Pens to Power: The Learning Network in Print

As we announced in April, there’s a new print education section at The Times, and every quarter when it publishes, work from our site will be in it. Here is what appears in the June 6 edition.

_________

Over the course of the 2017-18 school year, The Learning Network — a site about teaching and learning with Times content — received roughly 75,000 comments from teenagers around the world.

Many came in response to our daily Student Opinion questions, which are inspired by that week’s news, and ask young people to weigh in on everything from politics to pop culture, video games to vaping, fashion to football.

But nearly 10,000 of them arrived as submissions to our Fifth Annual Student Editorial Contest, in which teenagers were invited to write on the issues they care about most.

Here are the opening paragraphs from some of those essays. They are illustrated by the work of young artists who answered our call to show us what the phrase “student voice” means to them.

_________

_________

Dinner-Table Politics

The Thanksgiving table is a war zone. The soldiers? The conservative aunt who drove all the way from Alabama. The ultraprogressive sibling who makes passive-aggressive comments while passing the potatoes. And, of course the grandparents, who stubbornly reference the good ol’ days when political incorrectness roamed free.

Throughout America, families hunker down for the holidays with reluctance and trepidation. Civil conversation concerning the issues facing our country is becoming rarer by the day. But if we can’t talk about the issues, how can we fix them? The Thanksgiving table is a microcosm of the real world discussions in local and state governments, in Washington, D.C., in the White House itself. Americans must learn how to talk to each other about politics, from the dinner table to the Oval Office.

—Bridget Smith, 15

A 4.0 GPA and I Still Know Nothing

I don’t really know what a mortgage is, or how to do my taxes, but I do know what the derivative of y=2(3x^2- 4x)^2 is. I don’t know a thing about stocks, or what my Social Security number means, but I do know that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. I don’t know what a credit score is, or how to balance a checkbook, but I can do a geometric proof for you.

In five months, I will be heading off to college and living without my parents care for the first time in 17 years, and I have never felt so unprepared. Academically, I have no woes. It is the thought of living on my own, in the grown-up world, that troubles me. Society has become so focused on academics, test scores, and GPA, that no school wants to spend time teaching kids about buying a house, or paying off loans. Because of this, I am going off to college with little to no knowledge about everyday skills.

—Rachel Levine, 17

_________

_________

A Gen Zer’s Take on the Social Media Age

Adults seem to think the internet is nothing more than a breeding ground for unproductivity and detachment from the “real world,” that social media offers only a platform for cyber bullies and child predators. They mock us for our so-called “addiction,” calling us a self-involved, attention-starved generation.

But if you ask any intelligent young person — two adjectives that are not mutually exclusive — they’ll tell you all about what the information superhighway really means to us.

Today’s youth have come of age in an atmosphere where encroaching problems of climate change, global terrorism, economic crises, and mass shootings — to name a few — have opened our eyes to the reality we’re living in, the weight of fixing it all resting on our shoulders.

But we’ve also grown up in a world where we can type into Google anything we want to learn more about; we can engage with millions of people from all walks of life, come to understand perspectives at every angle. Knowledge is powerful, and we have all that we could want available at our fingertips.

—Elena Quartararo, 17

Under Black Cloaks

Can you imagine a life in which you are merely the property of someone else? Unfortunately, this is exactly the life of women in Saudi Arabia, where the treatment of women restricts their fundamental human rights. During my two years living in Dubai and Qatar, I went to Saudi Arabia three times with my father, where I witnessed their discriminatory policies.

In a mall in Riyadh, I was shocked to see a woman awkwardly eating noodles without taking off the veil of her niqab. She used a fork to lift the noodles toward the eye-opening, and slightly pulled the lower part away from her face, then pointed the fork down so the noodles would slide onto the inside of the veil without revealing her face.

—Bincheng Mao, 16

_________

_________

The Future of the #MeToo Movement Through the Eyes of a 17-Year-Old Boy

I’m Charlie, I’m 17, and I attend an all-male prep school. Discussions with my peers in the wake of the #MeToo movement have yielded shared feelings of disgust towards these abusers, and horror that we too may be part of the problem. This fear stems not from acknowledgment that we have facilitated harassment, but rather from the uncertainty of what constitutes reprehensible behavior.

