The 2022 Winter Olympic Games kicked off its opening ceremony last Friday night in Beijing. Did you tune in to watch the technicolor spectacle? How closely do you follow the Winter Olympics? What events have you been paying attention to? Which Olympic sports or athletes are your favorites?
Tell us in the comments, then read the related article to learn more about the opening ceremony.
Want more Picture Prompts? Find them all in this column.
Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.
The word coherent has appeared in 225 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on Jan. 29 in “Buy GameStop, Fight Injustice. Just Don’t Sell.” by Tara Siegel Bernard, Emily Flitter and Anupreeta Das:
The Superstonk discourse shows how the gospel of meme stocks has taken hold among a wide range of investors — from those who no longer buy into it, like Mr. Fritz, to others who accept it without question.
“I can’t explain it all,” said Ben Pomeroy, 38, who lives in Columbus, Ohio, and works for a manufacturing company. “I read it, and I was like, ‘OK, that makes sense,’ but if you asked me to explain it I don’t think I could give you a very coherent answer as to why these synthetic shares exist.” He has continued to add to his GameStop position.
Daily Word Challenge
Can you correctly use the word coherent in a sentence?
Based on the definition and example provided, write a sentence using today’s Word of the Day and share it as a comment on this article. It is most important that your sentence makes sense and demonstrates that you understand the word’s definition, but we also encourage you to be creative and have fun.
Then, read some of the other sentences students have submitted and use the “Recommend” button to vote for two original sentences that stand out to you.
If you want a better idea of how coherent can be used in a sentence, read these usage examples on Vocabulary.com.
Students ages 13 and older in the United States and the United Kingdom, and 16 and older elsewhere, can comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff.
Please note: Our Student Opinion questions specifically invite the voices of young people. We ask that adults respect the intent of this forum and refrain from posting here.
Across the United States, parents, activists and lawmakers are arguing that some books, especially those about sexual and racial identity, do not belong in school libraries.
Have you witnessed these book challenges in your school? What do you think about them?
In Wyoming, a county prosecutor’s office considered charges against library employees for stocking books like “Sex Is a Funny Word” and “This Book Is Gay.”
In Oklahoma, a bill was introduced in the State Senate that would prohibit public school libraries from keeping books on hand that focus on sexual activity, sexual identity or gender identity.
In Tennessee, the McMinn County Board of Education voted to remove the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel “Maus” from an eighth-grade module on the Holocaust because of nudity and curse words.
Parents, activists, school board officials and lawmakers around the country are challenging books at a pace not seen in decades. The American Library Association said in a preliminary report that it received an “unprecedented” 330 reports of book challenges, each of which can include multiple books, last fall.
“It’s a pretty startling phenomenon here in the United States to see book bans back in style, to see efforts to press criminal charges against school librarians,” said Suzanne Nossel, the chief executive of the free-speech organization PEN America, even if efforts to press charges have so far failed.
Such challenges have long been a staple of school board meetings, but it isn’t just their frequency that has changed, according to educators, librarians and free-speech advocates — it is also the tactics behind them and the venues where they play out. Conservative groups in particular, fueled by social media, are now pushing the challenges into statehouses, law enforcement and political races.
“The politicalization of the topic is what’s different than what I’ve seen in the past,” said Britten Follett, the chief executive of content at Follett School Solutions, one of the country’s largest providers of books to K-12 schools. “It’s being driven by legislation, it’s being driven by politicians aligning with one side or the other. And in the end, the librarian, teacher or educator is getting caught in the middle.”
Among the most frequent targets are books about race, gender and sexuality, like George M. Johnson’s “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” Jonathan Evison’s “Lawn Boy,” Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queer” and Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye.”
The article continues with a student’s perspective on a ban in his school:
Jack Petocz, a 17-year-old student at Flagler Palm Coast High School who organized the protest against the book ban, said that removing books about L.G.B.T.Q. characters and books about racism was discriminatory, and harmful to students who may already feel that they are in the minority and that their experiences are rarely represented in literature.
“As a gay student myself, those books are so critical for youth, for feeling there are resources for them,” he said, noting that books that portray heterosexual romances are rarely challenged. “I felt it was very discriminatory.”
Students, read the entire article, then tell us:
What do you think about efforts across the nation to remove books — especially ones that address race, gender and sexuality — from school libraries?
How do you think these bans affect students, teachers and librarians?
