CBG students at Matoaca Middle East show support for their candidates as candidates Jacob “Obama” Liming and Jon “McCain” Bunting participated in their final debate.

Forget stuffy civics lessons of rote memorization from books and notes. Eighth-graders in the Center Based Gifted program at Matoaca Middle School’s East campus received a hands-on approach to politics as they held their own presidential campaign, a month-long effort mirroring the national one.

“I think that typically eighth graders find the constitution kind of dry, so we take a different approach to our Political Parties and Pressure Groups unit,” says Christine Copa, Civics and Economics teacher at Matoaca. “If I let them run a campaign, they can see how it all works, learn more, and have fun.”

To get the campaign rolling, Copa gave each of her three civics classes a political ideology test to see which campaign would be the best fit for each class, with the class showing the most even split in political ideology taking the role of the Election Board. That decided, her students hit the campaign trail, spending about 15 minutes per class – as well as a few full class periods – organizing their campaigns. Like the national election, students created posters and flyers, filmed commercials for their candidates, and participated in two debates. The Election Board stayed just as busy, publishing several presidential election newsletters, moderating the debates, and organizing the voting.

“It was a lot of hard work conducting a campaign, but we got to learn a lot about how campaigns are run,” says Jacob Liming, aka Barack Obama. “It was worth it though because it gave us a lot of experience, and gave all of us a much broader understanding of politics.”

As with any campaign, students were assigned different roles equivalent to those found in a national campaign, including campaign manager, press secretary, speechwriter, pollster, media advisor, treasurer, and of course, the candidate. Along with Liming as Obama, Jon Bunting took the role of John McCain, Taylor Hevener portrayed Joe Biden, and Brianna Knaggs served as Sarah Palin.

“It was very stressful, but a lot of fun,” says Bunting. “I learned so much more than if we had just read books in class. We got to get out of class and talk to people, so it was just fun all around.”

Not everything was easy, however. While putting together a campaign can be difficult enough, candidates had to overcome a few extra challenges.

“The speaking was the most difficult part,” says Liming. “There was a lot of stuff to memorize.”

Bunting agrees. “Public speaking was definitely the hardest part. We had to find the information and word it in a way that wasn’t boring, but informed the other students about the issues.”

Participating in their second, and final, debate on Wednesday, October 29, the candidates gave students one last look at the issues before they jumped into the voting booth. Grabbing a majority of the popular and electoral vote, Jacob “Obama” Liming may have walked away the winner of the election, but all students reaped the awards of the campaign.

“I thought that both campaigns were very prepared with their speeches and all three classes did their jobs well,” says Copa. “It’s always great to see students get so excited about an election.”

nderatto@villagepublishing.com | 751-0421

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