Poynter High - Story Ideas

For high schoolers in a New York suburb, choosing next semester's classes just got a little more interesting. 

According to a recent article in the New York Times, the students at Pelham Memorial High School can now have 17 new electives to choose from, adding the spice of life to a pure academic schedule. 

"Now, budding musicians take guitar lessons, amateur war historians re-enact military battles, and future engineers build solar-powered cars — all during school hours, and for credit," writes Times reporter Winnie Hu.

After the No Child Left Behind Act, many elective programs were replaced with more math and science options, to ready students for the rigors of federal testing.  Administrators say they hope the added electives keep seniors interested in school. 

• How many electives are offered at your high school? How many were there last year? How many does your rival school offer?
  
• What electives have been dropped or added in the last year?  Since five years ago? Ten years ago?
  
• Ask students which electives they would most like to see offered, creating an infobox with your survey responses

Maybe your article will spark talks of adding an advanced breakdancing course as an elective?

With unemployment at 6.5 percent and predicted to rise to 8 percent by mid-2009, the impact will be far-reaching. Even to teens. Perhaps especially to teens, whose families could be affected and whose own job prospects diminished.

Poynter's Al Tompkins suggests ways to cover this story and offers links to helpful background information in his Morning Meeting column today.

Tompkins reports:

• The college student. In four weeks or so, winter graduation will occur, and a whole new generation of freshly-minted graduates will be looking for work. Graduation is often preceded by a job fair. When is the job fair, and what are recruiters hearing? There are also "virtual" job fairs. Do these fairs work?

• The military recruiter. When people get hard-up for work, the military might become a more attractive option, even in wartime. Are recruiters seeing more interest in this? Is a steady job a motivation? The Huffington Post raised the question of whether the military might be a more attractive option now that Obama has been elected and promises to get America out of Iraq.

• Holiday Helpers. Just about anyone who wanted a job used to be able to find one during the Christmas season, when retailers would hire seasonal help. Not this year, though.  

This year's holiday hiring levels are also being depressed by the rash of store closings and liquidations that have picked up in recent weeks.

Find the people in your community who are affected. Talk with them. Spend time with them. Tel their stories.

-- Wendy Wallace

Students and citizens,

The day is finally upon us.  After a campaign for the U.S. Preisdency that felt like an eternity, tomorrow is Election Day. By midnight, it should be official: voters will reveal the 44th president.

Even if few high school students can vote due to age restriction, what does this election mean for us?  How will a McCain presidency affect the country, or an Obama one? 

All rhetoric aside, students must take the lead in their school communities in addressing the policy implications of the Nov. 4 victor. 

• What does this mean for health care? Sure, as high schoolers, you are covered by your parents, should they be fortunate to have insurance.  And even if they do...as a college student, let me tell you firsthand, that luxury doesn't last forever. 
  
• What can we expect in terms of troop withdrawal, and the war in general?  Faced with a failing economy and less than stellar loan prospects, many high school students will enlist in the military as a way to finance their college career.  Will they face an Iraq/Afghanistan tour?
  
• What about all this change?  Both candidates marketed their campaign as a prospect of change - but how is that change tangibly defined? 
  

If Obama wins and you choose to write about the historic election of the nation's first black president, read this column by Poynter's dean, Keith Woods.  It poses questions to consider, angles to find, including this:

Tomorrow is the exciting part -- Americans meet their next President. 

Then, it's time for the tough questions.


 

In high school, who cheats?  Slackers, jocks, socialites?  All stereotypes aside, a scarier question emerges: Who doesn't cheat? 

Dr. Donald McCabe of Rutgers follows the cheating trend, surveying high schoolers on their tendency to cheat since the mid-1990s. McCabe’s most recent national survey polled 25,000 high school students from 2001 to 2008 and found that more than 90 percent said they had cheated in one way or another.

With only a tiny minority not cheating, it's official: Cheating is an epidemic.

Why Cheat?  Find out what students think motivates cheating:

• Is is the workload?
• The demand of extra-curriculars?
• The ease at which cheating is accomplished?

There will be inevitable difficulty -- even impossibility -- in getting students to admit to cheating, but theorizing on the motivations of cheating may prove useful in understanding such a far-reaching problem.