Maybe you have just finished reading The Road as one of your literary works – or another dystopian novel – and you want students to think about and grasp the idea of the bleakness that exists when the natural world is destroyed.  On the other hand, you might just love the outdoors yourself and want to share that enthusiasm with your students. 

Whatever the reason, opinion columnist Nicolas Kristof, from The New York Times, might be up your alley. 

In fact, he has been writing about the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) for years now.  He usually publishes a column every summer – for those in the Northern Hemisphere – about his thoughts while hiking sections of the trail with his family. 

While you may not personally love his style, he is prolific and highly respected.  Kristof has twice won the Pulitzer Prize and the curated opinion columns here offer your students a great body of work about the environment (one of the global issues presented by the IB).  Kristof also writes about human rights and charity (to name a few) and InThinking will publish other selected opinion editorials in the future.    

You have several options for how you present this work to your students.  You might go through opinion column by opinion column as a whole class.  If that isn’t your style, you might explicitly “teach” the first one, and have students work in pairs or small groups with the others, jig-sawing and sharing their close language analysis with each other.  You could also have them just read every column at once (or for homework) and use them for a larger discussion you want to have about nature and the environment.  Maybe you have students read like a writer, wanting students to read these columns with the explicit understanding that they will write their own.  Maybe you have a better idea. 

In other words, you have so many options with this body of work!  It could be as few as two lessons or you could stretch it out for as long as you like.  Do what works for you, in your class, in your context.   

Guiding Conceptual Questions (Representation and Perspective)

Body of Work - Nicolas Kristoff

Possible Overarching Questions

(students write answers to these in their learner portfolio)

Whole Class Discussion Questions

Toward Assessment