What is your role as a government teacher leading up to and after an election?

I think that the biggest role of a government teacher is to help students understand the process of elections and how the system works. Over the summer the other AP government teachers and I got together and talked about how we are going to incorporate this election into our classroom while we are still also bound by state standards and the college board standards. So what can we do to incorporate real life examples into the classroom. So essentially using it as a case study for things that we talk about like the electoral college or the primaries, that sort of stuff.

What are some specific examples of when you incorporated the election into your teaching?

Something that is new to AP gov this year that we decided to experiment with was incorporating current events presentations by students. You guys had a chance to sign up for a current event in groups of three or four every Friday and spent some time researching anything related to the actual election. A lot of students ended up focusing on Hillary Clinton’s emails, or the rhetoric Donald Trump was using during the election. It was sort of an experiment for us see what students were interested in based on what they brought into class and then it also allowed students to engage with the topics a little more directly. Some presentations include references to legislation we looked at in class as well and so that helped the students connect the information that we studied to what was actually going on in the world at the time.

With such a polarizing election, did you find it difficult to keep your own political views out of the classroom?

Yeah, I think that’s always a challenge, especially for teachers that teach government, is how to allow students to, one: express their own beliefs and opinions, especially as students are learning what their own beliefs and opinions are. So, one: to allow them to express their own beliefs and opinions, two: challenge their own beliefs and opinions, and also challenge them to look at different perspectives and be able to interact with students and people that have different perspectives than them in a respectful manner. So as a teacher a lot of the time I find myself playing devil’s advocate. I do not tell my students my political beliefs. They might guess one way or the other, right or wrong. It’s kind of funny to hear what students think I am or not, and I just smile and chuckle at them. I think it’s more of the role of the teacher to help students challenge their own thinking and assumptions, and at the end of the day if they change their views, that’s fine. If they stick to their views, that’s fine too.

Now that the election has already happened, what you feel your role as a teacher is?

Yesterday we had our departmentment meeting, all the social studies teachers were meeting together and we talked about just that: What is the role of a social studies teacher? Do we continue business as usual, or do we take time to stop, pause, and talk about what’s going on in the country and the world? All of our teachers were in agreement that we should be looking at what is happening and I think that in AP Gov for example we did take time to do that. Looking at the case study of a president who has not won the popular vote but who has the electoral college, so looking at that, that’s another one of the examples that we study in class. And so saying “Okay, that’s only happened a few times in history, like in 2000 for example, and now 16 years later happened again, so what does that mean? When we’ve talked about arguments for and against the electoral college, having student now say “Okay, so what are people going to be talking about today, or next week?”

One thing being talked about a lot at school is the test being delayed. It sounded like you had some reservations about that. Could you talk about that?

When I checked my email at two in the morning and saw that students wanted the test postponed, my initial thought is “No, we’re not postponing the test, you had two days to study in class, why would I postpone this test?” And then the more I thought and reflected about it, I still have mixed feelings. I very much believe you had this time to study and prepare. You’ve known about if for a month, take the test and then we’ll spend a few minutes afterwards to digest and process. But after talking to more adults on campus and processing the feelings of students on campus, thinking about if the teachers are going to take time to postpone what we’d already planned to talk about issues and results, should that also translate into my classroom? The more I reflected on it, I was thinking “Okay, this is exactly what we studied this unit. Should I have planned a test on the day after election day anyways?” And so giving students a chance to process the variety of election results, not just the presidency but what was happening in California, what was happening throughout the country. I think giving student the chance to look at things like the electoral college, that’s the example that’s sticking out in my mind. When was the last time we talked about this happening? When has it happened in history? So using that as a real life case study, you can’t have any better curriculum than what’s happening in the world right now, especially because our political behavior unit was all about… political behavior.

Do you feel that your teaching is affected by the relatively politically homogenous nature of our school?

This is the only place I’ve ever taught, so I think that if I were to teach in a different area in California or even outside of California, you always should be listening to what your students want and what your students need. I think that also makes me especially conscious of providing multiple viewpoints and incorporating multiple viewpoints to challenge students to hear things that they might not always hear or might not always be familiar with.