In your opinion, what makes a book “appropriate” or “inappropriate” for inclusion in a school library? If you were a school librarian, what criteria would you use to determine whether a certain book should be included in the library?
What’s the best way to address parents’ concerns that a book in a school library is inappropriate for their child? Should the library remove the book? Should a library have a policy in place to stop individual students from checking out a book if their parents disapprove of it? Or are there better solutions that don’t involve changing what books are available in a library?
Jack Petocz, a student who protested a book ban in his school, argued that removing books about racism and L.G.B.T.Q. issues was discriminatory. Do you agree? Why or why not?
Do you think the books in your school library represent a diverse range of perspectives and experiences? What subjects are adequately covered? What kinds of books would you like to see more of?
Want more writing prompts? You can find all of our questions in our Student Opinion column. Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate them into your classroom.
Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.
3. How does Webb compare with the Hubble Space Telescope? How was it designed to probe a crucial stretch of early cosmic history, known to astronomers as the dark ages? What role will infrared light play?
4. What is your reaction to the article? What did you find most fascinating, surprising or significant? Do you think the Webb telescope is worth 25 years of development and the cost of $10 billion? Does learning about its launch and mission make you more interested in space?
5. Make a prediction (or two): What do you think the Webb telescope will find? Do you think it will find evidence of life on other planets? The origin of black holes? The secrets to the birth of the Milky Way and the cosmos? Be bold — make some $10 billion predictions!
Going Further
Option 1: What questions do you have about the universe?
How are stars formed? How do they die? Do galaxies ever collide? Is the universe finite or infinite, and what would either mean? What is dark matter? Is it as sinister as it sounds? Are there multiple universes, like ones we’ve seen in “Spider-Man: Far From Home”? What questions do you still have about the universe? What else do you want to know?
You might begin by looking at The Times’s Space and Astronomy topic page or one of the stories below about the Milky Way and beyond: Then, write or discuss with a partner: What is your reaction to the article? How did it add to or change your understanding of the beauty and mystery of the universe? What was the most fascinating, provocative or memorable thing you learned? What questions do you still have about our cosmos?
If you have more time …
Want an additional challenge? Use your question and research as the basis for an entry to our Third Annual STEM Writing Contest, in which we challenge students to choose an issue or question in science, technology, engineering, math or health and write an engaging 500-word explanation of it. The contest runs from Feb. 2 to March 9.
Option 2: Why does the James Webb Space Telescope matter to the world — and you?
There was no military or economic advantage in devoting 25 years and $10 billion of national treasure to build a telescope, of all things, devoted not to looking down at our enemies, but out across time and space, trying to decipher the nature and condition of our origins. We all share the quest even if we all don’t get the time and chance to obsess about it.
And later:
We stagger upward under the weight of our knowledge of our own mortality. In the face of the ultimate abyss that is destiny, we can find honor and dignity in the fact that we played the cosmic game to win, trying to know and feel as much as we can in the brief centuries allotted to us.
Read the entire essay. Then, respond to the following questions in writing or through discussion with a partner: Do you agree with Mr. Overbye that “We all share the quest”? How important to you is it to search for answers about the nature and conditions of our origins? Does it matter if there is no military or economic advantage to be gained through the Webb telescope’s mission? In your opinion, what will humanity gain if we are able to answer many of our long-awaited questions about the universe?
Anthony Tattersall is vice president of the EMEA sales team at Coursera. His role gives him unique insights on how businesses, governments, and higher education can work together to build our future workforce and how data can be used to support this effort. The Emerge Education team interviewed Tattersall for a joint report with Coursera on “Developing Skills and Evaluating Pathways Into Jobs: A Vision for 2030.” Here is what Tattersall had to say:
What trends are you seeing around skills from your users?
The core things that drive an organization’s capabilities are the skills people have and their ability to exploit technology. Where businesses are really switched on to this, they’re focused on understanding skill requirements for roles right now and in the immediate future, and finding the best way to address that gap. The challenges are how to make learning happen within their flow of work, and how to use reskilling to create roles internally where hiring is not easy, such as tech, data science, cybersecurity, and so on.
In our work with governments, we see lots of countries struggling with graduate unemployment, partly related to the pandemic and partly because businesses want to hire people who already have the skills they need. There are many countries with large numbers of people based in industries at high risk of being automated out, and these are often lower-paid jobs — if those individuals aren’t given access to learning opportunities to develop new skill sets, there simply won’t be enough jobs to serve those people.
