Good morning! What do you and your students remember about the highs and lows of 2025? Take our special year-end News Quiz to find out! — The Learning Network
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| Clockwise from bottom left: Chris Pizzello/Associated Press; Andrew Medichini/Associated Press; Jamie Kelter Davis; Ashley Landis/Associated Press; Ye Fan |
Chappell Roan. DOGE. Labubus. Tariffs. “No Kings.” Ultraprocessed foods. “KPop Demon Hunters.” ICE. Nvidia. Taylor and Travis. A.I. Charlie Kirk. The Louvre. Zohran Mamdani. The penny. 6-7. The governmental shutdown.
Could your students explain each of these and why it was in the news this year? If so, they should ace our interactive quiz. And if they do, you might invite them to challenge themselves on what news they can remember from 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021 or 2020!
Recent Times reporting on education
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| Amelie Tomlinson, center, with her friends in Melbourne, Australia. |
- The Times’s DealBook Summit included a conversation about the test of purpose that higher education is facing as political pressure mounts and campuses face new cultural and financial strains. You can listen or read a transcript here.
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More teaching resources from The Learning Network
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| María Jesús Contreras |
An activity for your students: How young is too young for …
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| Rini, a new skin care brand aimed at children as young as 4, debuted in November with a line of hydrating face masks. Rini |
If there’s one thing we’ve learned from our many years of creating daily writing prompts, it’s that teenagers love to weigh in on what younger kids should and should not be allowed to do.
Whether we’ve asked how young is too young to indulge in skin care, use social media, own an Apple watch, go on errands without adult supervision, specialize in a sport or climb Mount Everest, students have had strong opinions, and they’ve supported them with admirable evidence and logic. So if you’re looking for a guaranteed way to help your class hone its argumentation skills, feel free to borrow any of these prompts to get started.
Before you go, see what teens are saying about the “6-7” trend.
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| Antonio de Luca/The New York Times |
How do you feel about “6-7” and other slang from the brain rot era? When we asked teenagers, many of them seemed to agree with Aaryan, from Los Angeles, who still finds it funny because “the point is that it means nothing, and half of the humor is watching adults overthink it.”
Here are two more teen takes we thought might be news to adults:
A lot of our slang is random on purpose, which shows that we don’t take everything too seriously and we like humor that’s playful and unpredictable. It also reveals how connected we are to social media, since trends spread fast and new phrases pop up almost every day. Most of all, it shows that we want our own identity, something that adults don’t fully understand, so slang becomes a way for us to bond, communicate, and feel part of the same culture. — Syreniti, EHS
I find it hard to concentrate in middle school, and it’s not the teachers’ fault. They’re great. The real problem is just those two numbers, 6 and 7. It was funny for the first day — no, the first three hours. It has become so overused that just typing them out genuinely fries my brain. Whenever a teacher even mentions 67 at the slightest bit, the whole class gets distracted, and I miss 30 minutes of class time that could’ve been used actually to learn.— Joseph, Julia R. Masterman, Philadelphia
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