And when I asked Grace MacLean, who received an honorable mention for her review of the TV show “Riverdale,” why she wrote her piece, she said, “I liked doing it because it wasn’t something I did for a grade. It was for fun so it came more naturally.”

Ms. Billings’s students aren’t the only ones who have been inspired. Earlier this year, editorials written by her former students for The Learning Network’s Student Editorial Contest were featured in our local paper in a multipart editorial series called “Marblehead High School Students Speak Their Minds.”

“The beauty of the assignment is that the students got to focus on what they were interested in learning more about,” Ms. Billings is quoted saying in the piece.

This year, Ms. Billings is using The Learning Network’s new Mentor Text series to teach writing in preparation for these contests. On a recent visit to her 11th-grade class, she was using two of those texts, “The Iguana in the Bathtub” by Anne Doten and “How Ramen Got Me Through Adolescence” by Veronique Greenwood, to introduce personal narratives to the class. Her students looked through each text to find words and phrases that the authors used well to evoke feelings and develop their characters. This whole class activity was helpful since students were working on writing personal narratives of their own to submit to The Learning Network’s Personal Narrative Essay Contest.

Connecting Novels to the News

Alisha Dolan uses The Times with her 11th-grade classes during their study of “The Crucible.” As they read, Ms. Dolan invites students to relate the novel to current events by having them find articles in The New York Times that explore similar figures, themes and events.

Students have connected the hysteria during the Salem witch trials to President Trump’s reaction to the Mueller report. They’ve also compared how immigrants were treated during the Red Scare to how they are treated in the United States today. They’ve even related the way Senator Joseph McCarthy discredited the media in the 1950s to the way Mr. Trump has tried to do so.

For fun, she’s had her classes enter The Learning Network’s annual Connections Contest, which invites students to link something they’re studying in school with the world today. When I asked why she likes using this contest, Ms. Dolan said it “is exactly what we do as part of English. Making relevant connections to ‘The Crucible’ and the world around us makes something written in the 1950s, now 2019.”