Holiday Newsletters: Facilitating Learning through Winter Break

On December 19th, my students departed for a two-week vacation, and I was terrified to think they wouldn’t be reading and learning while away from school. The lure of Instagram, Snapchat, and Vine draws students away from the New York Times, The WSJ, NPR, and any other vehicles for learning that a teacher might endorse. This past break, in order to keep them reading and informed while away from school, I sent my students three “holiday newsletters.” These newsletters contained news and opinion pieces on current events in different media formats.

One of my hesitations in crafting these newsletters is that I’m not a professional editor; but, through my own social media I’ve curated quite a list of feeds that keep me up-to-date with the news. I’ve tried to teach students this skill so they can be their own editors, but alas, most teenagers aren’t interested. So instead, through my newsletters, I made it as easy as possible for my students to keep up with current events, hoping to catch a handful of them bored over their lengthy break.

It worked wonders. I didn’t reach nearly every student, but I did reach some. And that’s what matters. A handful of my students took time out of their vacation to see what’s going on outside their bubble. They had a chance to be informed citizens, to choose something that interested them and keep learning

When my students returned from break, we held intellectual discussions that helped them keep up with news from over the break. In some classes these discussions encouraged more of them to go back and read the newsletters; I even had a student who went back to a previous newsletter to hear a 2005 Kenyon graduation talk by David Foster Wallace. She emailed me a week later:

Hopefully, the “holiday newsletters” encouraged the students to consume and to share more academic content.