Friday, January 25, 2008

Choosing a President

As I mentioned in the last post, we made some campaign videos in our English classes to help us choose a President of English Classes. We did different activities to discuss what we value in life and each class choose different values to represent their class and candidate for office. Some of our classes chose to say that Mobile phones, computers, and sports are important in their life, and every class choose to say that they value family and friends. Some classes even saw the importance of Peace for the world as a value. You can watch all of our videos on the kids' website(click here), but here is the video for David, who got the most votes this week.



After the kids watched the videos, it was interesting to watch their decision making process. Some kids voted for the students that they knew, others voted for the funniest video. Some people, however, voted for the underdog, just because they wanted to give them some points. It was very necessary for some students to keep their vote hidden. I made sure to insist on using secret ballots, and I was glad when I saw that many students felt free to vote for someone different from their peers. My High School students had a crazy idea for electing a marker for president. Ironically he looks like a great candidate, the video turned out really well, and many of the kids voted for it, because it was such a funny idea. I was just happy that they wanted to participate.

So, we hope you enjoy the videos. Maybe they can enlighten you as you contemplate the values of our different candidates for office. I'm afraid that during the Super Bowl and the Super Tuesday Primaries I'll be skiing in the mountains for our spring break and without Internet access. Hopefully YouTube and CNN will help me stay connected when I return.

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