Teaching the News
By Becca Gillis
It’s a Monday afternoon in early March. The winter play is days away, French and Spanish students are preparing to jet off to their studies abroad, seniors will embark on their projects soon, and the third quarter of the school year is about to end. Despite their novella-length to-do lists, about twenty students are seated in 2C, listening intently while quietly eating their lunches.
For these students, lunchtime has turned into “an emergency meeting of Current Events Club,” as announced as recess that morning, given the war with Iran, now on day three. Some students offer thoughts on the motivations for war or pose questions about what they’ve heard online or at home; others provide live updates as they receive news alerts from an ongoing press briefing. The rest simply take in the discussion, digesting their food and the specter of war before resetting for sixth period.
Whether frequenters of Current Events Club or not, Commonwealth students are grappling with the national and world events that will define, at the very least, their high-school years. How do we, as teachers, mentors, and an educational institution, guide them through the realities of our times? It’s a responsibility that stretches across academic disciplines and areas of school life, and one that our faculty and staff approach with varying perspectives but shared intentionality.
Current Events & Curriculum
Melissa Glenn Haber ’87, creator and teacher of our U.S. Politics and Policy in the Twenty-First Century class, is keenly aware of the political context in which today’s high-school students have grown up; the seniors she teaches have no real memory of the Obama administration and generally started to become aware of politics during the 2016 election. “The things that have been norm-busting ever since [2016] are the busted norms of their lives,” she explains. With U.S. Politics and Policy, Melissa “wanted a chance to really talk about what’s happening now in the context of how we got here.”
New for the 2025–2026 school year, the class invites students to interrogate large-scale ideas about our nation, its government and policies, and the political culture that has emerged in the last decade. Melissa is particularly interested in providing students with context for sentiment and media consumption across the political spectrum, helping students form more nuanced ideas around polarization. “I wanted a space to have a more intelligent conversation,” she says, juxtaposing her goals for the class with “boringly polarized and screaming headlines.” In addition to foundational questions about the size and role of government, the class also explores some of the most pressing social and political issues of the moment, such as the rise in white nationalism—“Why does nationalism have to be white nationalism? Why couldn’t it just be nationalism?”—and the ways in which ideas around gender are shaping our politics. “These ideas are really complicated, and I didn’t understand them when I was in high school,” Melissa says. “I would have liked to.”
In the language department, Mónica Schilder challenges students in her Spanish 4 class, Dictatorships in Latin America, to “think about the dangers of regimes that suppress freedom and how, through literature, art, movies, and music, generations—especially young people—still try to stand against what suppresses their own sense of identity.” Drawing on fictional and nonfictional sources alike, the class exposes students to the historical realities of living under dictatorships in countries such as Argentina, Chile, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba. At the same time, students are encouraged to draw parallels between Latin American countries and the United States, the past and the present. Mónica says that some of her favorite moments in class involve seeing students make those connections: “It’s very interesting to see them go, ‘Oh, so Peru was suppressing the press in order to make sure that certain candidates reach power—like fake news!’”
Through immersion in literature, film, music, and the other sources that frame the class, Mónica aims for students to understand the Spanish language as something more than grammatical structures and vocabulary words and culture as more than major holidays and popular foods. “One day, hopefully, they can travel to these countries and have a conversation with someone from a different generation. Or they can come across someone [from these countries] at college, and they can open a conversation and be a citizen of the world, rather than thinking all these things just happened in the past and belong in the past,” she says. Paramount, in her view, is that students understand the importance of remembering and how the figures studied in class demonstrate that taking action against abuse lies within their power. “It’s not always easy to talk about politics openly, because you don’t know where everyone stands,” she acknowledges. “But art, literature, gives you a way into those discussions that is just as powerful, but with the nuances of the art itself.”
English teacher Michael Samblas is no stranger to the nuances of the written word, having created a class focused on “literature that is itself difficult to categorize.” Seeking to fill a cultural gap in Commonwealth’s English curriculum (and share his own passion for the subject, inspired partly by his Cuban heritage), he designed a Caribbean Literature class after experiencing the popularity of the lunchtime Caribbean Reading Group that he led during the 2024–2025 school year. “It’s a class that is structured around various people’s understandings of who they are and what defines them, what defines a nation, what defines a culture, what defines an ethnic group,” Michael explains.
