Good morning! The holiday season has begun and we’ve got a bounty of resources. Enjoy! — The Learning Network16 questions to take your students through December
’Tis the season for … writing prompts? We think so, and based on some of the posts on our site that have been popular over the last week, many teachers agree. To offer you fresh ideas all December long, we’ve rounded up a collection of questions that can help your students reflect on their lives, share memories and traditions, weigh in on seasonal debates, write stories, look back at the highs and lows of this year — and plan ahead for the next. Happy holidays! Recent Times reporting about education
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Classroom activity: Talk to a Times photojournalist.
The Times photographer James Estrin joins us this month to chat with teenagers about using a camera to explore the place where you live, and already we’ve heard from students in Australia, France, Pennsylvania and Kentucky. What would your students like to know about finding interesting subjects? About taking memorable images? Invite them to post their comments and questions by Dec. 12. Before you go, see what teens are saying about technology bans.
The Times technology reporter Natasha Singer recently wrote about how, as public concern over youth mental health has mounted, government and education leaders are increasingly turning to strict bans to manage these risks. We asked teenagers: Do these technology bans actually work? The response was overwhelming and largely skeptical. Here are three interesting answers from one school, Glenbard West High School in Glen Ellyn, Ill.: In middle school, we all had school-issued laptops, and it seemed like every month there would be a new restrictive Chrome extension put in place. So what happened? Someone found a new, third-party browser that the teachers couldn’t access, and the entire grade had it downloaded within two days. Restrictions and technology bans are generally taken as a challenge rather than a barrier, and the reality is that they just don’t work. — Anna In the classes that do have the ban that I am in, it works very well. It’s like a complete social experiment. The whole class actually has real talks with each other and deep conversations like never before. One of my typically silent classes with very little human interaction, when we tried the phone ban in class one day, the whole class was very loud which was weird for such a quiet class. — Dylan It feels like the whole school is holding its breath, not because anything drastic happened, but because every phone has been taken away and every connection we rely on has been switched off at once. Adults might hope that this kind of environment will keep teens focused and protected. And yet taking our phones does not make the real problems fade. The worries, the friendships we lean on, the small moments of support we find online, those things do not disappear just because the phone does. Social media may create stress, but it also gives teens a place to talk, to laugh, to stay connected when life feels too heavy to handle alone. Completely removing that does not make us safer, it just makes us quieter. — Azera We’d love your feedback on this newsletter. Please email thoughts and suggestions to LNfeedback@nytimes.com.
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