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Teenagers in The Times: April 2019

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Teenagers in The Times: April 2019

Here is the April 2019 edition of Teenagers in The Times. This roundup of news and feature stories about young people that have recently appeared across sections of NYTimes.com appears on the first Thursday of each month during the school year.

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.

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Civics, Politics, Economics and Business

Bronx Teenager Who Became a Symbol for Ending Cash Bail Is Arrested on Slashing Charge

Pedro Hernandez, 19, who has accused the police of framing him in the past, was charged with slashing a man during a robbery.

Ex-State Trooper Who Fired Taser at Teenager on A.T.V. Is Convicted of Manslaughter

Damon Grimes, 15, was driving an all-terrain vehicle when officers tried to pull him over. After one used his stun gun, Damon crashed, and died soon after.

For Sri Lanka’s Children, the Deepest Scars Are Not Physical

Some suffered terrible injuries in the bombings. But for many others, witnesses to unimaginable scenes of carnage, the wounds are psychological.

Knives Were Left on Japanese Prince’s School Desk, Police Say

The Tokyo police were investigating security footage indicating that an adult had trespassed on the grounds of the school attended by Prince Hisahito, 12.

Raniya Wright, 10, Died of Natural Causes, Not Because of School Fight, Officials Say

Investigators said that Raniya, whose death caused an outpouring of grief and made national headlines, had a birth defect that caused a blood vessel in her brain to burst.

‘We Must Be Better’: A Young Black Student Takes His Own Life

Nigel Shelby, a 15-year-old black student at Huntsville High School in Alabama, killed himself. His family said he had been the target of homophobic bullying.

Los Angeles Archdiocese Pays $8 Million to Teen Girl Abused and Kidnapped by Coach

Advocates for abuse victims said the settlement highlighted the problem of abuse committed by non-clergy members at Catholic institutions.

Agreement Allows 2,700 Children in Central America to Join Parents in U.S.

The children had previously been granted conditional approval to enter the country as refugees under an Obama-era initiative, until the Trump administration canceled the program.

27 More Graves May Have Been Found at a Notorious Florida Boys School

The latest discovery adds to 55 graves already uncovered at a reform school that was infamous for beatings, abuse, forced labor and neglect.

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Education

When Your Diet Affects Your Social Life

This student at Samford University in Birmingham writes, “My dietary restrictions were limiting my college experience more than I thought.”

_______

Arts, Media and Culture

Review: With All-Boy Choirs Up for Debate, an Ensemble Soars

The storied Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, performed for the last time in America under Stephen Cleobury, its leader since 1982.

Ballet’s Biggest Matchmakers (Student, Meet Scholarship)

The Youth America Grand Prix is a competition in which the real prizes are scholarships. For those, you only need to catch the eye of one director.

Abuse Allegations Rock Vienna Ballet School

“The students who were subject to physical or emotional abuse have our deepest sympathy,” the ballet academy of the Vienna State Opera said in a statement.

For the Performing Arts Students in This Novel, Drama Is a Way of Life

Susan Choi’s “Trust Exercise” follows the intense relationships and betrayals among high school friends and their teachers.

Fast Times at Citywide Academy for the Performing Arts

In her new novel, “Trust Exercise,” Susan Choi trains her lens on a group of high school drama students, zooming in first on their teenage years, then focusing on them years later.

Film Club: ‘A Kiss, Deferred’

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Film Club: ‘A Kiss, Deferred’

How might it feel to live through a conflict that disrupts your way of life?

“A Kiss, Deferred” is a four-minute film that touches on themes of love and war. It profiles Nikolina Kulidzan, who, as a young girl growing up in Bosnia and Herzegovina, fell in love with a boy named Marko. In 1992, a civil war broke out in their country, shattering their lives and their relationship. This is the story of how war forced Nikolina and Marko apart and how love brought them back together.

Students

1. Watch the short film above. While you watch, you might take notes using our Film Club Double-Entry Journal (PDF) to help you remember specific moments.

2. After watching, think about these questions:

• What moments in this film stood out for you? Why?

