Before they started their English classes this fall, Herricks High School juniors Grace Robinson, Nicole Jara, Holly Triebe and David Fisher said, they didn’t talk about the news much at school.
Other classes touch on relevant current events, they said, such as the Nov. 13 attacks on Paris.
But English teacher Michael Stein made them central to his courses this fall, having students keep up with the news every day.
The exercise landed the four 16-year-olds among the winners of the New York Times’ inaugural Editorial Cartoon Contest, and gave them a deeper engagement with their world, they said.
“Just because we’re teenagers doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be citizens of the world. … This is the world that we’re growing up and coming into, …”,” said Robinson, of Williston Park.
Stein had students in his standard 11th-grade English and Advanced Placement language and composition classes subscribe to two email newsletters containing each day’s top headlines. In class, they discussed news stories and the Times’ political cartoons, analyzing the rhetorical techniques and strategies the artists used.
Each student then had to draft their own political cartoon and submit it to the contest, run by The Learning Network, the Times’ education blog.
“In other classes we would only talk about something really dramatic,” said Fisher, a New Hyde Park resident whose cartoon addressed the fact that the majority of American gun deaths are suicides. “(O)therwise we don’t talk about current events as regularly or as soundly as we did in Mr. Stein’s.”
Robinson’s entry about the media coverage surrounding the October shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon was selected as one of five winners from among nearly 500 entries from students across the country between ages 13 and 19.
“It really caught my attention that the media was only focusing on the gunman instead of the people who sacrificed their life and time for others,” said Robinson, a Williston Park resident.
Jara’s cartoon depicting Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump as a baby was one of 17 runners-up in the contest.
As a Hispanic person affected by Trump’s disparaging remarks about Mexican immigrants, the New Hyde Park resident said she wanted to “show the side of him that, basically, America knows that he is, but doesn’t like to acknowledge it much.”
Fisher and Triebe, an Albertson resident, both got honorable mentions. Triebe’s entry addressed the public’s easy distraction from major world events, which is “scarier than (what’s) in the news,” she said.
Stein has incorporated art into his English classes throughout his 12 years at Herricks, and thought political cartoons would work well in his first year teaching the Advanced Placement class, he said.
Creatively expressing their understanding of current events helps the students explore ideas in new ways in addition to getting them engaged with the news, Stein said.
“(I)f you put something creative into it, you get a better understanding because you put a part of yourself into it while reading something or figuring out the analysis yourself,” Jara said.
Stein said his classes are discussing classic works of literature. While many students are still getting the daily news emails, they have moved away from talking about the headlines every day.
He said he plans to keep this component of the courses next year, and may make more of a habit out of discussing current events.
“To have the time in class to discuss it and let everybody engage with the news in that way, we miss out when we don’t get to do that on a daily basis,” Stein said.
