2. After watching, think about these questions:
What questions do you still have?
What connections can you make between this podcast and your own life or experience? Why? Does this podcast remind you of anything else you’ve read or seen? If so, how and why?
3. An additional challenge | Respond to the essential question at the top of this post: How important are your high school grades for your future?
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 the Opinion essay “A Promise to Grads With ‘No Promise’.” Ms. Stack writes:
It’s high school graduation season. Time to cheer the teenage achievers (especially the overachievers) and send them off to campus adventures and incipient adulthood. This year, though, I want to talk about the other graduates. The ones without honor society stoles or academic medals or college plans. The ones who still don’t know what they could or should do, who taste a tinny dread when the band strikes up “Pomp and Circumstance.”
I’m talking about students who flailed academically, never discovered any particular talent, drifted unnoticed in the halls. The kids who got into trouble and now think of trouble as their natural habitat. The poor kids, the dwellers in volatile homes, the abusers of substances. The college rejects and even the high school dropouts.
If I could give all those kids a graduation gift, it would be this plain but important truth: Everything can still be fine. Not easy, necessarily, but fine. This is almost certainly true, no matter what seemingly hopeless mess they have made of their affairs or bleak vision they’ve developed of their abilities and future. Virtually all American 18-year-olds have more options and more time than they’ve been led to believe. Teenagers’ biographies (whether promising or ominous) should not be interpreted as dispositive proof of years to come.
This is clear to me now, having lived long enough to watch old friends rebound from seemingly ruined lives to happy, stable and prosperous adulthoods, and on the other end, noticing that some of my most promising classmates fizzled out on contact with the world beyond our little town. There are plenty of kids, of course, who turn out more or less the way you’d expect. But the whole process strikes me as infinitely less predictable than suggested by the mechanical churn and sort of the K-12 assembly line.
7. Join us again on Feb. 6 when we will feature the Opinion video “It Turns Out the ‘Deep State’ Is Actually Kind of Awesome.”
Want more student-friendly videos and podcasts? Visit our Film and Podcast Club 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.