• Were there any surprises? Anything that challenged what you know — or thought you knew?

• What messages, emotions or ideas will you take away from this film? Why?

• What questions do you still have?

3. An additional challenge: What connections can you make between this film and your own life or experience? Why? Does this film remind you of anything else you’ve read or seen? If so, how and why?

4. 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.)

5. 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.

6. To learn more, read “A Kiss Deferred by Civil War.” Ms. Kulidzan writes:

Many saw it coming. Ethnically charged graffiti began appearing on buildings around town. The local newspapers published the locations of bomb shelters. A classmate told me not to sleep in my bedroom because it faced military barracks.

I dismissed these warnings, just as I ignored all other signs of coming doom. In my 12-year-old mind, our town of Mostar, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, was too beautiful and the people too good to one another for there to be a civil war here. Besides, that spring was promising to be the greatest time of my life: I was happily in love for the first time.

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More?

• See all the films in this series.

• Read our list of practical teaching ideas, along with responses from students and teachers, for how you can use these documentaries in the classroom.

• Our next Film Club will take place on Thursday, May 9.

Learning With: ‘The Upshot, Five Years In’

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Learning With: ‘The Upshot, Five Years In’

Before reading the article:

How comfortable are you with reading graphs, including charts, maps and histograms? Have you ever found graphs to be useful or meaningful to your life? Are you ever confused or intimidated by them? What strategies do you use to read, interpret and evaluate them?

The Upshot is a section of The New York Times that often features graphs, and it recently celebrated its fifth birthday. To mark the occasion, The Upshot published many of its favorite, most-read and most distinctive work since 2014.

To get a better sense of what this graph-rich section is all about, set a stopwatch for five minutes and scroll through “The Upshot, Five Years In” until the timer goes off. Click on at least three articles and scan the graphs and visualizations.

Afterward, answer the following:

• How would you describe The Upshot in one or two sentences to someone who has never visited this Times section before?

• What kinds of subject matter and issues does it explore?

• What are some of the ways that the section visualizes data?

• Which story in the list was most visually appealing to you and why?

Next, choose one article included in “The Upshot, Five Years In,” but make sure it includes at least one graph. (Most of the articles include a graph, but a few do not.) Read the article, look closely at one of the graphs in the article and answer the following questions:

1. Why did you select the article you did? What did you find interesting about the headline or topic?

2. What do you notice in the graph you selected?

3. What do you wonder? What are you curious about that comes from what you notice in the graph?

4. What story does the graph tell? Write a catchy headline that captures its main idea. If your headline makes a claim, tell us what you noticed that supports your claim.

5. How does the text accompanying the graph add to your understanding of the subject matter?

6. What did you learn from the article as a whole? What was most interesting, surprising, provocative to you?

7. Try to assess the graph with a critical eye. Does the graph help communicate the ideas presented in the article? How clear and effective is the graph? Is there anything What information missing from the graph that might be helpful? Can you imagine alternative ways the data in the graph might be visualized? Explain.

Finally, tell us more about what you think:

— How important is graph literacy? Is it taught in your school? Where do you see graphs in your everyday life?

— Assess your graph literacy: In your opinion, do you have the tools and strategies to understand graphs, evaluate their reliability and draw logical conclusions? What are your strengths and weaknesses?

— How likely are you to read The Upshot in the future? What data or question would you like to see The Upshot explore? Why and how do you feel you would gain insight from a visual or graphical approach?

— If you want to analyze more graphs, then visit our “What’s Going On in This Graph?” archive, which borrows heavily from The Upshot. You can pick any one of the graphs we highlight, and answer the same questions you responded to above.

Further Resources:

Teach About Climate Change With These 24 New York Times Graphs

How to Quickly and Easily Remove a Background in Photoshop

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How to Quickly and Easily Remove a Background in Photoshop

Photoshop offers many different techniques to remove a background from an image. For simple backgrounds, using the standard magic wand tool to select and delete the background may well be more than adequate. For more complicated backgrounds, you might use the Background Eraser tool.

The Background Eraser Tool

The Background Eraser tool samples the color at the center of the brush and then deletes pixels of a similar color as you “paint.” It feels like painting with acid. Let me show you how it works.

