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Descriptions of effective teaching often depict an idealized form of "perfect" instruction. Yet, pursuing perfection in teaching, which depends on children's behavior, is ultimately futile. To be effective, lessons and educators need to operate with about 75% efficiency. The remaining 25% can be impactful, but expecting it in every lesson, every day, is unrealistic. Perfection in teaching may be unattainable, but progress is not. Whether you are aiming for the 75% effectiveness mark or striving for continuous improvement, this podcast will guide you in that endeavor.
17. Lindsey Cormack
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[00:00:00] Welcome to Better Teaching, Only Stuff That Works, a podcast for teachers, instructional coaches, administrators, and anyone else who supports teachers in the classroom. This show is a proud member of the BE Podcast Network shows that help you go beyond education. Find all our shows@bepodcastnetwork.com. I Am Jean Taver Netti, the host for this podcast. And my goal for this episode, like all episodes, is that you laugh at least once and that you leave with an actionable idea for better teaching. A quick reminder, no cliches, no buzzwords. Only stuff that works. Hello, everyone. This is Gene Tabernetti. Before I introduce my guest for Today, I just wanted to say a few words about this episode. For me, this was a difficult [00:01:00] episode because it is about teaching civics to our children and the importance of teaching civics and having educated citizens knowing about our political system.
When I was growing up, which was a very different time, which was a time of, even though I didn't realize it at the time when I was growing up, but it was a time in our history where we had just experienced tremendous upheaval, and so there was much more, comity, in the population. we had gone through shared, traumatic experiences as a nation.
And we were much closer and it was much easier to talk about things and, especially with regards to our government and how we were proud of ourselves as a nation. And so the more I talked to, My guest, Lindsay, the more I realized how little I knew about was going on with respect to civics education, which is a [00:02:00] difficult thing for me to admit considering all the time that I spend in schools and not understanding this element.
So, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Lindsay Cormack, and please pardon the, my interjections of my personal history, because I was just struggling to understand, where we got here, how we got here. I hope you enjoy this episode of Better Teaching, Only Stuff That Works I am very excited today to have as my guest, Dr.
Lindsay Cormack. She is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Stevens Institute of Technology and the author of How to Raise a Citizen and Why It's Up to You to Do It. Lindsay is the creator of DC Box, a digital archive of official Congressional e newsletters and her work has been featured in prominent journals and major media outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.
I'm pleased that she's here today to talk [00:03:00] about her new book and to talk about civics and civics education. Welcome, Lindsay.
Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to talk with you today.
Oh, me too. And one of the things that I was excited about. When I was reading your book, was that You're talking about, it's kind of a how to book for parents you know, how to talk about politics and what they need to know. But the other thing is that you sneak in all the content that they should know in case they don't.
And I always appreciate that when an author does that so that even if it doesn't get to the kids, the adults learn something. And so I think this is a great, it's a great book for Parents, educators everywhere. So, so thank you for being here.
Thank you. And thanks for recognizing that like style of book because you know, I didn't want it to be finger wag your scoldy to be like, you should know this. Instead it's like, we don't know this. That's not great, [00:04:00] but we can learn it together. And the second half is essentially like, here's the basics.
well, it is maybe it's a function of age that you see all the time on TV. There is somebody talking about a younger generation. And, of course, the younger generation is always garbage, and their generation is always great. And one of the things they always talk about is that we need more civics education, we need more civics education.
I want to back up and start at, what is civics? When you talk about civics, what is it? Because it's a word we use as if we understand each other.
Yeah, and you know, it's actually not my most preferred word because I think when we say civics, people's eyes sort of glaze over and they're like, that sounds boring, or maybe it's just about voting. But civics is really about kind of understanding your role in a community and the levers of power that exist in that community, how you can get outcomes that you like.
How you can like direct the future to the way that you want it to be. [00:05:00] And that's not always governmental. Sometimes it's volunteer stuff. Sometimes it's mutual aid stuff. And so I think it's broader than just, do you know how to vote? It's about a community life that we all sort of have to live in, whether we like it or not.
