Monday, May 3 (8:06 hours logged today)

Today marks a new record for my daily hours: eight hours and six minutes! 

My first achievement for today was finishing designing an activity using the Voting Rights Lab’s State Voting Rights Tracker. I outlined my ideas for the activity in last Friday’s entry, and I followed that structure fairly closely. However, instead of assigning each group a state, I will assign them a different issue from the Issue Areas page. From there, students can choose which states they want to explore, though I encourage them to check out how their issues manifest in states previously covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Students will then summarize what they have learned about their issue on a single Jamboard slide, which they will share with the rest of the class.

With the Jamboard activity finalized, the presentation is finally ready! I still plan to make some changes to accommodate the Minnesota students’ 45-minute time constraint, but here it is:

Another major development came after I met with Ann to discuss my project. I showed her all of the lessons that I have created so far (Gerrymandering, the Electoral College, Election Laws, and the Supreme Court, and the Origins of the Vote). She recommended that I find more audiences for my lessons, and she offered me these two opportunities:

1. Speaking with LREI’s Constitutional Law X-Block (which I was previously a member of) this Wednesday. I will use this opportunity to test out my “Election Laws and the Supreme Court” lesson before I teach it to the Minnesota students on Friday. I think the topic should fit well with what the LREI students have already learned about election laws. 
2. Teaching both of her 10th Grade U.S. History sections next week. This is huge! I’ve never led any class for 90 minutes before, so I am going to have to do some extra preparation to ensure that I have enough interesting content to cover. Furthermore, I will teach both classes in person. is not something I anticipated doing for my Senior Project, but I think it will provide a new window for me to address my essential question. How will students respond differently to my material when I teach it to them live? What do I need to change about my teaching approach? These are questions I will have to thoroughly consider as I plan for next week.

 

Tuesday, May 4 (4:38 hours logged today)

I spent the beginning part of my day in a meeting with my Psychology and Education cohort group. After going around and reading each other’s blog posts, we discussed the Summerhill School, which Sergei had us read about last week. Most of us liked the school’s approach to democracy and thought that it would effectively prepare students to make decisions in the real world. However, I dissented from many of my peers, reiterating my assertion in last Tuesday’s entry that Summerhill’s educational model could not work in every environment. I also argued that Summerhill could take a bit more responsibility for teaching basic, ground-level skills, namely literacy. Being able to read opens up so many possibilities for students to discover new ideas, stories, and ways of communicating with their peers. If the school’s goal is enrichment and educating “the whole child,” then I think it can do children a disservice by not establishing some sort of educational baseline.

As fascinating as Summerhill is, I had more important things to spend my day doing. Tomorrow, I will present my lesson on Election Laws and the Supreme Court to LREI’s Constitutional Law X-Block. I was previously a member of this group, so I sort of have an idea of what to expect. In each of their sessions, they choose a Supreme Court case (or a topic/Amendment encompassing multiple cases) and discuss the constitutional question and the Court’s ruling. Since I will be covering Shelby County v. Holder, I thought it would be appropriate to allow students an opportunity to debate it as they would any other case. Here is that slide that I added to facilitate that conversation:

When I added this slide, I was concerned that it might make the discussion on Shelby County eat into the time for the Voting Rights Tracker activity later in the lesson. This is still something I’m worried about going into tomorrow’s presentation. I think I will just play it by ear—keep one eye on the clock and limit the number of student responses. We’ll see how that goes!

 

Wednesday, May 5 (7:37 hours logged today)

This afternoon, I debuted my presentation on the Supreme Court and state election laws for the LREI Constitutional Law X-Block, and I feel great with how it went! And if my Google Form exit poll is anything to go by, students felt a similar way.

Of the eight students that attended, four of them responded to my form. Here is what they said:

I began the lesson with a Mentimeter word cloud poll—a tool I first used in one of my 12th Grade English electives. What I love about Mentimeter is that it allows students to gather their thoughts and background knowledge without having to say it out loud in front of everyone else. The word cloud feature is also an effective way to display where students may be in some agreement. Here is what their word cloud looked like:

As the size of the phrase indicates, there was a clear consensus that voter ID laws made it harder for some Americans to vote. Beyond that, it was nice to see students provide other responses—especially signature-matching systems, reducing voting hours, and restrictions on mail-in/absentee voting. That kind of variety showed me that I was dealing with an already-knowledgeable group of students that stood to gain a lot by diving into the nitty-gritty of voting rights.

After the “do now” Menti activity, I delved into my Shelby County lesson. Lucky for me, nearly all of the students in the class were familiar with the case at some level, so I did not have to spend too much time explaining the basics of preclearance. However, something I should keep in mind for the future—especially for this Friday—is to have some more effective checks for understanding than “any questions?” or “did that make sense?” It’s often difficult for me to interpret students’ silence after I present a slide: does it mean that they understand fully? Or does it mean that they don’t even understand enough to know how to ask for help? This is definitely something I want to bring up to Ann since she is a pro at encouraging participation in her classes.

I added an extra slide to my presentation specifically for the Con Law X-Block, since they are more intimately familiar with the Constitution than other groups I am presenting to. Before I revealed how the Supreme Court decided, I asked students to discuss some of the merits of the constitutional question: “Did Congress exceed its authority to enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments by reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act preclearance provisions?” When I opened the floor for discussion, Elijah was quick to assert that the case was more of a 10th Amendment issue than one of the 14th or 15th—that Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act was seen as unconstitutional by Shelby County for imposing unjustified standards on a select few states. I felt really glad that Elijah brought this challenge to my premise. He steered the conversation in a direction that I hope students would explore, and without any prompting from Ann or me. His contributions, as well as ones from Zander, Jemma, and others, helped propel the conversation and make the lesson run smoothly.