Remove a Background, Step 1: Open your Image

Start by grabbing an image that you want to remove the background from. I’ll be using this image as it features areas that range from easy removal through to more challenging spots.

Remove a Background: The example image.

Remove a Background, Step 2: Select Background Eraser

Select the Background Eraser tool from the Photoshop toolbox. It may be hidden beneath the Eraser tool. If it is, simply click and hold the Eraser tool to reveal it.

Remove a Background: Finding the Background Eraser Tool

Remove a Background, Step 3: Tune Your Tool Settings

On the tool options bar at the top of the screen select a round, hard brush. The most appropriate brush size will vary depending on the image you’re working on. Use the square bracket key ([ or ]) for quickly scaling your brush size.

Remove a Background: Brush adjustment panel

Next, on the tool options bar, set the Sampling to Continuous, the Limits to Find Edges and a Tolerance of somewhere between 20-25% is a good starting place.

Remove a Background: Limits settings. Find edges.

Note: A low tolerance limits your eraser to areas that are very similar to your sampled color. A higher tolerance expands the range of colors your eraser will select.

Remove a Background, Step 4: Begin Erasing

Bring your brush over your background and begin to erase. You should see a brush-sized circle with small crosshairs in the center. The crosshairs show the “hotspot” and delete that color wherever it appears inside the brush area. It also performs smart color extraction at the edges of any foreground objects to remove ‘color halos’ that might otherwise be visible if the foreground object is overlayed onto another background.

Note: For the example image, I actually used a rather high Tolerance than the 20-25% recommended above due to the wide range of blues behind this subject.

Beginning the background removal process

When erasing, zoom up your work area and try to keep the crosshairs from overlapping on the edge of your foreground. It’s likely that you will need to reduce the size of the brush in some places to ensure that you don’t accidentally erase part of your foreground subject.

Remove a Background, Step 5: Choosing Effective Limit and Sampling Settings

Even though I have used a smaller brush to work around the hair and neck area, the Background Eraser has still managed to gouge a few chunks out of the hair and shirt.

Overly aggressive tolerance settings are removing foreground detail

For foreground image areas that share colors with the background (like this one), you may need to adjust the Sampling and Limits. In this picture, I switched over to the Sampling: Once option, set my Limits to Discontinguous and set my Tolerance to 30%.

enter image description here

The Sampling: Once option samples the color under the crosshair only the moment you click and it doesn’t resample as you move your brush along. The DiscontiguousLimit option allows you to erase all pixels that match the sampled color that you’re erasing. This allowed me to get in between the hair strands without erasing them.

There’s a good chance the Background Removal Tool may be all you need to complete your task.

But if not, read on.

Remove a Background: Close up showing improved removal

Remove a Background, Step 6: Quick Mask or Pen Tool

While removing the background on our example image is mostly straight-forward due to the fairly solid background, there are inevitably areas of our foreground subject that get wrongly erased as we work close to foreground’s edges.

Remove a Background: Manually retouching challenging areas

In our example, the foreground and background share similar colors due to the lighting. This will be easiest to repair using Photoshop’s Pen tool. I only have a small section I need to touch up, so I’ll use the Pen to create a clean selection and delete the unwanted background.

Remove a Background: Using the pen tool to retouch difficult areas

Here’s the finished result:

Remove a Background: Finished background removal

Final Word

If you are working with a basic image with ample visual contrast between the subject and background, you can most likely get away with using only the Background Eraser Tool.

More complex images will likely require a mix of tools, samplings, and tolerances along with occasional manual touch-ups. There will be times when there is no visual difference between the foreground and background. We have to manually impose that distinction.

And don’t forget that if you are saving your image without adding a new background, you need to save it as a PNG to maintain the transparency.

CEO update: Answering the questions about FutureLearn’s new investors

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CEO update: Answering the questions about FutureLearn’s new investors

Update as of 3pm May 2, 2019

Read the original blog post announcing the news here.