For universities, it’s not just about getting someone that first job after graduating, it’s also about all the moments of career transition that people will experience over their lifetimes. Most people entering the workforce now will go through four or five major career shifts involving significant upskilling, and universities have an increasingly important role to play. But they are also experiencing challenges — there is a big focus on employability outcomes, and workplace skills are a fast-moving target, so learning content ages quickly. And how do you work with a higher expectation of blended learning programs?
What is Coursera’s approach to skills development?
At our core we’re a skills transformation platform, so we’re trying to enable people to learn anywhere in the world, at a time of their choosing, with access to the very best content from major universities and industry partners. The goal is to use applied learning to improve skills, whether upskilling (improving current skills in your area of expertise), reskilling (getting you into a completely new area of expertise), or deep skilling (to really develop a level of mastery).
The second thing we do is work with organizations to define the skill sets required for each role, and at what level of capability. Then we can take individuals, look at where they are, and help them understand their skills gaps so they can develop. All of our content is assessed, in some cases multiple times as you’re progressing through it, so individuals can see how well they’re progressing towards those skills goals and so organizations can build a landscape of their skills, at specific levels of mastery.
How does Coursera use data to improve outcomes for learners and organizations?
We have 87 million learners on the platform globally, across all age ranges, personalities, demographics; some people in work, some people out of work, and so on. The size of that dataset makes it very robust. We can see what skills people are working on and what jobs they’re doing to understand the underlying skill sets for those roles, and we can also see what their career trajectory is over time, so we understand how those skill sets lead to role changes. Feedback loops ensure all those data aggregation insights resonate with individuals actually taking our courses, who can reflect on the skills they think they are learning.
All this has helped us build a detailed skills taxonomy, with tens of thousands of skills, which we can correlate with third-party data sources, such as the World Economic Forum, to map at a very granular level what we think future skills requirements will be.
We also have a team of skills transformation consultants who work with businesses, governments, and institutions to build programs specific to their goals. Around 10% of the organizations we work with are big enough to invest in this, so if they already know exactly what they want to achieve, we can map our catalog to those specific skills development needs. But the vast majority recognize that the world of skills is rapidly changing and they don’t have a clear view of exactly what needs to be done over the next 2-3 years, on a per role basis, so they come to us for that guidance.
What should skills development look like in 2030 to create alternative pathways into jobs?
Someone once said to me that we overestimate the level of change we’ll see in 5 years and underestimate the change we’ll see in 10. Ten years is long enough for something no one saw coming to totally disrupt the marketplace. Education is one of the last bastions that hasn’t been disrupted and while the pandemic has accelerated change, I still think we’re at the very, very early stages.
I would love to see the education system become a lifelong learning partner, rather than a discrete point in time at the earliest stage of your career. That will involve more partnerships between governments, businesses, and education organizations — and I think the focus for universities then becomes more about accrediting programs, contextualizing to local needs, and curating a range of content that creates opportunities for people to develop skills they need. I hope we’ll see more democratization of access and ways to evaluate people’s capabilities beyond a degree: more professional certifications, more corporate universities, and more professional organizations offering alternative learning paths.
And I hope that by 2030 it’s a normal expectation that whatever your job, a percentage of your time is dedicated to learning, so managers are empowered to support it and all company processes are wrapped around that.
Two students share insights about HSE’s Master of Data Science program
The Master of Data Science (MDS) program from HSE University launched in 2020 as the first and only master’s program on Coursera from Russia. The program was designed for students to master the latest theoretical and practical knowledge and focus on solving real industry problems. We spoke recently with second-year students Vasilina Denyakina and Valery Sedin about their learning experiences, the wide variety of data science research topics they’re engaging with, and their career goals. We recap our conversations below, beginning with Vasilina.
Thank you, Vasilina, for speaking with us today! Let’s get started by talking about your choice to enroll in this particular program. Why did you choose HSE University when applying for your master’s in data science?
When choosing my future specialization, I wanted to learn to make effective decisions that were based on data. The MDS program at HSE University was appealing for several reasons. First, students learn about programming and algorithms from scratch. This was a big advantage over the programs offered by other universities. Second, the program is fully online. This was particularly relevant during the pandemic. The timetable is also quite flexible. Finally, the third reason was the language—all my classes at ICEF were in English, and there are a lot of mathematical terms I find easier to understand in that language.
