The New York Times as a Textbook

The first day of class we were told to obtain a subscription to the New York Times, upon hearing this I was a bit confused as I have never used something as current as a newspaper in a class before. After the first class spent

discussing the paper I was immediately in love with the idea of substituting a textbook for a paper. I believe by reading the paper we not only learn about writing but we also learn about interesting current topics. I have always been a newspaper reader but I have never read the New York Times, I was intrigued to learn that it is considered a more liberal newspaper as I have lately noticed my beliefs fall more on the liberal side. Because of the political aspect that newspapers have, I believe using the paper instead of a textbook accounted for more interesting discussions

because people generally debate political issues. It is always difficult to have class

discussions about things from a textbook that not many people necessarily care about. By using the newspaper as our textbook, we were essentially killing two birds with one stone. We learned how to perform rhetorical précis on articles as well as learn what was currently going on in the world. I believe it is important for people to be aware of what is going on in the world around them. I feel like college students are no longer as socially aware as they used to be, by using the paper as your textbook it almost forces students to hear about what is going on and by doing this maybe students will become interested and when the class is over will continue to keep up on current events.