Stephen Wilkes for The New York Times. Tape Installation by Stephen Doyle.
Riverdale Country School in the Bronx, where teachers and students are focusing on the concept of “character.” We’ve chosen the related article as our first for a new online discussion club for students.
It all started when we heard about the Big City Room Book Club, which just hosted an online discussion of “Let the Great World Spin” for adult readers. We were inspired.
But, we said to ourselves, most kids are already in a “book club” — otherwise known as “English class” — so instead, how about a regular event to encourage them to read excellent, long-form Times articles they might otherwise miss?
Then, that very morning, a perfect candidate was published: a Times Magazine article about teaching “character,” if it can be taught, told through the experiences of two very different schools. (And though we’ve chosen the inaugural article, we’re hoping you and your students will nominate future candidates.)
So the Learning Network Reading Club is born. Here’s how it will work.
Every so often, we’ll post an article that we think has great appeal for young people and invite them to come to our blog to discuss it. Yes, we do something like this every day via our Student Opinion question, but Reading Club will have a few very important rules to make it different:
1. Participants must respond to at least one other student comment.
Because we want to make this a substantive student-to-student conversation,we will approve only those comments in which the writer responds, at some point in his or her submission, to at least one other commenter. To do this, simply use the “@” symbol before the name of the person to whom you are responding, as in “@Kyle: I see your point, but I disagree because …”
We’ll start the ball rolling on each article so that there’s always at least one comment to respond to. For this discussion, we’ve asked our new college intern, Susannah, to post the first comment.
2. Read the whole article before commenting.
Students should post a response on our blog only after they have read the whole article — and, unlike the Times content we choose for most of our other features, for Reading Club we’ll be choosing long-form work such as the Magazine features weekly. If you’d like to have an in-class discussion about it first, that’s great too.
3.The discussion will be time-limited.
While we keep our Student Opinion questions open indefinitely, for this feature we’ll limit the time when students can respond to two weeks. This will help the conversation stay lively, but still allow classes to participate at school or for homework.
4. Use good Web etiquette.
Of course, our commenting standards will apply to this just as they do on all our features. But, as in a real conversation, here it will be especially important not to insult other people, go off on lengthy diatribes, or “yell” by writing in all caps. And please remember this is for students only, not adults.
5. No last names are permitted, but class codes are fine.
The Learning Network has different rules than other New York Times blogs: because many students who use the site are under 18, they may not post their last names when they comment, though last initials are fine. They may also use a “class code” of some kind, as many teachers have assigned for ourstudent contests. To do this, have all students append it to their names (“Rachel5A” or “JustinWLHS,” for instance).
6. We’ll feature favorites.
As we do for our contests, we’ll pull out articulate, thoughtful comments to highlight after each edition of Reading Club has closed.
So let’s get started!
Students, read the article “What if the Secret to Success Is Failure?” by Paul Tough and start posting below, following the rules above.
