Inspirations Before we began the process of learning about our presidential candidates, we educated ourselves about what our own views are on social, economic, and foreign issues. We did this by taking the isidewith.com quiz. We also practiced defending our opinions but also being open to new ideas in an educating, thoughtful way.
Project Objective:
Get up close and personal with the game of Politics: Defense & Offense
Learning about the presidential candidates and their platform
Develop a deeper understanding of the American’s Election & Voting system.
Knowing the importance of fact-checking
Use political propaganda to achieve your goal of getting your candidate to win our campus election
Analyzing the role of media in today’s politics
Learn how to debate and use political rhetoric
How to work as a functioning campaign team
Educate others on the issues and get them to vote
In this project, we created a campaign team which would help us achieve and learn the objectives above. We also created a Truth Campaign Video which fact checked our candidate which can be found here.
Project Process
Dear Future President Letter We wrote letters to our future president addressing issues that we thought needed to be fixed and that the president had the power to do so. I chose to write about college tuition and how it increasing at an alarming rate but is not being recognized as a problem. Through the process of writing this letter, I had an outline to make sure I hit all the points I needed to as well as many critiques from my peers and teachers. The format of this letter was also not an ordinary one. We tried to write in the same style as our Declaration of Independence. That consisted of a preamble, addressing all the issues, then a stirring conclusion. I have linked all my drafts below as well as my final letter.
Research Worksheets: We began the research portion of this project by filling out this worksheet. This helped pile all the information we needed to learn about the certain topic that we each chose. I chose to research on tax plans and income, but more specifically Donald Trump's plans and stances on those topics. I also found sources where people supported his plans as well as a source that opposed. After doing the research on his stance, supporting source, and an opposing source, I summarized it into a paragraphs for each to make things clearer.
Fact Checking: After doing the research on what things Trump says on tax plans and income, I also fact checked them. Seeing whether or not what he says is actually true but also if what he has proposed would actually work.
Opening Statements: Another part of our project was to participate in a debate with our peers who had researched on the same topic as me. The information that we used to create what we were going to say, or our opening statement, was using the researched we compiled from the worksheet. My first draft for each was my paragraphs thrown together (You can find those by clicking the buttons below). I found that to be an extremely rough draft and from there edited it to the final version you see below.
Through this project, I have realized that being an educated voter is extremely important. Being aware of what and who you are voting for is important in having your say in what goes on in our country. It takes away the chance for politicians to get away with lying and doing things that would only benefit themselves.
This project has also helped me learn more about politics in general. Before this I barely bothered to do my research on candidates or anything to do with politics. Now I have realized that things that go on in our politics, affect all of us. It can determine whether our country continues to progress or go back to the way things were. I have learned that there are ways to continue that as citizens.
A challenging part of this project was communication and understanding policies. For the debate portion, I struggled with public speaking and just getting my point across in the time that I had. I overcame this by practicing and having a deeper understanding of the information I had to say. Understanding all the policies and tax laws was a struggle for me because I found it very confusing. I overcame this by just continuing to ask my teachers questions and not giving up on my research, even though it was a lot of work for me to finally understand.
This presidential election did not turn out the way I wanted it to and I am honestly pretty disappointed, but I still have hope. Hope in our country to make sure we keep our future president accountable for his actions and what he says. I hope that his presidency is different than his campaign and that maybe it will create and continue progressivism. There are many issues that our country is still fighting and I am hoping that they will be addressed and fixed soon.