Every day in our Student Opinion forum we pick the articles and ask you what you think about them. Now, we’re flipping the script and asking you to tell us what we should read.
Consider it practice for our annual Summer Reading Contest, when we’ll pose this same question every Friday from June through August. As we say in our rules, we don’t care what you pick, we just care about why you picked it — what made it interesting to you, what you loved or hated, how it connected to your life, what it taught you, how it made you feel, or what it made you think about.
So wander through The Times, online or in print, and find something published in 2019 that gets your attention. It could be an article, but it could also be a photo, video, chart or graph, podcast, illustration, or anything else, including pieces published on The Learning Network. We’ll call out our favorite responses to this question in our Current Events Conversation feature later this month.
To show you how easy this is, here’s what we got last May when we asked the same question. You can find all the 2018 student picks here, but this handful should give you the idea:
• I Went Naked to a Museum, and It Was … Revealing: Unanimous choice, Sarah Gross’s English I, Section 2 class.
Why? Duh: “It’s a naked museum!” The students also added, “Apparently, some people think that they can connect better with art if they remove all the barriers between them and the art. Like clothes. But how do you go to a museum and take off your clothes around strangers?!”
Never Solved, a College Dorm Fire Has Become One Man’s Obsession:
“This type of article is my favorite, it is one that I can go into with no previous knowledge, and come out being able to recount the events described to my peers. I also like to read about mysteries and try to come up with my own conclusions, and I think it is interesting to share the stories with my friends and see what they might have to say.” — Randy Parris, Walhalla High School
Birds Beware: The Praying Mantis Wants Your Brain:
“It’s just cool! Plus being able to eat something twice as big as itself is crazy.” — Deep Gopani, High Tech High School
Lacrosse Casts Its Net Farther From the Coast, and Pulls In New Recruits
“It’s an article about lacrosse and how fast the sport is growing. I found it interesting because I didn’t know that lacrosse was growing that quickly!” — Jaime DiMatteo, Folsom Elementary School District
Students, find something in The Times that gets your attention and tell us why. If you like, use some of these questions to get started:
— Why did you choose it? What about it was interesting?
— Did you learn anything new from reading it?
— Why should other people your age know about it?
— What connection, if any, does the piece — whether an article, a video, a graph, a podcast or a photo — have to your own life, or to the lives of people you know?
— Did you have a strong reaction to it, whether negative or positive? Why do you think that is?
— Did it raise questions for you? Make you think about something in a new light?