Thank you for all your messages of congratulations, we’re really excited about what this investment means for the future. I can see that there are some questions and concerns about what it means, so let me try to clarify things. We’re not changing the company’s purpose – to transform access to education – nor our strategy. But we want to be one of the world’s major players in opening up education through online services. This investment, and the opportunity to work with our new investors, means that we can do more, more quickly to deliver on our ambition.

What type of company is FutureLearn?

There’s been a bit of confusion about whether or not we’re a charity. The short answer is no.

FutureLearn was set up by The Open University, which is a registered charity, but FutureLearn was never set up as a charity or not-for-profit organisation: it was established as a commercial arm of The Open University and it was always the intention that we would, over time, generate profits for them, as our shareholder.

The Open University was previously our 100% owner and shareholder, and now SEEK Group has joined them to become equal shareholders, with 50% of the company each.

But it’s important to say that we’re focused on making a profit in line with our values and those of our partners and owners, driven by our purpose to transform access to education.

Free-to-join courses will continue and we’ll also be offering more job-focused subjects

We will continue to offer free-to-join courses and we have absolutely no plans to restrict the variety of courses we offer.

As some of you have picked up on, we are beginning to offer more courses that will help people in their careers. We’re doing this because we see that the world of work is changing, a ‘job for life’ is a thing of the past and people will increasingly need to reskill or upskill throughout their working lives. That means there’s a rapidly growing, global demand for more flexible learning in career-related subjects, as traditional industries are transformed by technology, and jobs that didn’t exist a few years ago lead to huge skills gaps. So we’re responding to that by working with our partners to develop more courses to meet that demand. But again, this is additional to our existing portfolio. We’re not swapping anything out for these new courses.

Our team is passionate about learning for the love of learning and we have no plans to restrict the variety of courses offered. We already offer courses, and even fully online degrees, on everything from data science to ancient history and it’s one of the things we love about working here. We want to attract a range of learners, not just one kind of learner. That’s the beauty of our platform – the conversations you can have with people from completely different backgrounds, locations and perspectives than you, as you all learn together.

There’s no change to our purpose to transform access to education

We are genuinely delighted with the investment from SEEK. They are exactly the right investor for us. Their stated purpose is to help people live more fulfilling and productive working lives and help organisations succeed. They are focused on people and how they can help them, which is aligned to The Open University’s purpose to open up education to all and our purpose to transform access to education.

SEEK has invested in our business strategy; they’re not asking us to change what we’re doing. They believe in what we’re doing, want to help us achieve our goals and are very much aligned with our values. Here are some videos about their community focus and their culture so you can get a better sense of who they are.

Marketing and advertising

I’ve seen some concerns about receiving emails from SEEK and seeing lots of advertising on our website. This won’t happen. There are no plans for SEEK to use the FutureLearn website for advertising purposes.

Also, there won’t be any changes to our privacy policy, as a consequence of the investment. This means you’ll only receive emails from SEEK if you sign up to receive them with SEEK directly. SEEK won’t have any access to your data either, in compliance with our privacy policy and GDPR rules.

What does SEEK get?

Some of you have also been asking about what SEEK gets out of this investment – great question!

SEEK want to help people live more fulfilling and productive working lives and help organisations succeed. They see a huge opportunity for the employment market and the education sector to work together. They see new job roles being created and people who need to reskill and upskill to get those roles. These people often can’t take time out of their lives and careers to physically go to training courses, so online learning is the only solution for them. That makes FutureLearn, as one of the world’s best online learning platforms, a great fit alongside their other portfolio of businesses.

They also understand who we are as a business and who you are as our learners, and believe in what we are trying to achieve.

I hope this answers your biggest questions and that you will continue to take the courses and qualifications on offer from our excellent partners, enjoy them, and recommend them to others if you think they are good!

And finally, I want to thank you all again for your support over the years and hopefully long into the future.

Thanks,

Simon

Category
FutureLearn news

Word + Quiz: lede

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Word + Quiz: lede

: the introductory section of a story

_________

The word lede has appeared in 13 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on Jan. 15 in “Watch Your Lapels: These Great Ledes Are Coming for Them” by Marc Lacey:

The “lede” is the first paragraph of a newspaper story. It can be ponderous and downright dull. Or it can grab you by the lapels, pull you close and scream into your face: Read this.

