Here is the February edition of Teenagers in The Times, a roundup of the news and feature stories about young people that have recently appeared across sections of NYTimes.com. We publish a new edition on the first Thursday of each month.
For ideas about how to use Teenagers in The Times with your students, please see our lesson plan and special activity sheet, both of which can be used with this or any other edition.
“Britney Spears and I learned the same lesson growing up: When you’re young and famous, there is no such thing as control,” writes the author of this Opinion essay.
In Jaap Robben’s “Summer Brother,” a 13-year-old finds himself the default caregiver for his severely disabled brother. His dad’s a swindler. The bills are due. Disaster is inevitable.
“Raceless,” by Georgina Lawton, and “Surviving The White Gaze,” by Rebecca Carroll, follow two Black women who discover their racial identity after a childhood separated from their heritage.
The precocious hosts of “Tai Asks Why” and “The Show About Science” have matured along with their industry. For them, listening to their early episodes can prove a bit painful.
4. After you have posted, read what others have said, then respond to someone else by posting a comment. Use the “Reply” button to address that student directly.
On Wednesday, March 10, teachers from our collaborator, the American Statistical Association, will facilitate this discussion from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Eastern time.
5. By Friday morning, March 12, we will reveal more information about the graph, including a free link to the article that included this graph, at the bottom of this post. We encourage you to post additional comments based on the article, possibly using statistical terms defined in the Stat Nuggets.
Reveal
We’ll post more information here on Thursday afternoon. Stay tuned!
• Learn more about the “Notice and Wonder” teaching strategy and how and why other teachers are using this feature from our on-demand webinar.
• Sign up for our free weekly Learning Network newsletter so you never miss a graph. Graphs are always released by the Friday before the Wednesday live-moderation to give teachers time to plan ahead.
Students 13 and older in the United States and the United Kingdom, 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.
Back in the summer of 2019, members of the Codecademy community, who are also Forum Moderators, started an unofficial Codecademy Discord server to connect with other learners. Nearly three years later, we’re excited to announce that the Codecademy Discord server has been verified — it’s official!
To celebrate the verification of our Discord server, we spoke to two of the community members that were there from the start. Chris and Steven helped make the Codecademy Discord server what it is today. Below they share their experience with starting — and growing — this wonderful community resource!
But before we get into the conversation with Chris and Steven, we wanted to invite you to join our Discord server. Follow this invite and start participating. Here’s what you can expect:
Meet and socialize with other learners in real time to chat about coding and non-coding related topics.
Join the conversation in set channels for sharing resources and discussing specific programming languages and Career Paths.
Join Codecademy Chapter channels to connect with others who attend the same meetups as you.
Use Discord’s video and screen share options, which are great for working alongside your code buddy.
Share your wins and support fellow-learners as you work towards your coding goals!
How did the Codecademy Discord server start?
Chris was on vacation in Spain when the idea for the Codecademy Discord server was born. “I was on holiday and had difficulty accessing the forums properly from my mobile. I suggested to the Mod team that we create a Discord server, since those can be easily accessed from anywhere.”
“We started the server because it was a completely different environment,” says Steven, who stepped in to help run the server early on. “Discord is really great for quick questions and making friends with people to co-program with.”
What’s it been like to watch the community grow?
Chris took a break for a while after starting the server, but tells us, “It has certainly been amazing to come back to such a big and vibrant group. I’ve just checked how many people have joined today so far and it’s already more than the number that joined in the first week of the group being created!”
Chris shares a message of thanks for Steven for taking the reins after he stepped down from his Admin position on the group. “I couldn’t have done it without you, mate!”
Steven shares, “This wasn’t even the initial plan for the server. We were just going to try it out and see what happens and it has been absolutely amazing. I’ve really enjoyed it. There’s something about starting a project from the ground up and watching it grow.”
What’s your favorite thing about the Discord server?
Steven shares that his favorite part has been getting involved with the community, answering questions, and helping people. “It’s a great feeling, when you lead someone to an answer. After a while of leading them to it you see that mental lightbulb just kind of click. It’s a great feeling. I never get tired of it.”
