Joel Guralnik said his students at Canyon Springs High School are a lot more clever than people might expect of teenagers.

“My students surprise me all the time, not because I have low expectations, but just because they’ll say things that I just haven’t thought of before, and it’s cool to see,” he said.

He teaches about 200 students, from freshmen through seniors, in an elective class called “Contemporary Problems.”

They talk about beefs between rappers, how to plan for post-graduation life, the presidential candidates, the crises in the Middle East, racism, the sex trafficking and racketeering charges against Sean “Diddy” Combs and more. The students are intrigued by it all, Guralnik said.

They are making sense of the meshugas — in Yiddish, “craziness” — of the world.

That’s a universal concept, but for Guralnik’s students in majority-minority North Las Vegas, the term is new. A white Jewish man who wears a yarmulke and tzitzit and hangs a flag of Israel among the U.S. flags in his room, he is “visibly Jewish,” and, he finds, the first Jewish person almost every one of his students has met.

As racial and ethnic minorities, he said, they connect to him as a religious minority. He teaches them what antisemitism means; they already know what racism is.

Guralnik said he is good at compartmentalizing. But when Hamas and other Palestinian militants launched a surprise assault on Israel a year ago today, on Oct. 7, 2023, he told his students he might seem off. He has family in Israel, and met his wife in Jerusalem while both were studying abroad there in college.

Still, it’s a class called Contemporary Problems, and he frames the situation within the American lens.

“So when we’re talking about Oct. 7 and those situations, yes, it’s important to see how are the people in Israel, how are the people in Gaza, looking at the situation? How is it affecting their lives? Are there human rights questions? What violations are occurring? How is this impacting people on both sides?” he said. “But then there’s also the American question of, how much should America be involved in things? Should America be sending money? Is it not good for America to send money? Should America send troops? Is that going to lead to a World War III?”

They’ve also discussed Iran’s recent barrage of missiles on Israel and what that means for the U.S.,and how it might affect Vice President Kamala Harris’ position in the presidential race.

It’s always the right time to teach about civic engagement and current events, and with a fast-approaching election and myriad domestic and international crises, a class like Guralnik’s helps teens process the news cycle.

He said the elective is so popular that his school added a fifth section of the course this year. He teaches all five.

His students have little political knowledge at the start of the year, he said. Part of him gets sad about that, because some are 18 and are eligible to vote.

“But at the same time, they’re also super open-minded. I started the year asking the question, what is a Democrat? What is a Republican? And the students, 99% of them, have no idea. Which seems like it’d be a negative thing,” he said. “But it also means that conversations are much more open because people aren’t looking at things from a perspective of, ‘You’re a Democrat, so I don’t agree with you,’ or ‘You’re a Republican, so I don’t like your viewpoints.’ ”

Guralnik, a second-year teacher with a degree in political science and national security, maintains an inclusive classroom. He encourages respectful debate.

Some days, he has students grab laptops and splits the room down the middle, with half researching a topic using left-leaning media and the other on right-leaning media. That can mean CNN and Fox, or the Young Turks and the Daily Wire, to compare.

Their current project is to pick four policies each from Harris and Donald Trump and use their mixed platforms to ‘run’ for president among their classmates. He wants to see what policies are the most popular from both sides and see how that compares to how Americans at large think.

As the school year goes on, Guralnik said his students become equally interested in the mundane and the celebrity. And he can easily tie the pop culture drama back to politics.

“So like the P Diddy situation, that turns into conversations around what should punishments be for certain crimes, turns into conversations about some people having financial privileges to afford incredible attorneys and other people can’t afford that. How does that affect the outcomes of certain groups being marginalized — things of that nature,” he said.

He said other educators wanting to nurture student debate on current affairs should be excited, be open and know that they have an impact.

“I really make sure that the students don’t feel that there’s an agenda in the classroom, and because of that, they talk more, and when they talk more, they’re more excited,” he said.

He wants to know what they think.

“Share your opinion, it’s valuable,” he said. “That’s the only way we can actually work things out.”

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