Yesterday, we had our own presidential debate. The debate proposition was: “Barack Obama should be re-elected as president of the U.S.” They divided about evenly between Romney supporters and Obama supporters, after the dust settled (we’ve been working on this all month).
I gave my most advanced students (ISP7 cohort – all 8th graders) many lists of the “Top 10 reasons to vote for X” style, but they crafted and chose their reasons themselves.
I’m amazed at how my kids have handled this debate topic. It’s incredibly difficult, and hard for them to connect to or understand, too – they’re Korean 8th graders, after all: they don’t know or care that much about US politics. I actually expected a much lower level of interest and dedication to this topic than they have shown – I was doing it more as a prelude to the real fun: we’re going to be tackling the Korean presidential election, next, which votes in December.