Special April Challenge: What Got Your Attention in The Times This Month?

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Special April Challenge: What Got Your Attention in The Times This Month?

Are you avidly following the news right now … or are you mostly looking for distractions from it? Either way, we want to hear from you.

Right now, from April 6 to July 6, high school students across the United States can get free digital access to NYTimes.com. To celebrate that, we invite you to explore the paper, then tell us about the most interesting stuff you find — whether related to the pandemic or not.

At the end of this month, judges from around the newsroom will choose favorite responses and we’ll honor them in a special post.

Questions? Read on, and if they still aren’t answered, please write to us at LNFeedback@nytimes.com.

A. If you don’t already have a Times digital subscription, your teacher can use the directions on this page to visit nytimes.com/highschoolaccess and sign up your whole class. Another option? Everything on The Learning Network is already free, so you can also just use any of the articles, photos, videos or graphs we have already linked to.

A. Literally anything ever published on NYTimes.com is fair game. Just explore, perhaps using this piece, “21 Things Teenagers Can Do With a New York Times Subscription,” to get started.

It can be an article, essay, Op-Ed, video, photo, podcast or infographic. It can be about politics or pythons, meditation or memes, face masks or flying cars. We don’t care what you pick, we just want to know why you picked it.

A. Post your response as a comment on this page by going up to the top and clicking on the little conversation bubble underneath that top skateboarding image. Please note that our system only gives you about 250 words to work with, so you’ll need to be concise.

You can post anytime between now and 9 a.m. Eastern on May 1, 2020, but, please, just one response per student.

As for what to write, this challenge is a special shelter-in-place version of the Summer Reading Contest we’ve been running since 2010, so we have over a decade of good examples to show you. Just scroll through the winning comments from the last several years and you can see that teenagers have written about weighty topics like gender, race and identity, space exploration and 21st-century concentration camps, but they have also written on power napping, junk food, Beyoncé, Disney shows, running and bagels.

In short, we don’t care if you loved the piece or hated it, we just want to hear why it got your attention. Over the years, we have found that the best answers are those that make thoughtful personal connections to the topic.

A. The Learning Network staff, plus a team of as-yet-to-be-named New York Times journalists, will read everything that comes in, then we’ll honor our favorites by publishing them in a separate post sometime in May. We’ll announce it at the top of this post, and on Twitter and Facebook when we do.


Students 13 and older 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.