As a burgeoning professional in the field, we know practical skills are important, but what about theory? Does the program have a good balance of theory and practice?
Despite the practice-oriented nature of the program, there is still plenty of room for theory. All of the theoretical courses are useful. They provide a good foundation, and you can build up your understanding. If you need to dive deeper into a topic, an understanding of the basics makes it much easier for you to learn more about it yourself. Theory also helps solve practical tasks, as you can use it to build hypotheses when you don’t know which approach to take. The core subjects such as machine learning and deep learning are sufficiently practice-oriented and diverse in terms of tasks. The opportunity to solve a wide range of tasks in different fields is an advantage. I try to apply new knowledge to work right away. I hope to take my current projects to a new level in the near future, thanks to the experience I’m gaining here.
Can you tell us about a project that you found to be both interesting and useful?
I liked the deep-learning project where we had to create a neural network to generate captions for pictures. It wasn’t just informative in terms of learning the subject, but it was also fun. At first glance, it didn’t seem like it would be useful, but in the end, part of the architecture of the network formed a basis for working code.
How do you feel about career prospects in the data field? Do you feel there are good employers in Russia who are interested in hiring data science specialists?
Yes, in all kinds of fields—from giants like Yandex to small but steadily developing start-ups. I think that in the future, data science specialists will continue to be in high demand across industries. The amount of data around us is growing all the time, and the ability to work with it is an asset to anyone. Plus, data science is evolving every day. This is evident from the number of scientific articles published and the new technologies that are becoming part of our everyday lives: natural language processing, computer vision, drones, and much more,
Can you share some of the challenges you’ve faced as you’ve progressed through the program?
For a long time, the biggest difficulty was maintaining a work-life balance. I’m a perfectionist, so it wasn’t easy to get everything done at work, then switch over to studying and immerse myself in subjects that were, for the most part, completely new to me. Now I’m trying to take a simpler approach to everything.
How does that approach inform your connections with the learning community? And, do you think the online format of the program has allowed you to make beneficial connections?
There’s definitely no lack of communication between students. We have multiple ways of keeping in touch: email, Slack, the Coursera forums, and less-formal chats in Telegram.
Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts Vasilina! We’re grateful for your insights, and congratulations on all your accomplishments!
~
Now, we’ll shift our conversation over to talk with Valery Sedin. Valery, let’s begin with a very simple question. Why did you decide to pursue data science?
Data science is the future. Specialists in this field will change the world (and make it better, I hope!).
We couldn’t agree more! Now, we’re especially interested in talking about your master’s thesis, given your unique topic. Can you tell us how you ended up devoting your thesis to an analysis of women’s football?
HSE University is home to the nationally famous Laboratory of Sports Studies, and the choice of this topic in particular comes from a desire to conduct research that genuinely contributes something new to the field of sports science. Women’s football has been researched to a much lesser degree than men’s football, which means that there are more new discoveries to be made there. When I enrolled, however, I never dreamed that I would get the chance to write “Evaluating Performance in Women’s Soccer: A Machine Learning Approach” with Dmitry Dagaev, the head of the laboratory!
That sounds like an incredible opportunity. What can you tell us about how the analytical work was structured?
I used public data from the StatsBomb database of men’s and women’s tournaments. The database contains information on every action involving the ball in every match of every available tournament. We compared the effectiveness of these actions between women and men. The model is a fairly simple neural network. It was trained using a full batch of training data and data on women’s tournaments. The model can also be expanded to cover men’s football.
Your work sounds absolutely fascinating, and we’re grateful to you for sharing your experiences in the program!
~
Understanding how to leverage data is key to modern business success, and learners with the applied skills to do full-cycle work with data are in high demand across the global hiring landscape. We close our post today with some additional perspective from Dmitry Borisov, who teaches the online Python Advanced course in the MDS program, about how the program is optimized to help learners prepare for career success in the field:
“The amount of data is growing rapidly, and solutions based on data are used to create effective business strategies. So there is increasing demand in the market for people who can conduct full-cycle work with data: collection and logging, pre-processing and analysis, and the creation of predictive models. In order to make sure that graduates of the program have the necessary skill set to work with data, many of the courses in the master’s program are based on practical work. There are lots of tasks to solve, and each of them has unique solutions that are shared after the students submit their work. This provides the students with good templates and methods to improve their own solutions. During the course, students also have to deal with two complex tasks with a comprehensive review from the teacher.” You can learn more about the Master of Data Science (MDS) program from HSE University by clicking here.
