Voting in Maplewood

One treat of being a tutor is that I'm exposed to a variety of curricular plans, and I can see what works especially well with kids.

A student I have has been studying electoral politics over the last several weeks, and though he is in the sixth grade, his assignments have shown sophistication:

*Analyze various campaign ads (Obama going after Romney, the famous mushroom-cloud ad, a sunny JFK spot) -- and determine the desired emotional impact. How do words and images create a feeling? How does a positive ad differ from an attack ad?

*Analyze McCain's speech in 2008 upon accepting the Republican nomination. Why does he tell stories, and what emotion does he seek to create? (The stories--about autism, joblessness, and having a vet in the family--seem to be templates for a particularly dramatic season of "Friday Night Lights." Also, McCain's grace is--implicitly--a kind of ghost-rebuke to Donald Trump. Do you want to know precisely which norms Trump has shattered? You can find a catalogue in Amy Siskind's "The List: A Week-by-Week Reckoning of Trump's First Year.")

*Imagine you're George Washington, in a hot air balloon with Lincoln and Gandhi, and someone needs to jump out to limit the weight of the basket. Look at your life story. Should you stay in the basket? How would you convince others to "spare" you?

*Research the electoral college and precisely why its existence has been a disaster for Democrats more than once in the past twenty years. (This part was chilling.)

Any middle-school kid could do this work. So much better than a discussion of "Johnny Tremain," if you ask me. There's also a video game (likely a series of video games) in which you, a presidential candidate, travel around the country filming ads about the climate and about LGBT matters--and you try to keep track of your odds. https://www.icivics.org/games/win-white-house

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