Here we go again

Stuff like this really honks me off, and this is even worse (Darren, you owe me blood pressure medication).

Teachers at Soquel High School have agreed not to wear "Educators for Obama" buttons in the classroom after a parent complained that educators were attempting to politically influence his daughter and other students.

These teachers must not have much to do in the classroom, if they have all this time to waste on topics that have nothing to do with the curriculum. But I promised myself I wouldn't rant, so I won't. Instead, I'll offer an alternative for those who just can't keep from bringing the election into the classroom -- an alternative that does not push a candidate or a party, and actually has something to do with learning the class material -- and critical thinking, in the literal, and not the "think like a slobbering leftist" education school definition. Wow, how about that!

Student interest is a great motivator, particularly when you teach something many students find boring, or even intimidating, like I did. One thing we did that was very successful was build several applications with the tools we were going to cover that grabbed student interest when we said, "At the end of the semester, you'll be able to do this, too."

One of these was a simulation model that based on the scores for all of the games that season predicted the winner of the Superbowl (we had one for the NBA finals and another for the World Series, depending on which semester we were in).

So if you absolutely must address the election in class, here is one way you can do it where the students will actually learn something, and contains not a hint of advocacy or indoctrination.

Have students build an application that predicts the results of the election. Remind them that the more variables they incorporate, the more accurate it will likely be, and encourage them to make it as complex as they like.

You'd want to break them into teams to do this, and give them time to talk about what variables they would want to incorporate, and how. You should probably give them a list of sources for data, like realclearpolitics.com, gallup.com, and rasmussenreports.com. In fact, give them a whole class period to do nothing but plan their model, figure out where they'd get the data, and assign people in the team to do various tasks.

I'd give them a week to turn in the models. After going through them, you can pull several up with different results and as a class, pick apart the applications and discuss why they got different results (this is what is known as a learning experience). You can then, again as a class, discuss which of the models is/are most likely to accurately predict the results, and why. You can even give bonus points to the team whose model most accurately predicts the election.

See? You addressed the election, and you didn't have them sing creepy Hitler Youth songs.

If you think about it, these models incorporate a lot of mathematical knowledge in many different areas, and all through the model. Take collecting the data, say, polls. How are they going to deal with the different levels of statistical error in different polls? How will they deal with different party weights in different polls? What, other than polls, will they use as input variables, and how will they incorporate them into the model? For example, if they're going to look at the number of voters who went for Hillary in the primaries and turn that into support for McCain, how, exactly, are they going to do it? What algorithm will they use, and what will they base it on? And would they also want to use another variable, say, Democrat respondents who only lean Democrat in the election, or are undecided to calculate their Hillary conversion variable?

And what about actual election day statistics, will they use those? If so, which variables? How will they incorporate them?

You can turn just about anything into a real, learning experience in the classroom if you just think about it. Unfortunately, "thinking" seems to be an alien concept to many teachers these days.

The learning isn't only in creating the models. The learning -- and critical thinking -- is also in analyzing the models and comparing them once they've been done. What makes a good model? What makes this model more accurate than that one? Would this be a more accurate model if we tweaked the algorithms, and if so, how would we tweak them? You get the idea.

When my students are working in teams, I usually migrate from team to team, playing devil's advocate, and gently nudging them when they're completely off track (I call this guided constructivism). With a project like this, I would probably limit my input to making sure they understood, and correcting fundamental errors, like only taking into consideration the popular vote. Oh. And I would only do something like this after the students had all of the necessary knowledge and skills to actually build a working application. Sorry, but if you think turning students loose on their own to do complex projects like this is a good way to introduce them to new skills, you have no business within a hundred miles of a classroom.

(We talked about doing this with one of the sports championships, don't remember which now, but decided against it because making the data usable would require complex Excel text functions we had not covered in class.)

Cross-posted at Right Wing Nation