November 21, 2022
Dear Parents,
We’ve had a vibrant trimester in our elective Politics 2022: Midterm Madness! Now that the class has ended, I’d like to fill you in on what your children did.
While we began with a basic overview of what the midterm elections were and why they were important, our content varied day to day based on ongoing developments in the campaigns themselves and in the wider world of U.S. politics. We took deep dives into a few key races, most memorably the Pennsylvania Senate race between John Fetterman and Dr. Mehmet Oz, where we examined how candidates present themselves to voters through paid advertisements, the inevitability of “gaffes” that shift how voters perceive a candidate, and whether complications from a serious stroke should disqualify a candidate from office. Once debate season was underway, we viewed about a dozen clips from debates throughout the country to analyze not just the candidates’ positions and personas but also whether “gotcha” moments from debates should have an effect on voters’ decisions.
I also brought in a series of guest speakers, five in total, to chat with the students about various aspects of campaigns. Two of my former students, a former campaign staffer and political journalist respectively, joined us via Google Meet and addressed a slew of student questions. We also met with Robert Howell, who was this cycle’s Republican candidate for California insurance commissioner, and our own Mr. Linquist, who had a career as a young communications operative in Sacramento before joining ACDS. Our fifth guest was an old friend of mine who now manages disinformation policy for Meta (Facebook), prompting a vigorous discussion about how social media can distort voters’ perceptions of the truth during a campaign.
Although our focus was mostly on national politics, we did take some time to follow state and local races, most notably for San Jose mayor and the various statewide propositions. During the week of the Catalina trip, those students who were still on campus sifted through piles of campaign mailers and voter guides to make sense of the issues and decide how they would vote if they could. In the process, they learned about how complicated policy debates are and how easy it is for campaigns and special interests to manipulate voters who don’t have a ton of time to read up on the issues. In addition, the whole class researched their own representatives in Congress running for reelection (Lofgren, Eshoo, or Khanna, as well as Senator Padilla) and learned about some of the Silicon Valley-specific issues those officeholders have been highlighting.
The week before the elections themselves, groups of students in our elective prepared short presentations for their larger social studies classes, to educate their peers and get them interested in the upcoming results. Our class followed the “FiveThirtyEight” poll aggregator and then broke down the results in the aftermath. Throughout the trimester, each student also wrote periodic journal entries, reflecting on a variety of topics that we had recently discussed. We closed out the trimester with a “crudité party,” in honor of Dr. Oz’s viral video that Fetterman incessantly mocked; I honestly have never seen a group of kids devour a veggie tray so rapidly and enthusiastically!
Ultimately, I hope this elective instilled in these children an interest in politics, not just as an intriguing “sport” to follow but more importantly as an ongoing series of choices that have real effects on people’s lives, worth getting outraged over and worth participating in themselves in whatever ways they can. I also hope many of these students have brought some of their conversations home with them, and that you too have benefited from your children’s insights and curiosities about the election. It has been a true honor to experience the election with this group of kids, and I look forward to teaching each of them in other contexts in the coming months and years.
Sincerely,
Mike Fishback