Well, and I think that's important to know that it is broader because one of the things that you talk about is you know, things that schools can do outside, like community service and that sort of thing. And I grew up with that. I never thought about it as the word you don't like, civics, just thought about it as you're doing you're doing good work.
And then I thought, you know. Well, they say, well, that's part of what good citizens do, which tying it together, but not tying it together explicitly. Explicitly. So, one of the things, you know, you wrote this and the title is You know, it's about parents, what parents can do, but you started out doing a lot of research on what was already going on in schools in the United States.
Could you talk about that a little [00:06:00] bit? Do
Yeah, that's true. So I was fortunate enough to have six research assistants on this project with me, and we had a few big questions that we went to go ask. First, we wanted to look at what are sort of the curricular requirements that exist in the United States? And you know better than I that it's very varied.
Every state gets to set sort of their own standards. They get to tell you what the curricular time is going to be, when this content is going to be delivered. And then to kind of round that out, we also looked at some national level assessments. We looked at the nation's report card to check in on eighth graders and how they're doing at civics.
And then we also looked at AP US government scores for those 12th graders who opt in to take that. So those were our two big starting points. But then we also interviewed teachers in nearly every state that kind of get a handle on like, what were the people who were in the classroom feeling? Did they like, Tell us about constraints that we wouldn't have been able to see in the curriculum and in the test scores.
And I really liked this multi prong approach because I think we got to get a handle on the problem in a really rich way. And it was one of the it's one of my favorite works that I've ever got to do. It's a book that I'm really proud of. And so [00:07:00] I really enjoyed the process kind of beginning to end.
you think that you talked about how the current state has what's the word should we use about instead of civics?
You know, I always say politics and government, but I understand that those words are also sort of like dirty in a classroom setting, so I understand why civics gets used there. I just know when I talk to regular audiences, they're just like, that word doesn't mean much to me, but politics and government does mean something to people.
Okay. So, has the knowledge about politics and government, has it diminished over the years, do you think? Has it changed? Has the focus changed about what we want students or kids to know?
Well, you know, when we look at something like the nation's report card from 1998 until today, it's about the same. We have about 23 percent of our students who are considered proficient in civics and everyone else falls somewhere below on average. And so it's not necessarily that We are getting worse.
It's that we are not getting better. And we all sort of know that our politics is feeling worse. And so there's [00:08:00] a little bit of a mismatch there, which is we kind of have to level up on this one place. If we think that everything else is going to fall into place, we have to make sure we understand what the rules are in the first.
So it's not necessarily getting worse. It is getting less curricular time, but it's not getting any better. It's kind of stagnant.
I think my next book is going to be titled N of One, and it's going to be all about my perceptions of the world. And I was thinking about this a lot as I was reading your book, and the idea of what's changed over the years. So, I'm going to give you a hint about how old I am.
I started kindergarten in 1959. So 1959 was just a couple years after Sputnik. It was eight years earlier, we were in the Korean War. Fifteen years earlier, we were in World War II. And so now as I reflect back, All of our teachers, they either had spouses or they were involved in those conflicts or [00:09:00] they were they went through a shared experience, the shared patriotic experience.
And so, I remember in kindergarten, five years old, learning the Pledge of Allegiance. Remember in my education, there was never any criticism of the United States in anything. It was the best in everything. And so, I would, I even looking back, I would even say maybe there was some indoctrination, which I know I've talked to people and they say, yeah, that might be too strong but I could see based on the historical time period that might've been something that people thought was necessary to be able to pull together.
I mean, primarily two wars in just a few years, and well, and then we were in another war soon after that. So, your thoughts on experiences of, you know, historical eras, if that makes any difference in the importance of teaching?
