Because of William and Mary’s Spring Break, my Current Events Class didn’t meet last week. That means that this week, I need to remember what happened over the past two weeks so that my students don’t miss anything significant.
Over the five years that I have been teaching this class, I have streamlined my preparation process. The first thing I realized is that I couldn’t just talk to my students about the things I think are important; I also need to fill them in on things that I may have missed. I pay attention to the news – A LOT – but I didn’t want my personal biases to impact what I talked to my students about.
I discovered that several news organizations – BBC, CNN, USA Today, ABC, AP – publish daily newsletters providing guidance on what they think are the most important stories for the day. I compared these newsletters and realized that they were all pretty much picking up the same main stories. I decided to go with CNN. You can subscribe to this newsletter so you get it each morning. Here’s the link to their “5 Things” page, in case you want to check it out. https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/11/us/five-things-april-11-trnd/index.html
Each Monday, as I begin to prepare for my class, I look at the “5 Things” for the Monday and for the previous Friday. If there are specific things that happened during the previous week that weren’t captured by these newsletters, I look back at previous dates to pick them up. I make a short PowerPoint slide show for each Monday, so that I can just click on the links and not have to find the sites in real time to talk about the stories.
The second thing I do is look at a publication called News For You. It’s both a physical and online newspaper that is written in accessible language for people who are learning English. The Literacy Center used to get a dozen paper copies of this newspaper, but it stopped the subscription during the pandemic closure and hasn’t started it up again. I hope they will soon, because I like to let my students page through the paper and come across things they are interested in. Until that happens, however, we use the online version. I put a link to this site on my PowerPoint slide as well. I usually select an article or two that I think my students will be interested in, and we read it aloud from the screen in front of the room. Here’s the link for this newspaper. https://www.newsforyouonline.com/. You’ll be able to see the headlines of the articles, but you won’t be able to read them without a subscription.
Neither of these sources picks up local or state news, so I go to another site, the Virginia Public Access Project, to make sure I’m picking up important local stories. One of the things I talk to my students about is that many important things happen at the state and local level, but that these things get ignored because of the drama that often accompanies national news stories. We talk about our system of Federalism that creates this situation. Here’s the VPAP site. https://www.vpap.org/. You can sign up for a free daily newsletter that drops into your inbox every morning.
A couple of months ago, one of my students asked if it would be possible for me to send out a vocabulary list each Monday, so that the students have time to look up words they don’t understand before the class begins at 1:00. I said I would try – and I have found it to be a pretty simple task. I just sent out today’s vocabulary a few minutes ago.
One other thing I do is add slides to my presentation if I think they’re useful. For example, after President Biden announced that he was appointing Judge Jackson to the Supreme Court, I made a quick slide showing the current members of the Supreme Court, identifying Justice Breyer (who retired) and the three justices appointed by President Trump. As the confirmation process began, I made a quick slide showing the steps in that process. Today, I’ll be talking a little about gun violence (one of the “5 Things” topics), and I’ll have a slide that shows a color-coded map of states based on the severity of their gun laws. And so forth. It usually takes me about an hour to plan what I’m going to do in my class. It’s helpful that I taught government and history for a LONG time and I can usually figure out the underlying issues that are important to each story. It’s also helpful that a lot of the images I want to use — like diagrams of government processes, color-coded maps, and pictures of important people and places — are easily retrievable online.
My students are generally well-educated in their own languages and cultures, so they don’t have too much trouble understanding the points I’m making. This class is pitched toward students with a pretty good grasp of English, so they don’t feel lost very often.
Before the pandemic, this class numbered 15-20 people per session. When I taught this class through Zoom during the pandemic, I averaged 10-12 people per session. Since the resumption of in-person classes, the numbers are small – 5-8 people per class. The issue is vaccination – William and Mary required vaccinations for people taking classes on campus, and the immigrant population is, in general, less likely to be vaccinated. Even though the college has relaxed its vaccination and mask mandates, enrollment among the unvaccinated has been slow to resume. That’s fine with me, actually – I don’t really want to hang around with a bunch of unvaccinated folks.
Great graphic. That's the way I feel about the world today. I'm partial to the MSNBC newsletter but also read several others. Your students are very fortunate to have you as their guide.