Sullivan West prepares for mock election; Social Studies teacher talks shop

Posted 8/21/12

LAKE HUNTINGTON, NY — John Ogozalek has been teaching for 29 years, and this election year he is teaching Social Studies to four classes of seniors, and he also has an eighth grade class.

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Sullivan West prepares for mock election; Social Studies teacher talks shop

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LAKE HUNTINGTON, NY — John Ogozalek has been teaching for 29 years, and this election year he is teaching Social Studies to four classes of seniors, and he also has an eighth grade class.

Asked which way the students tend to lean politically he said, “I hear kids on both sides, for Hillary Clinton, for Donald Trump, even a little bit for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, so my sense is that it pretty much mirrors what you would find talking on the street on Main St. Narrowsburg or at Ted’s Diner in Jeffersonville.”

He said when he’s teaching about the election he covers the issues, the candidates and the process. He said, “We’ve been following this since before December last year because it started so early.”

In an interview that was conducted in late September, Ogozalek said he also teaches the students about the process regarding the Electoral College. “You can’t assume kids understand it, it’s complicated,” he said. “There will also be a contest students can sign up for, and whoever predicts most accurately what the final Electoral College vote will be will win a prize—perhaps a bag of chips.”

This year, as there was in 2012, there will be a school-wide mock election, which is being organized by a senior student who is performing her community service assignment for Ogazalek’s class; the vote is tentatively scheduled for about a week before Election Day, which is on November 8.

As for the mock election itself, Ogozalek says, as in 2012, his sense is that the poll of the students does not look that much different from a poll of their parents. He said, “One of the things I do with the kids is I get the results from the county, and I have the kids look at each town. You can see as you drive from Route 17B further west, it goes from the Town of Thompson, which voted for Obama in 2012, until you get to Fremont, which voted heavily for Romney in 2012, in Cochecton you get a mix of voters of different parties.”

He said, “The classic political science observation is that kids don’t always vote like their parents, but there is a tendency to vote the way their family does.”

In Sullivan County, in the actual election, Barack Obama received 15,268 votes while Mitt Romney received 12,705 votes. The totals for individual towns can be found at www.co.sullivan.ny.us on the election results link on the Board of Elections page.

The Social Studies teacher’s observations about what has changed the most over his 29 years in the classroom are the access to computers, smart phones and the Internet. He said, “When I started [in the Narrowsburg School District], the school might have had two computers that no one wanted to use,” and teachers still used film strips.

Now when he teaches about elections he can make use of sites like www.liv ingroomcandidate.org, which has an archive of all of the political television ads dating back to 1952, and which he can use in the classroom.

Also he said he registers eligible students to vote. “I have registered probably 10 students and three adults over the past three or four weeks. I tell the kids it’s probably the most important thing I do as a teacher. I can’t assign the students to vote for a grade. But I try to get them to vote by persuading them. Over the years I’ve registered hundreds of people to vote. They far outweigh whatever vote I have—I’ve negated my own impact,” he said, laughing.

As for knowing the likely political affiliation of a student, he said, “Quite honestly when you get into discussions in a 12th grade class about abortions and the death penalty,” the likely party affiliation is going to stick out for some students.

Ogozalek said, “We do a whole thing about what’s liberal and what’s conservative, which is fun. I give the students a self-survey, and I ask who scored way to the left or right, if you want to tell me, and I probably could have guessed already, because it comes out in discussions sometimes. Every once in a while you get a real ideologue in class, either way, and it’s kind of fun, because they hold your feet to the fire because they’ve been listening to Rush Limbaugh, and they know politics. That’s a fun class.”

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