Does history create stories, or do stories create history? This question lies at the core of the class, which highlights texts like Omeros, a Caribbean-based reimagining of the Odyssey and the Iliad, and Prospero’s Daughter, which places The Tempest in a Caribbean setting. “It really is a class about literary nationalism in a way,” Michael says. He notes that history, myth, and literature all play a part in a culture’s self-definition. “What stories does one group of nationalists try to emphasize, and what stories does another group of nationalists try to emphasize? In the U.S., we’re constantly having arguments over which statues we should erect, which statues we should tear down, which stories are worth telling, which stories are not worth telling, and what form those stories should be told in. That’s what I want students thinking about.”
Michael conscientiously ties current events into class discussions, encouraging students to think critically about how everything from politicians’ attacks on Haitian immigrants to Bad Bunny’s Superbowl Halftime Show performance connect to writings from Caribbean authors of the past hundred years. He hopes these discussions demonstrate the importance of continuing to grapple with questions about Caribbean history and identity. “What the Caribbean represents to the Caribbean people, especially when compared to what it represents to the North American imagination, is, I think, something that is still actively being negotiated and contested,” he says.
Regardless of which electives one chooses to take throughout their years at Commonwealth, every student eventually finds themself in Head of School Jennifer Borman’s Purposes of Education class, a senior seminar that raises fundamental questions about why and how we educate students. During the second semester, seniors read several chapters of Charles Merrill’s The Walled Garden, which details the founding and early days of Commonwealth. The memoir also includes ample political commentary, touching on how Merrill saw national and global events reflected in the life of the school and its students. Jennifer spends time unpacking the effects of historical events like the Civil Rights Movement with seniors but says “the more salient question is, ‘How does what’s happening in 2026, in our moment, show up here in your experience?’ Whether it’s our current president and anti-DEI efforts as they’re playing out in colleges and in our country, whether it’s AI and how that’s impacting their experiences, whether it’s economic trends or trends in college admissions—how does the arc of where we are at this moment in our economy, in our politics, in our institutions actually show up?” Through class discussions, readings, and an independent research project, seniors have the opportunity to investigate that question for themselves, analyzing current events not only as subjects of academic study, but as real, impactful forces in their lives.
When Class Gets Controversial
Is civil discourse really dead? Commonwealth teachers don’t seem to think so—at least not within their classrooms. “They have such complicated conversations,” Michael says of his students. “In Caribbean Lit, we talk about race a lot, and we’re able to talk about it with compassion and an understanding that these are controversial things, that occasionally someone will say something that you might not agree with, but that that person is not speaking from a place of malice.” A key part of the ability to have those good-faith conversations is Commonwealth’s emphasis on critically assessing the credibility of sources, which Jennifer calls a “part of the Commonwealth education from day one” and which lends students a heightened capacity to see through inflammatory rhetoric.
Still, Commonwealth students are no monolith, and differences of opinion inevitably lead to some level of tension when discussing sensitive topics. Melissa says conversations about race can feel especially heavy, as some students grow quiet out of fear of saying the wrong thing. At Current Events Club meetings on immigration issues, for example, she’s sensed that students who hold opinions out of line with the majority can seem uncomfortable raising issues. “There’s sort of a chilling effect on the students who don't share a lot of the majoritarian views,” she says. “I think [some students] can feel really isolated, and sometimes those are also students who may feel isolated in other dimensions, like because they’re first-gen kids or because they come from less well-represented ethnic groups…I think that we are really trying to think about that side of diversity—the diversity of opinion—which is really complicated, because often we diverge on issues that are really heartfelt.” At the same time, however, Melissa has also enjoyed vibrant and respectful debate in classes and club meetings, watching students dissect major schisms separating liberals and conservatives while they exchange ideas and philosophies. “I actually think students are much better at engaging with ideas than we might think they are,” she says, noting that much of their discussion and debate takes place online and in other spaces unseen and unmediated by teachers.
“I think our first duty as teachers—and we do this beautifully—is to help students learn how to speak and think and process and frame questions, and explore in a deep and broad way any issue from multiple points of view,” says Jennifer. “I think if students lead with, ‘Here are my views,’ that can really limit their ability to want to keep thinking something through.”
