Westerville South High School Language Arts teacher Cassie Coggburn attended an AP Summer Institute last summer, where she got the idea to have her students follow national newspaper columnists and write, at the end of the term, about what they had learned. Many were able to contact the journalists, but none more successfully than junior Noelle Jackson.
Jackson wrote Washington Post journalist Jay Mathews, the architect behind Newsweek’s Top High Schools list that uses the Mathews Challenge Index as a simple means of demonstrating how effective high schools are at attracting more kids to Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate course work. She told him she wrote her final essay on school lunches after being inspired by one of his columns. “By reading your pieces from week to week, I found that one of the most common ways you persuade readers is by using a great deal of evidence from multiple sources,” she wrote. “I also found that you include counter arguments and different examples of the issue. Another thing I noticed about your writing style that I liked was the diction and the way you worded your pieces… Reading your pieces has helped me gain a better understanding of how the education system around the United States worked and that all school districts are very different.”
Mathews responded, saying her message made him “feel very good, because it was so kind and because, unlike most of the complimentary e-mails I get, you weren’t asking me for a job or a book blurb or to write a column about a new web site. Praise without a catch is rare these days.”
Mathews further contacted Coggburn and South Principal Michael Starner, saying, “Obviously her (Noelle’s) teacher and principal also deserve praise for fostering such young people. I have studied many AP courses over the last 33 years, and what she tells me about this one is very impressive.” He also said making other people happy is a skill his parents taught him at an early age, calling it “one of the greatest gifts they gave me.”
Coggburn plans to extend this assignment this quarter to include international columnists as part of a unit on Media Literacy.
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