GILL — Seated in a large circle in their Gill Elementary School classroom, the fifth-graders have lots to report to teacher Jackie Chase from the final presidential debate the night before.
“He called her a nasty woman!” says one boy.
“And a puppet!” adds a girl, quoting Hillary Clinton’s characterization of Donald Trump.
While many elementary school classrooms shy away from this year’s in-your-face presidential campaign, preferring to keep an arm’s length from what some have described as a “reality TV” election season and preferring to use a somewhat sanitized curriculum about the workings of presidential politics as we have known it, Chase says she’s been enjoying this term immersing her class in the “what next?” election as it happens.
“I like politics, and I was contemplating whether I wanted to be in law school or become a teacher,” she says. “So I get to bring the best part of my interest for law and politics and things like that into teaching. They’re having a blast. They’ve even said to me, ‘We get to talk like we’re adults in this room!’”
And the 17 pupils did just that, having watched either the entire debate or a videotaped recap Thursday morning.
“I thought they seemed immature,” says one girl.
“Normally, adults wouldn’t really do that,” adds a boy in the group.
Another girl adds, “Instead of focusing on the issues, they were sort of focusing on getting the last word with each other.”
The pupils compared the final presidential debate with the debate they’d had in class, in which they actually discussed the issues they had researched. Instead of listening to the moderator — the children’s fifth-grade teacher, in the mock debate — “Trump was talking through him,” one boy notes. “They didn’t play by the rules.”
The kids also note that candidates were “name-calling” and “talking around the question.”
Why would they do that, asks Chase?
“’Cause they don’t have the answer to the question?” asks a boy.
“Maybe sometimes they don’t think the voters would like their answers,” adds another boy.
A girl raises her hand. “Maybe Donald Trump doesn’t say how he’s going to build the wall because he knows like it’s not really that popular?”
It’s a free flow of ideas among the children, with Chase asking more questions as she points to Trump’s refusal to say whether he’ll respect the results of the election, asking “What do you think that’s about?”
One girl raises the point about Trump’s concern over voter fraud.
“It will make him look like a sore loser if Hillary became president and he keeps trying to be president even if she is president,” says one boy.
A girl chimes in, “I think Hillary won’t, if she doesn’t win, for some reason, I think Hillary will handle it fine, but Trump will try to get 3,000 more votes, something crazy like that.”
A boy nearby suggests, “Maybe he doesn’t have sportsmanship.”
The class also points to the fact that the candidates didn’t shake hands as “a sign of disrespect,” and one boy tells the class that Trump has been “stereotyping Mexicans and Muslims. Donald Trump wants to take them all out of the country because he thinks they’re criminals and bring drugs and are stealing our jobs.”
“Why would that be bad?” probes the teacher, as the class continues to discuss Clinton’s e-mails, Trump’s statements of women and more. She asks them “What IS locker-room talk? … How do you think women are reacting to this?”
“They’re probably really disgusted,” answers one girl. “Because that’s kind of offensive for them. That’s not what we’re here for.”
These students have been incorporating the excitement over the election into reading assignments, public speaking and social studies learning, says Chase.
“They really need to under stand how the process works. That’s really why I brought this into the classroom. ”
The students were assigned to one of the two candidates — often the opposite one they requested to be — as Chase assigned what she calls “an informational investigation, rather than a personal belief study. I encourage my students to form their opinions later, after they have fact-based research using approved sources to back up their opinions.”
A team for each candidate has crafted summaries on the candidates’ viewpoints on each issue for their debate. Their research will go a long way in preparing them for the mock election that lies ahead.
“It was a great experience to see fifth-graders spend a half-hour energetically debating about immigration reform,” says the teacher. “The point of this is to have students become more aware of issues and policies, rather than media bias.”
Chase thinks a lot of teachers are reluctant to take on the wild card of real politics in their classrooms.
“Teachers are afraid of showing their own bias, especially in this election,” she says. “And they’re nervous about students taking on the perspectives of their parents and just sharing that. We started off that way, but I said ‘You’re allowed to have an opinion, and you’re allowed to share that opinion. But the only way you can do that in this room is if you have facts to back it up.’ That got them to research it, so they can say, ‘I like this candidate because,’ and I have to hear the ‘because’ for them to be sharing. Otherwise they say, ‘My mom says …’ No.”
Chase says she will hear students make statements that are simply incorrect, “so we’re able to address that as a group. It’s OK, they’re free to make statements, so I can question them and push their thinking.”
The whole experience, she says, “is eye-opening for them. … It’s a big reality check.”