Chris shares, “The whole point of the Discord-based community was to give people another — often more familiar — platform to meet and chat with like-minded individuals.” He’s loved seeing his initial pitch for the community on Discord come to life.
What’s next, now that it’s officially verified?
“It’s still hard to believe how far it’s come,” says Steven. “Now that the server is verified, I can finally start planning some really cool stuff. It finally gives us that feeling of, yes, we’re the real deal. We’re not just another of those unofficial servers that eventually just dies out because it doesn’t have enough support. It is going to have its challenges of course, but in the long run, it’s really going to help out the server, and that makes me super excited.”
Here at Codecademy, we want to thank our team of community moderators and superusers, as well as Codecademy learners, for their endless pursuit in making our community an unmatched resource for anyone learning to code!
We’re so excited to offer Discord, a real-time chat platform, for learners to use in tandem with our long-standing Codecademy Forums. We’re looking forward to the many more connections our community members will make with one another and what will come of those connections –– from finding a friend to building a cool project to landing a job of their dreams and everything in between.
If baseball somehow reflects America, as romanticists like to believe, then it also shares in its blemishes. The National and American leagues were segregated until 1947, and the decades since have been marked by a halting kind of reckoning.
On Wednesday, Major League Baseball took one of its biggest steps to redress past racial wrongs: It formally recognized several of the Negro leagues as on par with the American and National leagues, a distinction that will alter the official record books to acknowledge a quality of competition that the long-excluded players never doubted.
Daily Word Challenge
Can you correctly use the word redress 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 redress can be used in a sentence, read these usage examples on Vocabulary.com.
If you enjoy this daily challenge, try using multiple Words of the Day in a 50-word story that you submit to our Monthly Vocabulary Challenge.
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.
Have you ever eaten a meat or dairy substitute? The Impossible Burger? Vegan cheese? Nondairy ice cream? If so, did you enjoy it? How did it compare with the real thing? If not, would you ever try such products? Why or why not?
I spend nearly as much time talking about how I want to stop eating meat as I do eating it. I care about animals and the environment and, even more, virtue signaling about how much I care about animals and the environment. I just don’t want to make any effort or sacrifice any pleasure.
Lucky for me, a slew of venture-backed companies want to help me with my lazy altruism. They envision a world where we sit down for dinner and brag that no animals were harmed in the production of this carbon-neutral porterhouse. They want to Impossible Burger our entire diet. They want me to shift from farm-to-table to lab-to-table.
It’s beginning to work. Consumer sales of the increasingly impressive simulacra of meat, eggs and dairy products grew 24 percent from 2015 to 2020, according to the market research company NPD Group — and 89 percent of those people are, like me, not vegetarians.
I wanted to see just how realistic the lab-to-table future could be, so I decided to throw a dinner party filled with bleeding edge products that don’t bleed. The carefully chosen guest list would consist of my lovely wife, Cassandra, and our 11-year-old son, Laszlo, mostly because of the pandemic, and partly because it was going to be hard to find friends eager to consume bacon made from fungi and ice cream spit out by microflora.
It took me two months to gather the items for my party. They had to be animal-free and environmentally friendly and made in a sci-fi-impressive manner. They’d include not just food, but all the wow factors like jewelry and beauty products that could make a dinner at home with the same three people for the 300th day in a row feel like a party.
When I began shopping for our event, I learned that there are a lot of complicated methods to make basic things. You can mix together a lot of plants to approximate a pre-existing product, which is what Beyond Meat does for burgers with pea protein, canola oil, coconut oil and 14 other ingredients.
You can find a breed of mycelium (the root system of fungi) that approximates a particular meat texture and call it something like “beef fauxginoff.” Or you can insert DNA into algae, bacteria or fungi so they spit out whatever protein you want.
The newest tech is growing real animal cells the way you grow human organs from stem cells. You take different kinds of lab-grown muscle with different kinds of lab-grown fat, layer them in just the right order, and you may get, as more than a dozen companies are working on, Wagyu beef, lobster or foie gras.