On the National desk, we began a tradition recently of honoring the “lede of the week.” We scrawl a particularly graceful lede in longhand on a white board that is visible to those coming and going from the newsroom. And we post the winning ledes on Twitter, where they regularly get loads of retweets.

_________

Learning With: ‘Emperor Akihito, Who Gave Japan’s Monarchy a Human Face, Abdicates Throne’

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Learning With: ‘Emperor Akihito, Who Gave Japan’s Monarchy a Human Face, Abdicates Throne’

Add to your chart: What else have you learned about Akihito and Japan’s imperial family? What else are you still curious about?

A royal engagement typically unleashes breathless headlines and frenzied efforts by the press to learn of the wedding details. All that is happening in Japan, where Princess Mako, the eldest grandchild of Emperor Akihito, will soon be engaged to her college boyfriend.

But news of the impending engagement, which broke Tuesday night, is also raising fresh questions about the status of women in the imperial family.

Under the Imperial Household Law, which governs the succession of emperors in Japan’s monarchy, the world’s oldest, women are not allowed to reign on the throne. And women born into the royal family must officially leave it once they marry. …

The public overwhelmingly supports changing the law not only to allow the emperor to give up the throne, but to allow female successors. In a poll by Kyodo News this month, 86 percent of those surveyed said they were in favor of allowing a female to reign. And close to two-thirds said that sons — or daughters — born of royal women should also be allowed to ascend to the throne.

Under the current law, even if the princess, the eldest daughter of Prince Akishino, the younger brother of Crown Prince Naruhito, were allowed to remain within the imperial family after she marries, her children — even any sons — would not be in line to the throne. That is because the law requires that the line of succession pass only through the men of the family …

Given how short the line of succession has become, imperial family watchers say that the law should be reformed to allow for more heirs.

“Now we all know that an important imperial family member will be lost with the engagement of Princess Mako,” said Isao Tokoro, professor emeritus of legal history at Kyoto Sangyo University and an expert on the imperial family system. “It is urgent that the system should be reformed so that female members can remain in the imperial family. Otherwise, we will lose more and more members from the imperial family.”

Because the role of Japan’s emperor is largely symbolic — he acts as a figurehead with no real political power — is the imperial system even worth maintaining? In your opinion, what value, if any, does this symbolic role have today?

Tidying Up

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Tidying Up

Do you know about the book (and related Netflix series) by Marie Kondo about how to declutter by getting rid of what no longer “sparks joy?”

How neat and tidy are you? Do you regularly give away, recycle or throw out things you no longer need or want, or are you more of a hoarder? What spot in your room or house most desperately needs a little decluttering? Why?

Tell us about it in the comments, then read a related article to learn more about organizing what you own.

Find many more ways to use our Picture Prompt feature in this lesson plan.

Weekly News Quiz for Students: Easter Sunday Bombings, Mueller Report, Census Question

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Weekly News Quiz for Students: Easter Sunday Bombings, Mueller Report, Census Question

Above is an image related to one of the news stories we followed these past two weeks. Do you know what it shows? At the bottom of this quiz, you’ll find the answer.

Have you been paying attention to the news recently? See how many of these 10 questions you can get right.

Are Digital Memories Ruining Our Real Ones?

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Are Digital Memories Ruining Our Real Ones?

Think of a recent experience that you or your friends video-recorded and then watched later.

Close your eyes and try to remember as much as you can from that moment.

What do you remember? What do you see?

Can you recall the actual experience? Can you remember what it looked like and felt like to be present in that moment? Or can you remember only the photograph or video you had recorded and then seen?

What does this tell you about the impact of digital recordings on your memories in general: How distinct is your memory? How much of what you can recall is from the time of your experience? How much of your memory is based on watching and rewatching it later?

Do you think videos enhance or detract from your memories?