The Voting Rights Tracker activity was the part of the lesson I was most concerned about. I feared that students would have trouble understanding the tool and how to get the most out of it if they did not have enough time to explore. Some of my worries intensified during the lesson, as I was only able to give the two groups about ten minutes. 

Despite my initial concerns, I think the activity was not a success—maybe not as much as the gerrymandering activity, but a success nonetheless. Students quickly took the lead and selected topics that covered a wide range of voting rights issues, from the restoration of felons’ voting rights to pre-registration proposals. Here’s what they came up with (as well as the directions for the activity):

I was impressed to see the students make such progress within our short time frame. I wish I could have allowed them more time to explore, but we would have sacrificed some of the share-out time. For Friday, I think I will make the directions on the first Jamboard frame a bit clearer. When I pulled up the Jamboard, I sort of startled myself with the huge block of text I had written for directions. If I make these a bit more lenient, I think students would feel freer in how to approach their research and what to share on their frame.

Overall, I had a very fruitful “test run” of my Election Laws/SCOTUS presentation. After a few more changes, it will be fully ready for Friday!

 

Thursday, May 6 (6:05 hours logged today)

During my meeting with Ann yesterday, she recommended that I watch the documentary Slay the Dragon in preparation for my upcoming lessons on gerrymandering. The film covered a grassroots group in Michigan and a legal team in Wisconsin as they try to purge their respective states of unfair redistricting. I loved it, and I thought it gave plenty of striking examples of the consequences of gerrymandering. 

One of the most compelling of those was gerrymandering’s connection to the Flint water crisis. In 2014, Flint emergency manager Darnell Earley switched the city’s water source to the Flint River, which was known to contain high levels of lead and other contaminants. As a result, at least 12 people died (Source). Two years earlier, Michigan’s Republican-controlled government passed a law that allowed state-appointed “emergency financial managers” to fix local financial crises. They did this despite hundreds of thousands of Michiganders rejecting a similar bill during a recent election. The documentary subjects allege that the Michigan Republicans were able to take the actions that led to the water crisis because they had gerrymandered the state legislative map in 2011 to give themselves an advantage—one that made them less accountable to their constituents. 

In all of my lessons, I have tried to begin with a provocative image as a hook. I think everyone was stunned by the coverage that came out of Flint in 2014, and I had no idea about the crisis’s connection to gerrymandering. I want to begin my Monday and Tuesday lessons with this connection, as I think it will immediately grab students’ attention.

 

Friday, May 7 (4:20 hours logged today)

This morning, I had my second lesson of the week and my second one overall with the Minnesota students. The crowd was a little bit tougher than the one on Wednesday, but I think that is mostly owed to how there were so many of Ann’s Constitutional Law/Elections veterans on Wednesday. Fewer students attended this session compared to the previous one (from about 16 to 9), though we still had a lively conversation.

Here are some things that I think worked well:

• Exploring the Voting Rights Tracker. Both groups (~ 4 or 5 students each) delved into voting in the criminal justice system—one group tackled restoration and the other tackled incarcerated voting. Students quickly caught on to patterns in the current legislation, such as voter impact and political affiliation. They also asked me some really good questions about the existing legislation maps. I found that some were more comfortable voicing their confusion in these small groups than in the larger session—I’ll keep this in mind for the future.
• Mentimeter opening activity. This was a great way to get students to start thinking about the topic and organize their background knowledge. Just like with Wednesday, I think it worked well as a callback and transition to exploring the Voting Rights Tracker. Here are the issues that students brainstormed:

On the other hand, I wish I had improved on these things:

• Cut the Quimbee video. The video is well-suited for students like the ones on Wednesday since it refers to a lot of “section this” and “facially unconstitutional that.” This language—understandably—can be off-putting for students that don’t have any background in legal studies. Also, the video moves rather fast and packs a lot into only two minutes. If I had cut it, I could have directed the conversation about preclearance and Shelby County at a pace more suitable for that particular audience. 
• Cut the slide with the oral argument quotes. This would have allowed me to dedicate more time to talking about preclearance, which I think is where a bulk of the confusion was. Plus, the points by the teams at oral argument were essentially the same as the ones in the justices’ opinions. 
  • Similarly, skim off parts of the justices’ quotes. I added back a part of RBG’s opinion that wasn’t necessary (the “retrogression” line), and the Chief Justice’s quote was a bit long.
• Make the Jamboard instructions more specific and efficient. Even after I removed some of the words from the initial version, the directions still read like a giant block of text. Some of the students were confused about what they should put on the Jamboard. If I had made the directions a bit more specific (eg. “screenshot the existing law map,” “screenshot one or two pending bills”), I think this would have cleared up some confusion. Here is what the students produced in the ~ 10 minutes I gave them:

• Center the Voting Rights Tracker activity around Minnesota. Several students asked about voting laws in their home state, and I wish I had included something in the activity where they would examine that. This was also a point of feedback from the first lesson; some students wanted to learn more about gerrymandering in Minnesota.

All of these points remain relevant criticisms for my upcoming gerrymandering lessons with Ann’s 10th graders on Monday and Tuesday. She told me that those kids were a “tough crowd,” so I will plan to focus on only the most engaging parts.