Contest Dates: Dec. 5, 2019 – Jan. 14, 2020
So you’re studying the Civil War — or Shakespeare, or evolution, or “The Bluest Eye.”
Why? What does it have to do with your life and the lives of those around you? Why should you remember it once you’ve turned in that paper or taken that test?
What relevance does it have today? What lessons can you learn from it that can be applied to the world outside of school? What parallels do you see between it and something happening in our culture or the news?
Essentially, we’re asking students to do what we do every day: connect what’s in The Times with what you’re learning in school.
But if you simply open nytimes.com and start clicking around, you’ll see that the task is not that hard. The Times publishes hundreds of articles from around the globe every day, so you can almost always find something that confronts the very same themes, questions or issues that you’ve been discussing in class.
Please note: We will update this page with more detailed rules and the submission form on or before Dec. 5, 2019, the date when this contest officially opens.
Until then, here are useful resources so teachers and students can begin planning for this contest:
• Our 2018-19 and 2017-18 winners, runners-up and honorable mentions.
• Our lesson plans “Making It Relevant: Helping Students Connect Their Studies to the World Today” and “The Past Is Present: Strategies for Bringing Current Events Into the Social Studies Classroom.”
• A link to add this contest to your Google calendar
• Our contest rubric
If you have any questions, please contact us at LNFeedback@nytimes.com.
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2019-20 Contest Rules and Guidelines
1. Choose some piece of academic content: something you’ve been reading, discussing or learning about in school. It may be a work of literature, an event in history, a concept in civics, a phenomenon in science or something else entirely. It can be as small as a single haiku or as large as a world-changing event like the Industrial Revolution.
2. Find something published in The New York Times anytime in 2019 or 2020 that you think connects to your chosen subject in some interesting, meaningful way, and explain how.
3. You can pick any article, Op-Ed, image, video, graphic or podcast, or anything else you like, as long as it was published in The Times in 2019 or 2020.
4. Tell us, in 450 words or fewer, how and why the two things connect.
5. All entries must be submitted by the deadline posted in the announcement about this contest.
6. You can work alone or in a group of up to five people, but just one submission per person, please.
7. What is the “prize”? Having your work published on The Learning Network, and, potentially, in print in a Times special section.
9. Submissions must be from middle and high school students, ages 13 and up. Since internet privacy laws are changing in the U.S. and around the world, please stay tuned for exact details about age requirements in different countries.
10. The children and stepchildren of New York Times employees are not eligible to enter this contest. Nor are teenagers who live in the same household as a Times employee.
