Current events can be a great way to help students make connections between their curriculum and the real world. However, they can also be a distracting and stressful topic that can erode productivity. The good news is that there are many ways to reduce these distractions and get back on track.
In recent years there has been significant social movement organizing around Black lives Matter, the Latinx community and other racially subordinated groups; a growing distaste for governmental institutions – especially public health institutions – amongst large numbers of the population; more serious political polarization; mass teacher strikes; a climate crisis that has manifested in forest fires, droughts and hurricanes across the country and the world; and the death of nearly five million children under age five from mostly preventable causes including malnutrition, preterm birth complications, infectious diseases like malaria, tuberculosis and pneumonia; and sex work and drug abuse.
These “Big Events” have disrupted the life histories, norms and values on which parents and their elders based their decisions and created new conditions for youth. They include a more widespread youth culture of earning money or goods through sex trading, and drugs with the potential for injection (including hepatitis C and HIV/AIDS). It also included more intergenerational normative disjuncture as younger generations saw their parents’ beliefs and values as irrelevant to the changed circumstances, leading to more independent youth cultures that generate beliefs about how best to respond to change.