Our shared worry was not spurred by Harvey Weinstein or Matt Lauer, but instead from claims brought against Aziz Ansari. The allegations against Mr. Ansari appeared to be a landmark event, for instead of universally turning favor against him, they divided the community. Some notable feminists, including Bari Weiss, even began to back Ansari.

Following the release of the allegations, Weiss published an article in The New York Times in which she calls for women to be more vocal about their wishes, and states that lumping Ansari in with other accused abusers “trivializes what the #MeToo movement first stood for.” This sentiment was shared by my peers.

Following the publication of the original exposé, my morning commute was dominated by debates over whether what Ansari did was wrong, and whether his accuser went too far. The fact that such discussions occurred is evidence of a systematic problem across the younger generations; we are unsure what exactly constitutes inappropriate sexual behavior.

—Charles Gstalder, 17

_________

_________

Civil Obedience

When I was 5, I needed someone to hold my hand as I entered school. When I was 12, I needed someone to point to the entrance, but I could walk in alone. Now, at 16, I don’t need anyone — I’m a different person: independent and mature. Yet, I am treated as if I’m still a child.

After the horrific Florida shooting, students walked out of their classes in honor of the 17 lives lost. As noted in “How Young is Too Young for Protest? A National Gun Violence Protest Tests Schools,” even Utah’s Wood Cross Elementary School staged a protest in the school gym to allow the students to experience “a little civil disobedience.”

Like Wood Cross, the administration at my school staged our protest. The day before the walkout, a minute-by-minute schedule and list of guidelines — including the only two doors we could exit from — were uploaded onto Facebook.

The next day, our obedient student body shuffled into the fenced area between our school buildings only to witness teachers’ comments about how ‘cute’ we were and their apologies for being 60 seconds behind schedule. By 10:05, the end of the designated “shouting time,” my friends and I lowered our posters in defeat.

Although I am thankful that my school supports the walkout, nobody needed to be hand-held through this protest. Protesting is fighting and risking consequences, risking falling. Protesting is true civil disobedience. Yet Henry David Thoreau is rolling in his grave thinking about our “protest.” In “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau does not “lend [himself] to the wrong which [he condemns].” Instead, he fights against it, because he has the right “to do at any time what [he thinks is] right.” We have the same right. Why prevent us from using it?

—Anushka Agarwal, 16

_________

_________

Accountability-Based Testing is Broken

In 2015, 11 teachers were convicted of racketeering and other crimes in the infamous Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal, in which “inordinate pressure” from top administrators to meet standardized test score targets or face severe consequences led the teachers to cheat on state standardized tests.

Sadly, such cases of coordinated, large-scale cheating are surprisingly pervasive, underscoring the undue importance attached to standardized test results. These test results are used in an admirable effort at accountability, but the process of accountability via standardized testing is now deeply flawed. Testing has evolved into an industry, a game for test companies and policymakers; everyone benefits — except the students and educators, who are just cogs in the machine.

—Alan Peng, 17

The Case for Lowering the Voting Age

Only a freshman in high school myself, until recently I had always accepted the idea that teenagers lack all responsibility. Convinced that high schoolers possessed insufficient maturity to vote, I dismissed the idea as absurd.

I was all the more shocked after attending the “March for Our Lives” on March 24th. Organized by high school students, the strength and courage that all the young speakers possessed was truly inspiring. My awe was shared by all who attended the march. The event finally reversed my doubt in my fellow teenagers. If high school students can organize a worldwide march in the face of an issue as difficult as gun violence, they are more than capable of voting. The time has come to lower the voting age to 16.

—Kathryn Zaia, age 14

Is It Actually Smart To Sit Still?

Some tap pencils relentlessly against desks. Some remain completely unaware of their rapidly bouncing knees or shaking feet. Some stare into space, lost in whatever daydream that is playing out on the board in front of them, unable to see the math problems on it. Some turn to their phones for a source of interaction — a teacher’s worst nightmare.

Students are restless. And what do schools require them to do? Sit.

—Hannah Amell, 15