The kids stay in the picture

Jeff Benson

To an eighth-grader, the biggest news of the week might not be the

latest hurricane to storm across Florida, the presidential debates or

the steaming eruption of Mount St. Helens.

Not when “Shark Tale” was just released in theaters and when

baseball’s Anaheim Angels and Los Angeles Dodgers clinched their

respective divisions.

Christine Christopher understands how her students think, but the

eighth-grade honors English teacher at TeWinkle Middle School

attempted Monday to push the importance of national and world news

and how it affects them.

“Thirty-five children just died in a bombing in Baghdad,” she

said. “Why is it important to learn about that? You guys are 13 and

in eighth grade. How does that affect you?”

Maybe they were too nervous to speak, but only a few hands went

up. Minutes later, Christopher offered her own insight.

“The children are curious and looking to find things hiding in

boxes, and then they find out it’s a bomb,” she said. “It’s really

sad. The bomb shouldn’t be there in the first place.

“We’re a team across the U.S., and we should be a team around the

world as well. That’s our goal, right? World peace?”

On Monday, Christopher passed out issues of Friday’s Los Angeles

Times and had each student cut out an article of their choice. For

homework, they had to summarize the who, what, when, where, why and

how in their stories.

The students practiced jumping to other sections of the paper to

continue reading longer stories and learned the similarities and

differences between freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

Amy Martinez, 13, wrote about a Times story she found titled,

“Bush, Kerry trade barbs on Iraq War.” She had no trouble with the

who, when and where, but the why was tougher.

“I’m kind of interested in what’s going on in the election,” Amy

said. “It’s 50-50 right now, I guess because of the issues and what

they have to say. When I see the debates, they always go for the

issues, but they like to criticize each other.”

Others headed straight for the sports section.

“Dodgers -- game one is coming up,” Aran Antunez said. “I’m

writing about what they did. [Backup catcher] David Ross ended the

[Thursday] game with a home run so the Dodgers could only be one game

away from their first National League title in nine years.”

Christopher believed the exercise would help her students improve

their writing and would inspire them to read newspapers more often.