William & Mary Model Congress Blog
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
James Blair Model Congress: Day 1
Today, Tom, Daniel, I and 4 others were introduced for the first time to the middle schoolers of James Blair Middle School to teach some kids from another generation some civics. This was Day 1 of a series of after-school meetings for the James Blair Middle School Model Congress Conference (JBMCC).
JBMC had been one of the many schools that we had contacted last year for our first conference in the 'burg. After a little research, they decided that they would love for someone from our club to teach a group of students how model congress works in the form of an after-school activity.
When Jessica Taylor and I first started this club in 2008, we decided to make one of the mission statements of the club to teach civics to those who may not know much about the governmental processes in D.C., thus, I felt like this activity was one that was both appropriate and useful for this club as a whole.
In addition, it was a win-win situation, as we had some new members that also still needed to get acquainted with parliamentary procedure and how to act as a chair.
Today's meeting was fairly self-explanatory. Since it was our first, we did not want to overwhelm our students with too many words. For some reason, some of us thought that going into a middle school armed with terms such as "nuclear proliferation" and "foreign policy" and "economic/monetary stability" would be a little much. We'll get there eventually. Instead, we started them out by teaching some basic terms and basically showing how a bill becomes a law and why Model Congress exists.
We had about a group of 7 today, which is a little bit less than what we usually deal with in a committee, but certainly not to the extent that this cannot work. Perhaps by the end of these sessions, these seven will have more experience in Congressional procedure and processes than some college students I know.
Also, I'd like to give a special kudos to Matt Donohue and Jackie Goldschmidt who handled most of the speaking during today's meeting and kept the presentation rolling. Good job guys.
Next week, we'll have another meeting in which we will start talking about the types of bills that students might like to take upon themselves to research and write. It'll be interesting to see what sorts of ideas for bills these kids can come up with.
JBMC had been one of the many schools that we had contacted last year for our first conference in the 'burg. After a little research, they decided that they would love for someone from our club to teach a group of students how model congress works in the form of an after-school activity.
When Jessica Taylor and I first started this club in 2008, we decided to make one of the mission statements of the club to teach civics to those who may not know much about the governmental processes in D.C., thus, I felt like this activity was one that was both appropriate and useful for this club as a whole.
In addition, it was a win-win situation, as we had some new members that also still needed to get acquainted with parliamentary procedure and how to act as a chair.
Today's meeting was fairly self-explanatory. Since it was our first, we did not want to overwhelm our students with too many words. For some reason, some of us thought that going into a middle school armed with terms such as "nuclear proliferation" and "foreign policy" and "economic/monetary stability" would be a little much. We'll get there eventually. Instead, we started them out by teaching some basic terms and basically showing how a bill becomes a law and why Model Congress exists.
We had about a group of 7 today, which is a little bit less than what we usually deal with in a committee, but certainly not to the extent that this cannot work. Perhaps by the end of these sessions, these seven will have more experience in Congressional procedure and processes than some college students I know.
Also, I'd like to give a special kudos to Matt Donohue and Jackie Goldschmidt who handled most of the speaking during today's meeting and kept the presentation rolling. Good job guys.
Next week, we'll have another meeting in which we will start talking about the types of bills that students might like to take upon themselves to research and write. It'll be interesting to see what sorts of ideas for bills these kids can come up with.
Labels: Daniel Thorpe, Jackie Goldschmidt, James Blair Middle School, Jessica Taylor, Matt Donohue, Tom Fisher
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