Yeah, I mean, I imagine it absolutely does because we know these sort of like context to our [00:10:00] lives influence everything that we're doing. So it's not just that you seem to have shared historical context with other people, but you also had a media environment that was so less bifurcated and cut up than it is today.
So it's not just that like, You know, the global experience is similar. We have these big conflagrations and there's warlike activities. It's that most people are also hearing the same sorts of stories. News sources are smaller. It's not something that's algorithmically directed to you and someone else is getting a different story.
And that's like not the world that we live in today. And so I think even if we do have these sort of like shared big experiences, They just don't mean as much to everyone. And an example of this can be like the Olympics. I remember even in my childhood, if there was an Olympics, it was everyone was watching this and this is how we're going to do it.
And now there's, you know, so many other things that you can experience and take away from it that we don't sort of have this sort of like, Oh, we're all doing this one thing or focused on this one issue.
well, yeah, I think that's a great point. I mean, there's so many know, the current media situation, it seems to be [00:11:00] like a tipping point for so many things. You talked about in the book that conversations with kids about politics and government should start very, at a very early age. Can you talk about that and talk about what the progression looks like and thinking about the sophistication of kids and what they can understand?
Sure. So the reason that I kind of prescribed this is because these conversations are happening with and around our kids, even if we're not actively doing it. Like our children are getting messages about politics and government from even like children's media and children's literature. If you look at some of the shows like Paw Patrol or even like Simpsons of yesteryear, there's oftentimes like a mayor character.
And that person is like, at best, a bumbling doofus, and at worst, they're out to do harm to the city that they're meant to protect. So they are getting these sort of messages on what government is, even if it's in small little ways. And so I make the argument that I think parents should do this work, but try to do it in [00:12:00] a way that's more productive, where they can say like, you know, hey, look, if we have nice roads, Government had a hand in that.
If we like the park that we can go play on, there's someone in our local community that said, Hey, this is worth fighting for. This is our taxpayer dollars coming together to make something better for all of us. And so my argument is not that you're like quizzing your five year olds on the Constitution, but it's that you show them there's something good about this too.
You take them to vote with you, show them the spaces, get them into the traditions of what it means to be an American in a democratic republic. That's the stuff that I talk about early on. And then as you get older. You know, when you've got these early adolescents, 10 to 14s, they're going to take social studies classes that have them grapple with these things.
The modal delivery around the United States, although, you know, there's differences, usually in 7th or 8th grade, kids will get something that's like a U. S. history or a world history or something that's social studies ish. And that's when they're going to start getting into these concepts in school and you can kind of build on that.
But I think you can do more. I think you can do things like if you have a local election coming, you have a 14 year old at home and you don't know [00:13:00] much about these candidates, you can ask them to be the family researcher and be like, Hey, can you go spend 20 minutes, try to figure out what you can about these candidates.
It's like a little sleuthing activity. They can get online, they can go see if they have a webpage themselves. Maybe they're on YouTube, maybe they've got Twitter, whatever, and let them sort of do that, but. Decision making, who do I like more? How do I make this determination? Even though they're not the ones who are going to vote but they get to get that practice And then by the time you've got 15 to 18 year olds I have like five little bits that I go over in the book that I say like these are the things your kids Have to know before they get out of your house Because on average our kids don't go to college, which means they're never going to touch a lesson like this again And the ones that too might get at most one political science intro course.
And so there's plenty of pieces about how to participate in our government, how the constitution works, what the setup is here, that if they don't get it at home and they're not getting it at schools, they're just going to continue to play catch up and they're not going to be as politically powerful as they could be if we did this work with them.
You said that there were five things. What are those [00:14:00] five things that you talk about that they need to know?
the first thing is they need to know how to register to vote and we might say you know all that happens in schools But on average it doesn't in the last federal election only a quarter of our 18 year olds were registered to vote Despite the fact that over half of them live in states where you can pre register as early as 16 So as parents we have to get them to register to vote and to understand that process Sometimes they need like a social security number to register most 18 year olds Don't know what that is.
