4Real Forums: Teens and Current Events

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High School Years and Beyond
4Real Forums : High School Years and Beyond

Topic: Teens and Current Events

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SusanJ
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Posted: Jan 20 2010 at 5:02pm \| IP Logged

I've been really struck the last few days in conversation with family members how little awareness there is that ALL news sources have a bias. I'm sorry if this is blatantly obvious to all of you here and I'm beating a dead horse, but, I plan to really educate my children about this once they are news age. I've seen so many times that people label a source "unbiased" if they happen to agree with the particular bias. I did a fantastic project in high school during an election year gathering a variety of media and finding the underlying assumptions being communicated when the same story is reported in different ways.

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ALmom
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Posted: Jan 20 2010 at 6:01pm \| IP Logged

We subscribe to Catholic World Report as I want a solid Catholic perspective - where things are reported current event wise with the whole world in view, with current events in the Church, etc. I don't want anything that is bashing or disrespectful and I haven't seen anything disrespectful in Catholic World Report -honest and unafraid to report on problems, but not disrespectful, imo. With Catholic World Report, we get a better, fuller picture. It's biggest disadvantage is that it doesn't come out in as timely a manner as the weeklies and then there is the shipping so by the time it gets to us, the news can be dated. However, we have found that it often clarifies something we've heard in secular news around here that we knew wasn't quite right. Usually because someone asks us a question - "Did the pope really say such and such?"

We can easily hear or be exposed to other pov via newspapers, TV, radio and conversation. We live in the Bible belt so in any given conversation there are likely to be some current event topics that come up from an evangelical pov - these sometimes coincide with Catholic and sometimes not. We also do not want to exclude current church events or things closer to our heart - struggles of persecuted Catholics, etc.

I've never assigned it or asked teens to read it; they almost always have read at least some. It seems to draw them in. There are always adult issues that are addressed in current events so parents should be comfortable with what is in a given issue before leaving it out for dc.

Oh, believe it or not, another source of some info is IEEE magazines (Acoustics, Physics today, etc. - we learned from one of those about the Israelis kill switch on electronics and it spurred a discussion about what we are doing outsourcing so much of our manufacturing of computer chips and even airplane components and could the Communist Chinese ever exercise a kill switch on us in a conflict. This is certainly not a regular source of current events (it does have a different focus) but there are some very interesting articles addressing current events related to science from time to time for any science fans. You'd have to have other sources of info too, but hey these are not emotional, and have not generally been agenda driven. (I drive the agenda by the direction we take the information - the ponderings we do).

Janet

Erin
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Posted: Jan 21 2010 at 5:02am \| IP Logged

Well I wasn't even looking for it and this link came my way: 25 Great Ideas for Teaching Current Events

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