You can also combine these methods, as Impossible Burger does, using soy, coconut oil and a tiny bit of heme — an iron-y, blood-like, soy protein spit out by DNA-manipulated yeast.
7. The goal of the World Through a Lens series is to help transport readers to some of our planet’s most beautiful and intriguing places. In what ways did the featured article succeed in those aims? What did you find most intriguing, memorable or inspiring? What does seeing and learning about another way of life teach you about your own?
Going Further
Option 1: Analyze and interpret a photograph.
Choose one photograph from the article that you found particularly informative, surprising or affecting in telling the story of Kazakh people. As you look closely, respond to questions adapted from our What’s Going On in This Picture feature:
Then dig a little deeper:
What do you notice about the composition, colors, objects and people in the photo?
Why did this photo stand out to you? What do you find intriguing or moving about it?
What do you think Ms. Thomas wanted to communicate with this image? What questions would you ask her or the subjects of the photo if you could?
Option 2: Document your own family traditions through the art of photography.
If you were hired to document the traditions of your own family for the World Through a Lens series, what would you show and why? What would you hope audiences around the world would understand, appreciate and learn?
Take some time to reflect on your own cultural and family heritage: What traditions — events, activities, games, songs, meals, dances, athletic or artistic endeavors — big or small, shape and define you?
After selecting one aspect of your family’s lifestyle and traditions, brainstorm ways to best capture it photographically. Use the photos featured in the article as inspiration, whether it’s Ms. Thomas’s shooting a close-up shot of a woman’s hands to show the physical hardships of life as an animal herder, or an extreme wide shot to capture the wonders and beauty of the vast terrain atop the Altai Mountains.
How would you show the beauty, the skill and the challenges of your own family traditions? Whom or what would you photograph? What settings would you choose? When would you use wide, medium or close-up shots?
After you have captured at least three photographs, write a short artist’s statement that connects the three images and explains why you chose them and what they reveal about your family.
About Lesson of the Day
• Find all our Lessons of the Day in this column. • Teachers, watch our on-demand webinar to learn how to use this feature in your classroom.
After 70 days 3 hours 48 minutes, Jasmine Harrison, 21, became the youngest woman to row an ocean. She is among a diverse set of endurance athletes to attempt the feat.
If you were to set a world record, whether in a sport or anything else, what world record would you most want to set?
Tell us in the comments, then read the related article to learn more about this young woman and what the challenge entailed.
Students 13 and older in the United States and the United Kingdom, 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.
In early 2009, when Facebook was still nascent in its efforts to swallow as much of the internet as possible, online games were not yet the behemoth they would become.
Then, that June, came FarmVille. If you weren’t among the tens of millions of people tending a cartoon patch of land on Facebook each day, piling up an endless stream of cutesy collectibles, you were still getting copious nags and nudges from your friends asking for help. The game either pulled Facebook users into an obsession or persistently reminded them that they were missing out on one.
Daily Word Challenge
Can you correctly use the word nascent 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 nascent can be used in a sentence, read these usage examples on Vocabulary.com.
If you enjoy this daily challenge, try using multiple Words of the Day in a 50-word story that you submit to our Monthly Vocabulary Challenge.
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.
1. After looking closely at the image above (or at the full-size image), think about these three questions:
2. Next, join the conversation by clicking on the comment button and posting in the box that opens on the right. (Students 13 and older are invited to comment, although teachers of younger students are welcome to post what their students have to say.)
3. After you have posted, try reading back to see what others have said, then respond to someone else by posting another comment. Use the “Reply” button or the @ symbol to address that student directly.
Each Monday, our collaborator, Visual Thinking Strategies, will facilitate a discussion from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Eastern time by paraphrasing comments and linking to responses to help students’ understanding go deeper. You might use their responses as models for your own.
4. On Thursday afternoons, we will reveal at the bottom of this post more information about the photo. How does reading the caption and learning its back story help you see the image differently?