That card's probably still with mom or in an envelope or something. So we got to do that piece, just get them started that first time. We also need to make sure that they sort of understand a few things about how our politics works. The first one that I talk about is primary elections versus general elections.
And the reason that made the list is when we talk to teachers about stuff that doesn't get covered that much in high schools, primary elections are one of the things that they just don't know about. They maybe cover the presidential primary, but increasingly in parts of the United States. The election that is competitive is that primary.
And by the time you get to the general election, either the Democrats going to win in increasing number of places because there's [00:15:00] registration imbalances. So it's not really a contest in November. The contest is earlier. The third thing is I think every child should have read the constitution at least once.
And I know that this sounds like it's maybe really boring work, but I think it's good work. Like we all like to play games that we know the rules to, and the constitution is just a charter of government. It's not that long and it's something you have 18 years to do with your kids. So make sure that they have like a little touchstone with every one of these pieces so they can kind of understand what it is they're graduating into.
The fourth one is I think our kids need to understand the concept of federalism. This again came from talking to teachers, which is, you know, federal government has different things than the state government has different things than the local government. And a lot of our quality of life decisions happen local or state.
And we just don't really have a full appreciation of that. And the last one is sort of this bundled thing. which is our kids need to have practice having hard conversations. And the reason that made the list is because as a college professor, I get to see kids who are raised in all different environments, all sorts of home settings.
But in the last 10 years, what I have noticed [00:16:00] is that kids are very hesitant to either sit in discomfort themselves or make other people uncomfortable, potentially with their own sort of opinions in hard conversation spaces. They need to get better practice at this because nothing gets better if we can't talk about it.
And by doing that in a home situation with a family surrounded by love, that's where you can kind of make those mistakes, figure it out, get better. And then it's just not as hard when you're out in the world with other people bumping up against them. And that's what politics is and that's what life is.
And so I think these are fine things for parents to take on with their kids. And they make your kids more powerful.
And thank goodness for that last section of your book to explain these things because I think that's one of the things that from the very beginning when I was reading your book and saw the premise of it, that the parents were going to do it, is that I worry about the knowledge of the parents.
And there are lots of things that. are going on in schools now that, you know, we're asking, you know, we talk about dysregulated [00:17:00] students is one thing. And then we have dysregulated adults attempting to mitigate, you know, those circumstances and parents and it just goes on and on.
And, um, how, let me ask you this. How did you Make the determination to do this in the home versus attempting to make changes in schools.
So when I set out, I actually thought this was going to be a book about how to do this in schools. And in the course of the research was about two and a half, three years, it became increasingly clear that there are just some very hard constraints to getting these sorts of things done in schools. And it's not that my argument is it shouldn't be done in schools.
In fact, if I could wave a magic wand, I'd actually make it so that K through 12, like every other subject, our students get to interact with some form of civics, government politics, so that they can layer their understanding like everything else. But. You know, doing stuff in schools is a really hard because it is a political process.
It's something where you have to like lobby to make sure your state legislature either [00:18:00] allocates more dollars or allocates more classroom time to these things. It's also something where we know that schools are under a lot of pressures. One of the things that we heard from nearly everyone we talked to is that When you have a crowded curriculum and you have an SAT and an ACT at the end of this whole road, the things that get taught are the things that are going to be tested.
And neither one of these tests has a components of civics. And so when you're like trying to look at what you can cut, this sort of stuff gets squeezed out. And so knowing like, okay, well, we're not going to be able to change the testing environment. That's a problem. But we also heard from teachers that Parents themselves were kind of part of the problem, where even teachers who were like, you know, well meaning social studies teachers who want their kids to understand government, they were afraid that even if they talk about subjects that are like pretty basic, like, the division of powers, like, okay, we have Congress as one branch and we have a president as another branch of the judiciary.
