Going Campaigning...

After reading an article entitled “Batter Up” in NEAToday, I’m thinking a little more politically this week. This article was about various NEA members and how they are making a difference in education by campaigning for candidates who they feel will best support their goals for education. The members varied from elementary to high school teachers and political parties. Some teachers were content to work in their communities supporting local candidates, while others were thinking bigger with the presidential candidates.

This article seemed to come along at a perfect time for me. As I’ve been working on a teacher leadership class this past semester, I’ve been wondering how I can make a bigger difference in my chosen profession. Campaigning will be a great summer project for me and will help me feel empowered by making others aware of important educational issues. If these teachers in the article can do it, why can’t I? The only thing the article didn’t tell me was where I can find more information about getting involved in political campaigns. I did visit the NEA website, which has some other activities related to politics, but I still didn’t find what I was for. Locally, I’m not even sure who’s up for re-election in November, so visiting candidate websites is a little pointless. As far as the presidential election goes, I’m pretty sure I know who I want to support, but I’m not positive. However, going in this route seems like the best way to get the word out about educational issues. I’m even considering talking with some of my friends and seeing if they would like to join me. So for now, my goal is to figure out who to completely support this November.

In hopes of narrowing down my candidates, I visited www.glassbooth.org, a website I heard about on a podcast from BBC5. This website allows you to take a quiz about your opinions on various issues and matches your answers to the candidate who most closely resembles the same answers. It’s a great website to inform students about and have them try. However, for me, it wasn’t much help. There was a one percent difference between the two I’m trying to choose between. At least I got the political party right! :)

Although this doesn’t completely go along with this topic, I did find a website this week that I wanted to share. It’s called freerice.com and was created by a parent of a high schooler who wanted to prepare their child for the SAT’s. This vocabulary quiz website will donate 20 grains of rice to the U.N. World Food Program for every correct answer. When I was testing it out for my Website Wednesday newsletter I got up to 220 grains of rice! I was psyched about this website and its generous goals and wanted to make sure the news got out on the web. Visit it for your chance to send rice to people who need it.