"We're never quite certain where The Times will take us when we walk through our classroom door," write Sarah Gross and Jonathan Olsen, the teachers with whom we've been collaborating for our Friday Common Core Practice postings. Since this is the last week before the winter holidays, we asked these teachers to take a break from prompt-creating and just reflect on the semester so far. Here is what they sent. The Times and a Classroom Policy of Serendipitous Discovery By Sarah Gross and Jonathan Olsen Followers of The Learning Network are familiar with how we use newspapers to teach literacy in the age of the Common Core. We've committed this year to using hard copies of The New York Times as the fulcrum of most classroom activity, and we are loving the results. Since the informational text advocated by the Common Core is crammed onto every page of The New York Times, our daily classroom routine now includes students reading selections from that day's paper and responding to writing prompts in their journals. Many of these prompts form the basis of Common Core Practice, a weekly writing activity published on The Learning Network. But this doesn't mean we put the paper away and move back to our textbook when students are done writing. Inspiration in the Oddest of Places Freshmen students read copies of the newspaper throughout our classes, often finding inspiration in the oddest of places. We've come to call this process "serendipitous discovery." We're never quite certain where The Times will take us when we walk through our classroom door. Our connected students thrive in an environment that allows them time to follow their own interests, reading and writing about everything from politics to restaurant reviews, finance, pro basketball team anthems, and, at least once, chickens. They are easily able to draw connections from these newspaper articles to what they are learning in other classes. Because these connections are real and current, we are finding that our students both retain information longer and analyze that information better. From the Crusades to Current Clashes - and Other Curricular Connections As one of our students, Kathryn, explained in her writing journal, she was able to use The Times to connect the ways in which the Crusades were a failure in reclaiming the Holy Land to the current clashes in Israel. She was also able to discuss abiotic and biotic factors in life after reading about Dr. David Haskell, a professor of biology, who observed a square meter of forest for a year and wrote a book about it. She later had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Haskell when he Skyped with our classes. If you've been reading our weekly posts, you know that she and her classmates also read about a translucent Buddha floating in the East River and started an international art campaign on Twitter with the hashtag #art4me. As Kathryn wrote, "The New York Times has given me a new level of information to connect what I am learning in class." Seeing the News Through the Lens of Biology, Math, Foreign Language and the Humanities Recently, we have been asking the students to look at the paper through the lens of the disciplines they study in school, like humanities, biology, math, software applications, and foreign language. Too often, our students see each subject area as separate entities, with little to no interaction between them. But we know this isn't true in the "real world." Job openings for engineers ask for strong writing and communications skills, while those for scientists ask for critical reading and thinking skills. There are even calls for liberal arts majors to learn computer programming. The Common Core Standards themselves call for more reading and writing in science, history, and technical subjects, integrating these areas under their Language Arts Standards. As we prepare our students for jobs that most likely don't even exist yet, it becomes increasingly important that they see these connections between disciplines and understand that the world is one big, integrated place. Google's 20 Percent Time in the Classroom, and a Trebuchet With our freshmen students we embark every year on a project inspired by Google's 20% Time philosophy. In short, Google encourages their employees to spend one day a week working on a project that they are passionate about. To emphasize the 20 percent philosophy, we work with our colleagues in biology and software applications to put aside about 20 percent of class time for this project over the course of a few months. We usually reserve what we call Free Form Fridays for this task. We ask our students to think way outside the box and develop projects they are passionate about, but with one caveat - the projects have to be horizontally integrated with both their liberal arts and science courses. Class time is used in all of these subjects to give students the ability to work collaboratively and explore their creativity. To kick off our task this year, we looked to the pages of The Times for inspiration. We asked our students to find examples of subject area integration and to cut out the articles that most interested them. Our students tore through the paper, finding articles in every section that met our criteria, including advertisements. They hung many of these articles on our windows as a visual reminder of the interdisciplinary possibilities that exist in the world today via the pages of The Times. By using the paper as a way to show subject area integration, our students came away from the exercise more focused and better informed than we could have ever imagined. Whether it's a chopsticks/fork hybrid or starting their own YouTube channel about baking, our students will be working on their Free Form Friday projects for the next few months. Now we just have to figure out where we're going to store the giant trebuchet one group is planning to make... This week, Mr. Olsen and Ms. Gross also have a piece in ASCD Express: "Black and White and Read All Over (Our School): Newspapers as Informational Text" Our Common Core Practice posts will be back in January 2013.