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"Back in January, when I asked high school seniors to send in college application essays about money, class, working and the economy, I wasn't sure what, if anything, would come in over the transom. But 66 students submitted essays, and with the help of Harry Bauld, the author of "On Writing the College Application Essay," we've selected four to publish in full online and in part in this column. That allowed us to be slightly more selective than Princeton itself was last year. What these four writers have in common is an appetite for risk. Not only did they talk openly about issues that are emotionally complex and often outright taboo, but they took brave and counterintuitive positions on class, national identity and the application process itself. For anyone looking to inspire their own children or grandchildren who are seeking to go to college in the fall of 2014, these four essays would be a good place to start."

If you're a regular Times reader, you've no doubt enjoyed, and maybe even taught with, some of the 1,000-plus personal essays from the Magazine's Lives column, which has run weekly for decades. But did you know that NYTimes.com also regularly features personal writing on everything from love and family to life on campus, how we relate to animals, living with disabilities and navigating anxiety? In this post we suggest several ways to inspire your students' own personal writing, using Times models as "mentor texts," and advice from our writers on everything from avoiding "zombie nouns" to writing "dangerous" college essays."

Interesting essay on giving and taking writing criticism

It is a disconnect that is growing in the Internet age as concepts of intellectual property, copyright and originality are under assault in the unbridled exchange of online information, say educators who study plagiarism. Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students - who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking - understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.

Posts connected to NY Times articles that can be used as writing prompts.

I'VE been teaching college freshmen to write the five-paragraph essay and its bully of a cousin, the research paper, for years. But these forms invite font-size manipulation, plagiarism and clichés. We need to set our sights not lower, but shorter. I don't expect all my graduates to go on to Twitter-based careers, but learning how to write concisely, to express one key detail succinctly and eloquently, is an incredibly useful skill, and more in tune with most students' daily chatter, as well as the world's conversation. The photo caption has never been more vital. So a few years ago, I started slipping my classes short writing assignments alongside the required papers

A simple idea for incorporating non-fiction - it is all around us.

"Each Friday we collaborate with a classroom in New Jersey to test and publish three short writing ideas that address Common Core Standards and that are grounded in New York Times content. This week, all three prompts focus on the common theme of life on a coastline - a topic of great importance to our classroom collaborators, who recently went through weeks of disruption because of Hurricane Sandy."

Op-Docs is The New York Times editorial department's forum for short, opinionated documentaries, produced with wide creative latitude and a range of artistic styles, covering current affairs, contemporary life and historical subjects.   Op-Docs videos are produced by both renowned and emerging filmmakers who express their views in the first person, through their subjects or more subtly through an artistic approach to a topic. Each is accompanied by a director's statement. In December 2012, we started a new Op-Docs feature: Scenes. This is a platform for very short work - snippets of street life, brief observations and interviews, clips from experimental and artistic nonfiction videos - that follow less traditional documentary narrative conventions.

Change in Education

Teacher Knows if You've Done the E-Reading

avoiding the praise sandwich

""Every young person will continue to need basic knowledge, of course," Tony Wagner said. "But they will need skills and motivation even more. Of these three education goals, motivation is the most critical. Young people who are intrinsically motivated - curious, persistent, and willing to take risks - will learn new knowledge and skills continuously. They will be able to find new opportunities or create their own - a disposition that will be increasingly important as many traditional careers disappear." So what should be the focus of education reform today?"

Short video that illustrates Shakespeare's influence using movie clips.

"Carrie is a professor at a university. She had asked me how to turn an area of her expertise, secondary school education, into writing that the general public would find rewarding and enjoyable. That's when I began talking about scenes, using her accident as an example of how to approach her work. Almost all creative nonfiction, essays or books, are, fundamentally, collections of small stories - or scenes - that together make one big story."

"Last year, Mr. Olsen and Ms. Gross, who work at High Technology High School in Lincroft, N.J., a school that U.S. News ranks as the No. 1 S.T.E.M. school in the nation, created short daily reading and writing prompts for their students to use with that day's Times. They told us they wanted to do it again this year, but wanted to tailor the tasks more closely to Common Core demands. So we agreed. Each week, they will send us the questions they tried in class that they and their students felt were the most successful. So, beginning Sept. 21, each Friday you'll find three quick, classroom-tested tasks that ask students to do Common Core-focused work with that week's Times. Our hope is that you'll see at least one each Friday that works for you, and that you'll write in and help us shape the feature as we go. It's an experiment, after all."

Op-Docs is The New York Times editorial department's forum for short, opinionated documentaries, produced with wide creative latitude and a range of artistic styles, covering current affairs, contemporary life and historical subjects.   Op-Docs videos are produced by both renowned and emerging filmmakers who express their views in the first person, through their subjects or more subtly through an artistic approach to a topic. Each is accompanied by a director's statement. Are there applications for the classroom? Anyone can submit there own Op-Doc.

"Copy-change collaborations invite young writers to use an established text as a framework for writing an imitation piece that follows the original sentence for sentence, but that somehow remakes it completely. In this version, ninth-grade students collaborate to write a piece about "To Kill a Mockingbird" that is based on a recent Times article about viral Internet content."

"What issues do you care most about? What topics do you find yourself discussing most passionately, whether online, at the dinner table, in the classroom or with your friends? Later this week we will be announcing a brand-new contest in which teenagers will be invited to write evidence-based persuasive pieces on the topics of their choice. To help jump-start your brainstorming, we have gathered a list of 200 writing prompts from our daily Student Opinion feature that invite you to take a stand."