Hold up. ¿Pero por qué?

The group chat has a take.
Let’s see what holds up.

Stories for Grades 6–8, Grades 9–12 and college. Investigate one with the crew. Then help your people make sense of it.

Mateo

Mira. We had tonight planned. Then someone dropped a clip in the group chat.

Wait, what happened?
Gia, Jordy and Mari pose together for a mirror photo.
Before the posters
Sami, Jordy and Dec share a laugh while testing the recorder and microphones at their studio table.
Mateo in a cobalt overshirt and Gia in a yellow cardigan compare their notes outside the Common Room.
Outside the Common Room
Rafa records a short explainer while Voz and Duda help him think about the question behind it.
Rafa’s camera roll
Anika, Dec and Sami react to a round of their tabletop game.
Gia and Mateo compare a cropped courtyard picture with the full photograph while Lupa points to the missing context.
The full frame

The clip is real. The caption still might be wrong.

Gia wants to warn people before they leave home. Mateo has been setting up the screening all afternoon. Jordy notices that the clip stops in the middle of the sentence.

The crew needs the original before they tell everybody what happened.

Open the case
the crew9 members

Giadid everyone see this clip?? people are already asking if they should turn around

Jordypause. the clip cuts off mid-sentence. can we find the rest before anyone reposts?

It started after class.

Gia and Mateo met in a college class called Children, Youth, and Digital Culture. They kept arguing about the things people were posting, sharing and getting wrong long after class ended.

Eventually the conversation moved upstairs to a room above a bookshop in Fort Greene. Friends from school, work and the neighborhood started coming too. Everybody noticed different things.

The Common Room became the place they went when something didn’t make sense yet.

Meet the crew
All nine friends crowd together for a selfie in the Common Room.
Everybody made it into this one.

The same people keep showing up.

Gia catches one thing, Jordy catches another, and Sami asks what the plan means in real life. They know each other, disagree, and keep showing up as the questions move from school to work to the neighborhood.

Meet the whole crew

How a lesson works

Every lesson runs the same four steps. The story changes, and your answer can change when the evidence does.

  1. Story

    Something lands in the crew’s group chat, and it doesn’t add up.

  2. Evidence

    Follow the post back to the documents or sources behind it.

  3. Practice

    Try the skill on a short example before using it in the case.

  4. Task

    Decide what the evidence supports, then write the message the crew needs.

The five units build on each other.

There are four lessons in each unit. What you learn in one case comes back when the next question gets harder.

All units
  1. late fallUnit 2

    Read the fine print

    Lessons 5 to 8

  2. winterUnit 3

    Find who’s responsible

    Lessons 9 to 12

  3. springUnit 4

    Put it to the test

    Lessons 13 to 16

  4. late spring into summerUnit 5

    Take it public

    Lessons 17 to 20

True, false or needs context?

Choose a response to one claim, then compare it with two of the crew’s replies.

The claim

If it’s on video, it happened the way it looks

one more thing...

You don’t have to know what to call the question yet.

Sometimes it starts as “wait, that makes no sense.” That’s enough. Bring the screenshot, the rule, the weird email, the rumor, the first paycheck, the campus post everybody is arguing about. We’ll start there.

Mateo in a cobalt overshirt and Gia in a yellow cardigan compare their notes outside the Common Room.
still talking after everybody said bye
Sami, Jordy and Dec share a laugh while testing the recorder and microphones at their studio table.
“one last sound check” apparently
@thecommonroom

the answer changed when we found the full thing lol

11:48 PM, edited after somebody finally checked