?s Debatable? offers ideas for writing and speaking about hot-button issues, while ?Mentor Texts for Writing? and ?Creative License? can help them go further with narrative, descriptive writing.
6. Take Action: Many of the young people profiled in these Times pieces were chosen because they went above and beyond in trying to change something about the world they didn?t like.
Whether it?s convincing Seventeen Magazine to ?celebrate every kind of beauty,? or exhorting the Commission on Presidential Debates to have a female moderator (both of which campaigns worked), in the age of social media, young people have a bigger voice than ever.
Ask your students, What do you believe in? What can you do about it? How can stories like these inspire you?
7. A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words: Have students choose an intriguing photograph from one of the articles, or from a featured slide show (perhaps one of these or these?) and think about the story it tells.
You might ask them to start with the three simple questions we ask weekly in our ?What?s Going On in This Picture?? feature. Or, have them complete the Saying What?s Unsaid handout (PDF) and use it as the jumping-off point for a narrative in which they speak from the point of view of one of the photograph?s subjects.
8. Only Connect: Do you know the literacy technique many call ?Text-to-Text/Text-to-Self/Text-to-World??
This series offers scores of choices for making those kinds of connections, whether on stories about identity, resilience or ingenuity . We even have our own graphic organizer (PDF) they can use to do it.
From there, students might reflect or react on connections to their own lives by journaling or writing personal essays. Then, challenge them to search The Times and other news sources to find other pieces that connect with the one they?ve chosen somehow.
9. That?s Debatable: Examine hot-button issues covered in The Times by preparing for and participating in debates.
Is it O.K. for boys to wear dresses? Should doctors prescribe pills to help students gain an edge in school? Do cheerleaders at public schools have the right to make banners featuring Bible verses? How young is too young to participate in grueling endurance races?
Students can prepare for the debate on these of other issues by working in groups to complete the Debatable Issues handout (PDF). Then, select panels of students to present arguments for both sides in a formal or informal debate.
10. Creative License: Topics that appear in this series, whether lighthearted like a piece on girls? rock camp, or serious, like one on juvenile offenders, provide powerful prompts for creative writing.
Students might create found poems, write short stories, or imagine first-person narratives from the point-of-view of one of the subjects in any of these pieces.
11. Your Turn: Have you used the Teenagers in The Times feature with your students? Tell us what has worked in your classroom, and we may add it to this list.
See all Teenagers in The Times posts.
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: November 8, 2012
An earlier edition of this post misstated the country Malala Yousafza is from. It is Pakistan, not Afghanistan.
Source: http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/08/teaching-with-teenagers-in-the-times/
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