We’re having our municipal elections tomorrow and the kids are being encouraged to participate through a program sponsored by the school district and Kids Voting. I had the experience today of helping the fourth graders learn how to vote online. I knew this was going to be a stretch for a lot of them because representative democracy is such an abstract concept. It’s hard to explain what elected officials do in their various jurisdictions. Helping the kids to learn how to log onto the website seemed hard enough, but it wasn’t, as it turned out. I also felt the need to help my students learn how to inform themselves. So I forged ahead. If they were going to participate, I didn’t want them to vote for people they knew nothing about.

I found some old (past couple of weeks) copies of the local newspaper and the kids found articles about most of the candidates. Some were running for city council, and we didn’t vote for them because the project only offered them candidates for School Board or Borough Assembly. I had the kids divide up into teams and work together reading the paper to see what they could learn as a group about the candidate(s) that appeared in the copy of the paper they had. This was no easy task for 4th graders with limited knowledge of terms like “bonded indebtedness” and “economic development initiatives” but I was fairly certain that as a group we could construct some kind of meaning from the effort. Then they reported back to the whole class, and I wrote what they found out in table I quickly drew up on the board. They had paper copies of all of the candidates’ names and they circled the ones that seemed like the people they would want to win.

We had

  • Foote v. Skaugstad: Assembly seat H; Funding for roads v. Lower gas prices;
  • Esaw v. Cotton v. Gillis: School Board seat F; School Funding&Math Curriculum v. Quality Teachers&Math Curriculum v. Attendance issues;
  • Schmidt (unopposed) School Board seat G; Math (aged 55);
  • Romans v. Beck: Assembly seat D; (4 kids-age 68)Save $$$ v. (3 kids-age 55) lower taxes;
  • Frank v. Eberhardt: Assembly seat E; (age 58) Roads v. less government;

It was funny to me that they began to report the ages of the candidates. But what the hell? I wasn’t going to interfere if they thought that was important information. If anyone familiar with these candidates reads this, understand that I did not make this up. I was the scribe for what they gleaned from the paper. I know that the information they found may not have been accurate, but they were doing the best that they could pulling words out that they recognized. Words like e-m-p-h-a-s-i-s, they spelled out when they tried to get me to help them understand what something meant. We didn’t have newspaper articles for all of the candidates and I told the kids that they would have to decide whether they felt comfortable voting for someone they knew nothing about. I wish that we would have been provided with kid-friendly campaign material. When I see the list of sponsors for this project I have to wonder why we don’t get more support. They said that it felt bad not knowing about all of the candidates because maybe they’d vote for someone they really didn’t like. (Man, I know how that feels!) I also told them that I knew something about these people but that I wouldn’t tell them what I knew. One student suggested I tell them what I knew and let them make up their own minds. But I said that I wasn’t sure if I could be fair to all the candidates. The kids understood what I meant.

That opened up a whole line of discussion about whether the newspaper was fair. I asked them if they thought that maybe there was more to know about these people than what we read in the paper.

“Yes.” They readily saw that there was probably more to the story.

I wanted them to think about the information we were getting. We talked about whether there might be other ways to learn about the candidates.

“Yeah,” they said, like TV commercials and signs.

“Ok,” I said. “Which of those do you think would give you the best information? Is there anywhere that we could look to find out EVERYTHING there is to know about a person?”

They didn’t think so.

One of the boys, when he saw the pretend voter registration cards I was handing out said, “Hey! We did this last year. But we didn’t do what you made us do. We didn’t learn anything about the people. We just voted for them!”

I thought, “Crap! What do we teach them about democracy when we do THAT?”

I spent over 2 hours today on this. Way too much time but this stuff seems to just come out of nowhere and demand attention at the last minute. So I set aside some other things to do this lesson. I read some hype about how this is all online now and the kids are so computer-savvy that they pick up on how to vote very easily. How backward is that? As if voting is only a matter of checking boxes, or clicking on stuff. We need to teach kids how to research and dig for information, how to evaluate information for bias, not how to click on the names of people they know nothing about. This could have been a great critical literacy activity if only we’d had reading material that was appropriately leveled.

At first I was daunted by the task of helping them to learn about the candidates. If I’d had more computers we might have been able to see if the candidates have websites. At this level of politics in this size of community they may not. I’m glad I put the time into doing the lesson, though, because I think my students learned a few things - not necessarily about the candidates, but about the process of choosing a leader. They knew better than to be satisfied voting for a leader that they don’t know anything about.

Smart kids.