There are many benefits of having Youthink in schools...

There are many benefits of having Youthink in schools, a major one being that it provides student writers with an authentic audience for their written work. It is one thing to write for a class assignment, with a teacher and possibly a few classmates for an audience, but when students write for Youthink they know that their work will be read and appreciated by thousands of readers. It is an incredibly rewarding experience for students to walk down the hallways and see their peers in other classes flipping through a magazine that they’ve been published in.

Youthink is also an excellent teaching tool, as it provides students and teachers with up-to-date examples of good writing in several genres (including reviews, interviews, opinion pieces, and articles on issues that are relevant to teens such as caffeine consumption and racism). Best of all, these examples are all written by people their own age, who are in similar situations as themselves, which shows students that it is possible to be an active contributor to the culture in which they are living and that writing is useful in the world beyond the classroom. I’ve used Youthink in my language arts classroom as exemplars of good writing in genres that we are learning, as well as for topics of discussion.

The students I teach enjoy Youthink because of its relevance to their lives. When a new month has started, they are continually asking if the new Youthink has arrived so they can read the reviews and the creative section, check out the latest writing contest, and see what their peers' opinions are on things happening in the world. They also enjoy flipping through to find pieces written by people they know.

All in all, Youthink is hugely beneficial to students as writers and readers, and I hope we continue receiving it in years to come.