News Quiz Makes Headlines
UPDATE: Garfield’s new Weekly News Quiz is now in the headlines itself, in an April 5, 2024, piece by Seattle Times Free Press Editor Brier Dudley.
The PTSA eBark newsletter recently asked Librarian Tyson Manzin and News Quiz Creator Rafael Brewer ’27 to tell us about it in their own words….
One big question: What’s the difference between Gossip and News?
This is a question that tests many educators and students daily and has become a skill especially difficult to put into practice for our high school students. In this age of information, it is increasingly challenging for our young people to separate fact from fiction, news from fake news and gossip from fact based, data-driven information. We, as a Garfield Library Program, hope to give our young people the skills to navigate these info traps, social media gossip and the ecosphere of local, national, and international news outlets, and to make sense of our social landscape.
In this effort, we have launched a weekly news quiz to engage and push our young people to dig a bit deeper into this world of information. Spearheaded by 9th-grader Rafael Brewer, this is a student-driven project aimed at focusing on news that is important to them. From this perspective, we want to make the realm of “fiction versus nonfiction” accessible to the entire Garfield student body. We want an informed community!
In Rafael’s words:
My name is Rafael Brewer, and I am a freshman here at Garfield. I really care about civic education and current affairs. I believe that all students should be informed about the world around them and what’s happening in their local communities. That’s why I launched the Garfield News Quiz in January of this year. I hope the News Quiz can be just a small part of encouraging our young people to listen, engage, and stay up to date in current affairs.
The quiz is put out weekly and takes about three minutes to complete. It is accessible to everyone through a QR code in Monday’s advisory slides and directly through their student email. The quiz is around ten questions long, filled with some basic questions about local, national, and world news from the past week, curated from multiple news outlets; sometimes we even ask questions from our own Garfield newspaper, the Messenger.
If you stay informed, you should score well. All students are rewarded with a Bulldog Buck just for submitting and then we choose an overall winner from the students with the highest scores. The winner gets a choice of a gift card to Ezell’s or Central Café and Juice Bar.
Now, what can you do at home to support this cause?
We encourage you to talk to your kiddos about the news. Ask them if they have been completing the news quiz and talk to them about it. Ask them what they like, what they dislike, and are they learning.
Let’s fight fake news and create an informed Garfield community. Go Bulldogs!