With the pressure of grades, a social life and other extracurricular activities constantly competing for a student’s immediate attention, it is not surprising that an upcoming AP World test might feel like the equivalent of the earthquake in Japan, or that one sheds more tears over a friend’s move than over the situation in Darfur.
According to AP NSL teacher Matthew Schilling, students are often overcommitted, and the importance of keeping up with the news is not always stressed at home.
However, because they live so close to the District and are almost of voting age, students may still feel pressured to stay on top of current events or else risk missing a step when talking to their more politically aware peers.
“People become much more engaged as a result of their courses,” junior David Stark said. “AP NSL really opened the door to politics, and for me, it stayed open. Now that I’m in AP U.S. History, my other politically-minded friends and I constantly have history and politics to pepper our conversation with.”
Although Stark keeps up with the news from sources like the Huffington Post, CNN and MSNBC, other students combine current events with the social aspect of their lives.
Modern Internet communities provide a way for people to hear about and react to news their friends have heard about, but which they might not have had time to check.
Junior Nachu Bhatnagar keeps the CHS community up to date by posting Facebook statuses which reference current events in an entertaining way.
“Egypt needs a new president, I need a new job. This could be perfect,” Bhatnagar said in a recent status.
Other sources students use to keep up with news include reddit.com, a social website where popular news stories are voted to the front page by visitors themselves, and email homepages like Yahoo, which often display top news stories so students logging in to check their email glimpse the latest headlines.
“I read the newspaper, but the Internet is better because you don’t have to go searching through the pages or flipping through channels to find a good story,” junior Brian Cleary said.
Even though most CHS students might not watch the nightly news habitually, considering that it is during the evening hours when they start working on assignments or head out to extracurricular events, they nonetheless remain informed.
Through the adaption of more creative methods of communication, CHS students manage to not only stay relatively aware of current affairs, but also to bring a new and appropriate sense of interconnectedness to global news.