When you set a big goal, how often do you celebrate your progress?
Sometimes, we get so caught up in advancing to the next step that we forget to appreciate how far we’ve come. But it’s important to remember that, with each line of code, you’re that much closer to your end goal — whether it’s building the next global software company or launching a new career.
So, to help remind you of your progress, here are a few milestones to celebrate as you learn to code.
1. Writing your first line of code
Your first lines of code are your introduction to the world of programming.
This may not seem like a cause for celebration, but it is! “Hello World,” which you’ll code in the first lesson of Learn HTML, is many a developer’s first step, and you’re following a path tread by thousands. Millions, even.
And, if you haven’t already taken this step, it’s easier than you think. Here’s an example:
Hello World
This paragraph is a child of the body element
This paragraph is a child of the div element and a grandchild of the body element
Once rendered, the code above will generate a page that looks like this:
See? It’s that simple. Welcome to programming.
2. Completing your first course
Continuing with our Learn HTML example, by the end of the section on elements and structure, you’ll have written code that looks something like this:
The Brown Bear
About Brown Bears
The brown bear (Ursus arctos) is native to parts of northern Eurasia and North America. Its conservation status is currently Least Concern.
There are many subspecies within the brown bear species, including the Atlas bear and the Himalayan brown bear.
Species
Arctos
Collarus
Horribilis
Nelsoni (extinct)
Features
Brown bears are not always completely brown. Some can be reddish or yellowish. They have very large, curved claws and huge paws. Male brown bears are often 30% larger than female brown bears. They can range from 5 feet to 9 feet from head to toe.
Habitat
Countries with Large Brown Bear Populations
Russia
United States
Canada
Countries with Small Brown Bear Populations
Some countries with smaller brown bear populations include Armenia, Belarus, Bulgaria, China, Finland, France, Greece, India, Japan, Nepal, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.
Media
In other words, you’ll have created your very first web page!
The best part about this milestone is that it helps eliminate the stigma many people hold about programming. No longer does it seem foreign or inaccessible. In fact, it’s just like learning any other language — except instead of communicating with other people, you’re communicating with a computer.
3. Building your first project
Your first project marks a transformation in your development. You go in as a coding newbie, and you come out as a full-fledged developer.
Some people might disagree, believing that there’s a set of requirements you have to fulfill before meeting the criteria, but Codecademy Software Engineer Zeb Girouard explains that the only real criterion is actively applying your skills:
“It’s the doing of some task that makes one a developer, engineer, salesperson, etc. — not some preconceived set of boxes to tick. Have you made, or are you currently making things, with software? If so, you’re a developer. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”
Giacomo S., a Team Lead from London, explains that there’s also a sense of accomplishment that comes with completing your first project.
“The first project you architect is like your creature,” Giacomo says. “You like to see it grow much like it is your child.”
Codecademy Curriculum Developer Alisha Grama was particularly satisfied after building her first project — an AI designed to play Nine Board Tic-Tac-Toe.
“I was so excited,” she says. “ I played against it so many times — checking for bugs — and I could never beat it, which was also fun. I felt very accomplished every time I got a ‘draw.'”
4. Diversifying your programming knowledge
As you master your first programming language, you’ll soon start looking for others to add to your tech stack. This is a significant milestone because learning different languages and programming styles (e.g., functional and object-oriented) will provide you with multiple approaches to apply to future projects.
Mariel Frank, Codecademy Senior Curriculum Developer, helps illustrate this by sharing her experience with different programming languages.
“Ruby was built with the intention of making the coding experience a happy one,” Mariel explains. “It’s extremely flexible — there are many ways to code something ‘correctly’ in Ruby — and you’ll hear many a Rails programmer talk about its ‘magic.'”
“C++,” she continues, “gives you a bit more context of how things like memory and data types work. It’s older, strongly typed, and you have control over memory in a way that you don’t with many high-level languages.”
Lastly, Mariel describes Python as “opinionated and clear,” sharing this xkcd comic, which “sums up nicely the experience of learning it when you’ve already learned other languages.”
5. Sharing your work with others
There’ll come a time when you’ll want to put your coding skills on display.
