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__The Learning Network: Teaching and Learning with the New York Times__ []




 * What is this?** The Learning Network offers resources for teachers who wish to teach content with the vast resources that //The Times// offers. The Learning Network offers connections between content that teachers want or need to teach and current issues in the news. The site does a phenomenal job of spotlighting issues and ideas in //The Times// that directly relate to particular content areas or educational issues. For example, the language arts page links Shakespeare to the storm of criticism about the recently released movie “Anonymous,” which challenges the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. The film dramatizes a version of history in which the seventeenth earl of Oxford actually wrote all the works that Shakespeare has since been credited for. In this way, The Learning Network allows teachers to have ready access to the conversations that are going on around this movie and can be well equipped to lead a lively discussion on this topic in class.


 * Ideas for using this in a classroom:**

The idea of teaching with The New York Times is worthwhile not only because it connects us to resources we might not otherwise be able to easily obtain, but also because these kinds of events can make our teaching more personally relevant and meaningful to the students. Students may not initially care much about Shakespeare, but if they’ve seen or heard about “Anonymous,” the teacher might be able to draw on this prior knowledge and organize a lesson that will be memorable and enhance critical thinking skills. Similarly, by helping teachers link current events to other content areas, The Learning Connection gives teachers wonderful ideas for interesting sets and how to make the input we give students matter to them. By teaching with The New York Times, the “so what?” question that often haunts every lesson has a good chance of being answered.

Another idea would be to make use of the "poetry pairings" that The Learning Network puts together each week. Once a week, //The New York Times// takes work from the Poetry Foundation’s American Life in Poetry project and pairs it with some news content in The Times that relates to this poem in some way. Again, this could be enormously helpful in linking a poem that the students might not otherwise care much about to something that they are interested in. http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/category/poetry-pairings/

Finally, The Learning Network offers lesson ideas that teachers can utilize. The language arts page can be found at h[|ttp://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/category/language-arts/] This is a great way for teachers to collaborate not just with other teachers in the particular schools in which they teach but also with other teachers in their content area across the country. The Times takes ideas for lesson plans from its readers, so the lesson plans shared are truly ideas from the field rather than simply a newspaper’s idea of what might work in schools.

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