One thing I’ve always loved about traveling and living overseas is the exposure to different newspapers. This is doubly true because I come from a country (America) where the printed newspaper is a dying breed, replaced by online content. But in most other countries the newspaper is a thriving, important part of daily culture. You can learn a lot about a country from picking up a few days’ worth of one of the big daily papers.
Now, Oman’s English-language papers certainly aren’t going to win any awards, but they are a nice way to keep in touch with what’s going on in the area. Plus you can hardly beat the price–I get the Muscat Daily delivered everyday for 15 OMR/year. Yes, per year. It has enough news to make the morning coffee a bit more interesting.
I begin my Muscat Daily each morning by flipping to page 8, where the good editors of the paper have included a “Today in History” column. I think they’re just pulling up Wikipedia’s main page and grabbing the 15 most recent events (I’ve never seen anything pre-1700). Today, for example, we learn that on this day in 1964 the Olympics began in Tokyo, which makes me think two things: Why were the Olympics beginning in October? And, there’s been quite a bit in the news recently about Tokyo’s next Olympic turn, in 2020.
Even better than my own fascination with these events is the constant connection I can make between “Today in History” and “Today in History Class”. At least once per week something pops up that I’m studying with the students. Like this: we began learning about Stalin’s Five-Year Plans in Grade 11 two weeks ago. Thirty minutes after class ended I opened up the paper and saw that on that day in history, in 1928, the Five-Year Plans began! The students were a bit shocked–first, to see what they’re studying appear in the paper, and second that their teacher appeared to have timed his course so spookily (pure coincidence).
And so the students (hopefully) see that the topics we cover have interest to many people and don’t exist in some academic vacuum, confined to a stale syllabus for the sole purpose of tormenting teenagers. These events, appearing daily in the paper, are part of a large chain that lead us here today.
