Read in and out of comfort zone

 

from NYT learning network - 

read NYT - windows and mirrors

Before you read any further, try a quick experiment:

• Go to the NYTimes.com home page, or to any of the individual sections.

• Find an article, video, image, podcast or graphic that is immediately interesting to you because it is on a topic you know or care about, or are somehow connected to already.

• Now take a second look. Find an article, video, image, podcast or graphic that is outside your usual comfort zone, yet still seems potentially interesting.

• Read — or watch or listen to — them both. What happened?

This is exactly the challenge Kim Butterfield, an English teacher at Central High School in La Crosse, Wis., and a member of this year’s New York Times Teaching Project, gave her students.

What they discovered is that no matter how foreign a topic feels initially, you can nearly always find a way to connect to it and learn something valuable. And, as Ms. Butterfield explains below, when her students shared what they chose, “all of our worlds widened.”

We liked the idea so much we asked other Teaching Project members to try it. We ended up with students in schools from four U.S. regions — the South, the Midwest, the East Coast and the West Coast — all attempting the same exercise, and all discovering the same things Ms. Butterfield’s students did. Below, you can read excerpts from the reflections of a few students in each of these classrooms.

We have labeled the students’ choices “windows” and “mirrors,” because all of these teachers explained the assignment in terms of Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop’s often-cited metaphor of “windows and mirrors,” which she described this way in a 1990 essay:

Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created and recreated by the author.

When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books.

What mirrors and windows can your students find in The New York Times? If you’d like them to try the exercise described above, we have a related Student Opinion question, “How Often Do You Read, Watch or Listen to Things Outside of Your Comfort Zone?” that challenges them to take the same steps, then post their answers to our comments section.

If they enjoy that, they might also be interested in our annual Summer Reading Contest, which invites teenagers to tell us what got their attention in The Times each week and why. This year it begins on June 11 and runs through Aug. 19.