Sneaking in some Social Studies
This week my math students are working on graphs and charts. Since Virginia held its primaries on Tuesday, I decided to work a little social studies into the lesson by using election figures as the data. I'd have liked to use Virginia's figures but since people were still voting here that wasn't possible. Instead I used national delegate counts for both parties and made bar graphs and pie charts to show visually how Clinton and Obama were neck and neck (with Edwards way on the bottom) and McCain was kicking everyone's ass.

Then I talked about how those were national results but every state voted on its own and every state was different. I talked about how Obama crushed Hillary in Illinois and Hillary stomped Obama in New York and Delaware was more or less even and how all the states that voted so far combined added up to an even race. Then I posted the results of the most recent primary then available (Louisiana) to show how different statewide and national races could be, showing a big Obama win there and a narrow Huckabee victory even though he was getting squashed nationally.

Then we talked about line graphs showing change in a single measure over time and I used what I could remember of Republican polls going back to last year to show the rise and fall of candidates' fortunes. I made up my data, but made sure it followed the general trends. Giuliani's lead in the polls disintegrating as the months went by, McCain's free-fall and revival, Huckabee's rise, and Ron Paul's Ron-Paulitude.

That was actually the best part for me -- getting to make fun of Ron Paul and getting all the students to join in. Didn't even have to attack his assinine policies, just showed him on the bottom of the GOP opinion polls month after month, and every time I added a new month's worth of Data and talked about the other candidates rising or falling, and extending the lines on their graphs, I'd end with "and Ron Paul stayed flat" and add another segment to his straight line near the zero marker. The kids loved the running gag. They started to join in, chorusing "and Ron Paul stayed flat!" Some of them even got a little impatient as I talked about the rest of the candidates: "and what about Ron Paul?" "He stayed flat." Cheers. :-D "And Fred Thompson dropped out of the race, dropping his numbers to zero, so Ron Paul finally got ahead of someone." Laughter. It was sweet.

My biggest regret was that one of my students asked me what the difference between the two parties was, but since it was technically a math lesson I couldn't switch over to civics entirely and fully answer that -- or answer at all at the time, really. I did get to talk to her about it a little in the hallway later, but didn't get to lecture the whole class. Ah, well, can't have everything.

Oh, and the results of the Potomac primaries came in that evening: sweeps for Obama and McCain. Clinton still has a chance to turn things around, but I think we're going to be looking at an Obama-McCain race in the fall. It will be refreshing to have two candidates who most Americans can respect as people even if about half of them will be unhappy with the policies of the winner.

On Wednesday I switched from teacher to student and did my first graded assignment in a very long time for my religious tolerance class. The professor wanted at least one page on the question "how did religion and politics interact in the 16th century" and I gave him 3. I'm a little worried -- I haven't written an essay in quite a while and I think what I turned it was meandering, overlong, and very poorly structured. I'm really glad now I'm doing this practice run before taking actual grad courses for credit -- looks like I need the intellectual warm-up. Have to wait until next week to find out how merciful a grader the professor is.

Footnote: the LJ spellchecker recognizes McCain's name but not Obama's. I wonder if he'll need to win the general election or just the nomination for LJ maintenance to change that.

Edit: in response to the spamming by mostly anonymous Paultards I've reset the comment status on this post to friends only.