Before the summer holiday begins,
be sure to encourage your students to participate here. And watch the video below for guidelines on how to participate. This is copied from the New York Times, The Learning Network.
Every year since 2010, The Learning Network has invited teenagers around the world to add The New York Times to their summer reading lists. So far, more than 90,000 have done so.
If you are looking for ways to offer students more “voice and choice,” we hope our open-ended contest can help. Every week, we ask participants to choose something in The Times that has piqued their interest, and then tell us why. At the end of the week, judges from the Times newsroom and The Learning Network pick their favorite responses, and we publish them. It’s that simple.
Though our goals include some that appear on many educators’ lists — helping students become more aware of the world and their place in it; learning how to navigate sophisticated nonfiction; and practicing writing for an audience — we also hope that students will realize that reading the newspaper can be fun.
As you’ll see in the guidelines below, students can choose anything that was published on NYTimes.com in 2023. We don’t care if they pick a piece about Ukraine or U.S. politics; college or cats; happiness or hairstyles; music or mental health. We just care about why they chose it.
Here’s how the contest works:
1. Every Friday beginning on June 9, we will publish a post asking the same question: “What got your attention in The Times this week?” That’s where you should post an answer any time until the following Friday at 9 a.m. Eastern, when we will close that post to comment and open a new one that asks the same question. On Aug. 11 we’ll post our final question of the summer, open until 9 a.m. on Aug. 18.
You can always find the proper link to the place to post at the top of this page, updated each week. You can also always find it on our home page.
To see how this works, visit this post from August 2022 and check out the student comments that were submitted at that time.
3. You can participate as often as every week, but we allow only one submission per person per week.
4. Responses must be 1,500 characters or fewer. We have a contest rubric as well as a guide for students that details four simple ways to make your response stand out.
5. Any teenager anywhere in the world is invited to join us, if you are in middle or high school, or if you graduated from high school in 2023 and haven’t started college yet. See below, How to Submit, for more details.
6. Make sure to provide us with the complete URL or headline. For example, “The Queen of Everest Trains While Working at Whole Foods” or https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/31/sports/lhakpa-sherpa-everest.html.
7. Every Tuesday during the contest, starting June 27 and ending Aug. 29, we will publish the previous week’s winner or winners in a separate post you can find here. We will also celebrate the winners on Twitter and Facebook.