In “Is the Immediate Playback of Events Changing Children’s Memories?,” Julia Cho writes that looking at a video right after an event can alter the actual memory of the experience:

The night of the elementary school talent show, we came home to celebrate with ice cream when my mother took out her iPhone to show a video she’d taken of my 10-year-old daughter’s performance. My daughter had played Ed Sheeran’s “Perfect” on the piano by ear and sang along. Despite her nerves, she got out there in the middle of the stage in a new dress with scattered sequins and sang her best, bowing to an audience of clapping parents before she walked off stage — an expression of relief and pride on her face.

When I saw my mother’s finger hovering over “play” on her phone, my daughter leaning over her shoulder, I stopped her: “You know what … let’s just let her enjoy the moment.”

I’ve seen the way my daughter’s facial expression changes, her eyes squint slightly, and her neck pulls her head back just a little when she watches videos of herself. I knew that in my daughter’s mind she’d felt like a rock star up there, and that seeing the video might surprise her and change the way she remembered the experience. It’s not that her performance wasn’t good — just that it might be slightly different on video than the way she experienced it, the way we all feel when we hear ourselves on a recording and say “Wait — that’s what I sound like?”

I wanted to keep her experience sacred for at least a little bit longer. I wanted to keep it her experience.

It turns out that my hesitancy has a genuine scientific basis. Daniel Schacter, a psychology professor at Harvard whose books include “The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers,” told me, “We know from research that reactivating an experience after it occurs can have large effects on subsequent memory for that experience, and depending on what elements of an experience are reactivated, can even change the original memory.”

Many studies have been done on how a person taking a photograph reinforces or reshapes their memory, but what about our children — the subject of our constant documentation? Does seeing themselves in the third person change or even falsify their memories? Instead of remembering the experience of singing up there on the stage looking out at the audience from her own eyes, my daughter’s memory becomes entangled with the videographer’s perspective from the audience looking up at the stage.

The article continues:

What would have happened if I let my daughter watch the video right after her experience? According to Dr. Siegel she would have quickly moved from being a participant to being a more distant observer.

“A half-hour after the show, instead of being able to languish and enjoy the rich bodily sensations and emotions that accompany autobiographical experience and memory and narrative, she’s now being thrust into the observer autobiographical experience because she’s watching herself on the screen,” he said.

I have no videos of my elementary school performances, ballet recitals or birthday mornings from my early ’80s childhood. Videos were not sent via phone for instant viewing. Even film had to be developed when I was growing up; vacation pictures would be viewed a week or so after the experience. We got to linger in the experience for a while, from our own perspective, not the camera’s. Even though many of my childhood memories are hazy, they’re mine.

Students, read the entire article, then tell us:

— Are digital memories ruining our real ones? Why or why not? How difficult is it for you to separate your actual experiences from your videos and photographs of them? How have digital recordings of you affected your self-image?

— The article concludes:

It’s been a week since my daughter’s performance. “I can’t believe it’s over!” she says twirling around the kitchen. She knows I have a video of the performance, but, interestingly enough, she hasn’t asked to see it, and I haven’t volunteered it. I think I’ll let us both remember it just as it was that night for now: raw and unfiltered, and from our own perspectives, perfect.

Do you think Ms. Cho made the right decision to withhold the video from her daughter? If you were her daughter, would you have demanded to see it? Do you agree with Dr. Daniel Siegel, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, that videos can “rob our moments of their ephemeral power”?

— Have you ever thought of recording an experience (through video or photographs) and then decided not to because you felt it would detract from the moment, or from future memories of it? Having read the article, do you think you are more likely now to put your camera away next time?

— How good is your memory? How important are your memories to your identity and life? What do you think of the author’s statement that “Even though many of my childhood memories are hazy, they’re mine”? Is this a convincing argument for putting down the video camera? Or do you think her perspective is somehow outdated or irrelevant to people from your generation who have grown up surrounded by technology?

— Do you have a favorite memory? Was a camera present to record it?

— How much of your life has been recorded digitally? How often do you rewatch these images and videos? Do you think videos enhance or detract from your memories? If you have children of your own, would you want to videotape everything — from their first steps to high school graduation? Or would you ever hold back?

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