Maybe you’re building a portfolio to find a new job. Or, you might be stuck on a coding problem and need help from someone with more expertise. Either way, this is your opportunity to share your unique creations with the world.
If you haven’t already, upload some of your projects to sites like GitHub. Better yet, copy them into workspaces and share the links with your friends.
6. Teaching other developers
As you explore tech communities like the Codecademy Forums and Stack Overflow, you’ll find opportunities to share your knowledge. For instance, you might come across a learner who’s struggling with a problem you faced in your coursework. Or, you might have a helpful code snippet that’s just what another developer needs to complete their project.
As we progress, we tend to forget about the challenges and obstacles we faced early on in our journeys. Helping other programmers learn the skills you’ve already mastered will really illustrate just how far you’ve come along in your development.
Plus, breaking down complex concepts and explaining them to others helps reinforce your own knowledge. Take it from Judah Anthony, Codecademy Engineering Manager, who offers this advice:
“Learn by teaching. Pick a topic, whether it’s a new tech you want to push or a best practice like API design. Create a blog post, lightning talk, or brown bag to teach about that topic, and use that as an opportunity to learn, study, and research the latest on the topic yourself.”
Note that the milestones listed above are only the tip of the iceberg! Take a look through our forums and Discord to find hundreds of other learners sharing their accomplishments, big and small.
What milestones have you celebrated recently? Which stick out the most in your memory? Leave them in a comment below.
Franzen threads these stories, and their tributaries, so adeptly and so calmly that at moments he can seem to be on high-altitude, nearly Updikean autopilot. The character who cracks this novel fully open — she’s one of the glorious characters in recent American fiction — is Marion, Russ’s wife.
When we first meet her, she’s a frump, virtually a nonentity, an overweight pastor’s spouse, invisible except as a “warm cloud of momminess.” Russ, who puts people in mind of Atticus Finch and a young Charlton Heston, is embarrassed by Marion and “her sorry hair, her unavailing makeup, her seemingly self-spiting choice of dress.”
Daily Word Challenge
Can you correctly use the word unavailing in a sentence?
Based on the definition and example provided, write a sentence using today’s Word of the Day and share it as a comment on this article. It is most important that your sentence makes sense and demonstrates that you understand the word’s definition, but we also encourage you to be creative and have fun.
Then, read some of the other sentences students have submitted and use the “Recommend” button to vote for two original sentences that stand out to you.
If you want a better idea of how unavailing can be used in a sentence, read these usage examples on Vocabulary.com.
Students ages 13 and older in the United States and the United Kingdom, and 16 and older elsewhere, can comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff.
Do you enjoy storytelling? Do you like hearing your family member’s stories about growing up? Do you like telling your friends and family stories, whether real or make believe?
During his Christmas break, Dillon Helbig, an 8-year-old boy from Boise, Idaho, wrote a book that he wanted everyone to read.
He had spent a long time on it — four days to be exact — and filled 81 pages of an empty journal with a richly illustrated tale about how he gets transported back in time after a star atop his Christmas tree explodes.
But he did not have a book deal. (He’s only in second grade, after all.) So when his grandmother took him to the Lake Hazel branch of the Ada Community Library in Boise at the end of December, he slipped the sole copy of his book onto a shelf containing fiction titles.
“I had to sneak past the librarians,” said Dillon, who says “li-berry” instead of “library.”
Over the next month, a series of circumstances made the book one of the library’s most sought-after titles and also inspired children in Boise to write their own stories.
The book, “The Adventures of Dillon Helbig’s Crismis” by the author “Dillon His Self,” had drawn so much attention by the end of January that 56 people were on the waiting list to check it out, said Alex Hartman, the manager of the library branch.
If every person kept the book for four weeks, the maximum borrowing time, the last person on the list would have to wait more than four years to read Dillon’s tale.
What is your reaction to the article? Would you like to read Dillon’s book?
Have you ever shared a story, either through spoken word or in writing, with a big audience? If so, what was the story? What was it like to share it with so many people? If not, would you ever want to?
If you were to write your own book, what would you write about? What genre would you choose? Who would be the main characters and what would be the themes? What would be the central conflict? Write a back cover blurb, or summary, of your imagined book.
Do you think more libraries should accept books written by children and teenagers? Why or why not?
Want more writing prompts? You can find all of our questions in our Student Opinion column. Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate them into your classroom.
Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.