But just as teachers hope to help students set aside their biases in order to explore a broad range of perspectives, they, too, are individuals with their own biases and beliefs. “Teaching is indoctrination; let’s just be honest,” Melissa quips, emphasizing the imbalance created by gaps in age and experience. “Teachers need to be aware that when they say things, some number of students are going to accept them non-critically, and so that teacher’s opinion can be an endorsement of something as true. I’m very aware of that,” she says. Is the solution to refrain from ever sharing an opinion? Not exactly, Melissa argues; it can be harmful in its own right to fail to acknowledge one’s bias, which is why she clarifies to her students when she is “speaking from the ‘I’ perspective” or when she may have gaps in knowledge around certain issues.
Mónica feels similarly, especially when her class tackles documented human-rights abuses. “It’s not that I want to brainwash anyone…but I would never be able to remain neutral if I see injustices being done,” she says. “I don’t think we are doing our students a service, even if they believe the opposite of what we believe, by not talking about these things. We are creating an open space, and I think that most of my students, if not all, feel safe in the classroom for a dialogue and a conversation about our values and ideas without too much judgment.”
Institutional Efforts
Beyond the classroom, Commonwealth is perpetually contending with how to respond to current events on an institutional level: which events to address and how, what programming to offer students, how to adapt in changing times. As Head of School, Jennifer faces a complex and nuanced balancing act. “If an issue has a direct bearing on our mission, that is certainly a prompt to think about what we might say,” she explains. At the same time, she says, “there are good reasons to be mindful of when we hold forth,” bearing in mind the importance of the free exchange of ideas in our building. If she suspects that students may feel unsafe due to global or national events, or if one or many members of our community are likely to be personally impacted by something, Jennifer’s top priority is ensuring they receive the support they need. Sometimes that’s personal outreach; other times, it’s creating a public space to talk through anxieties and ask questions.
Current events frequently take center stage during weekly assemblies, where speakers from a broad range of backgrounds share their stories and experiences with our entire community. During the 2025–2026 school year, students heard from voices such as City Councilor Henry Santana; Dr. Sherry Turkle, MIT professor and researcher focusing on the impact of AI and social media; Hanni Myers, Holocaust refugee and social-justice advocate; and Andrew Crespo, Harvard Law professor and Executive Faculty Director of the Institute to End Mass Incarceration.
Many students take it upon themselves to stay informed and get involved, too. Michael Samblas is quick to shout out Natan ’27 and Ari ’28 for a recent “mind-blowing” Humanities Club presentation on surprising patterns in Neil Gorsuch’s voting record, and Luca ’27 for spending a weekend canvassing for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani—just two examples in a host of ways Commonwealth students have thrown themselves into today’s political happenings.
Of course, not every student has a natural inclination toward politics, which is why Michael hopes that more humanities-oriented electives become available to ninth graders in the coming years. “We want to dispel the idea that you’re either a STEM kid or a humanities kid,” he says. “We want kids to say, ‘I’m going to be a software engineer, but I also want to be deeply knowledgeable about the political situation in the world right now.’” In Melissa’s view, creating a quarter-credit class focused on current events could give students the space to develop that deep knowledge. That dedicated space could be useful, because “current events are easier to understand when you stay on top of them, and Commonwealth has a lot of demands on kids’ time,” she points out. She also suggests that ninth graders might benefit from a weekly digest written at a suitable level, recalling her own struggles to understand complex news as a high schooler. But perhaps the most vital part of teaching our students about current events is helping them to care on a deeper and more personal level. “I think the revamping of community service is the place to start,” Mónica says. “When you are seeing other people’s realities, when you actually put your hands out there, that’s when you’re really going to get it.”
Jennifer agrees. “I mean, a very simplistic definition of current events is, ‘What’s happening in your community?’ And I feel like the more that we experience and meet people and see things, the deeper our understanding and our ability to think, ‘All right, I’ve had a certain set of experiences in fifteen years, and I am now meeting other people who’ve had very different experiences, and my sense of the world has expanded, and I should look up from my own frame of reference and start to understand a bigger world.’ That's a seed of developing a sense of concern for and commitment to others.”
Becca Gillis is the Senior Communications Associate at Commonwealth. This article originally appeared in the summer 2026 edition of CM, Commonwealth's alumni/ae magazine.