Congress is first. It's article one of the constitution. A kid can hear that. Go home, tell a parent, here's the lesson [00:19:00] today. And a parent might hear, Oh, that teacher doesn't like the president. Then they can inflame a Facebook group or they can email an administrator or bother a principal or even badger the teacher themselves.
And so they said, you know, it's a really fraught environment to kind of do this work, even at a basic level, because there's this fear of parental blowback. And so it became kind of clear. We were like, okay, well, this isn't really something that you can say, Hey, My easiest solution that I can give to you is do it in the schools.
Instead. It's like, I think we have to do a little bit inward and do it in our homes. And hopefully that can like help schools do this better because we'll value it and we'll see their support to doing this work right now. That's not quite the state of the world that, as I see it.
You know, it's interesting you mentioned the blowback from parents. As I was preparing to talk to you today, I emailed a social studies teacher, a friend of mine who teaches in a, I'll be as nondescriptive as I can. So people, I'm just going to say a red state. And he, you know, I was telling him about the premise of your book [00:20:00] and did he have any questions?
And, you know, and he just said. Yeah, it's the parents. I can't do it. I just stopped. I just stopped making any sort of comment that could be construed as any sort of bias at all. And this is a very thoughtful fellow, and it's just too bad that's where we are.
I agree it's too bad, but that is really what we heard from nearly everyone we talked to. Is it's, you know, it's not a good environment if you have 30 little bosses who are overlooking you and then they have 60 of their like parents who can always tell you that you're doing it wrong. That's a hard environment to operate in.
And this subject tends to get more ire than others. which I think actually speaks to one of our crises, which is we just don't really know that much. And so we can't do it very elegantly or thoughtfully. We just sort of do it brutally. And if we knew a little bit more, the nuance wouldn't be so bad. And our kids being exposed to different ideas also wouldn't be so hard.
Boy, and that gets me to, you know, my big concern [00:21:00] about the parents doing this. I mean, I've heard you say, and I don't know if it was in the book, I don't remember if it was in the book or not, but it seems so analogous to other things that we ask schools to do that parents have acquiesced partially to, and I think of sex education.
You know, it was just so necessary. And then the schools, you know, is it, there wasn't anybody who disagreed that the parents shouldn't do it, but they just weren't. And I think it's similar in this situation where, you know, we agree. I don't know if anybody wouldn't agree that we would want the parents to teach these, all these five things to their students.
Are they capable? And how big a group do we have of parents who just aren't capable? And how do we reach them? You mentioned you talked to parent groups, if you could maybe expand on that a little bit.
Yeah, you know, I, part of this like book project has been talking to parent groups and sort of bringing the message to them. And I do hear resistance and [00:22:00] hesitation, and it's usually of the form of like, well, I feel like I don't know enough. And so I don't want to lead my kid astray, or I don't want to influence them in a way that's like not correct.
And I think that sort of feeling is inhibitory in a way that's different. Not even really functional because none of the book is saying, you know, your kids need you to be government trivia experts. That's not what they need you to be. They need you to be someone who can model what it is to seek more information in the pursuit of making a better life for yourself.
And so that is, you know, you. Hey, there's an election coming up. We're going to have some ballot initiative. I don't know anything about that. Let me go learn a little bit more. That's not that they come to you and say like, Oh, how are you voting on this? And you have a fully formed answer all of a sudden.
It's that you just show them a process. You model behaviors that are like pro social, pro civic, and then they're going to take that too. To the point of a lot of parents not being capable of this. There's like very good research on that. That's absolutely true. Especially parents who weren't raised in the United States.
They're at such a disadvantage because even though they've had to study for like citizen exams, there is so much value in [00:23:00] living an experience where you get repeated exposure to these things and people who weren't here just couldn't do it. And so my hope is in doing this sort of work in homes that you know, can understand the material, can deliver this content, can have an ability to say like, you know what?
I can learn a little bit more. That sort of stuff ripples. Like, we know that when people can do things with others, then those kids can go have those conversations with other kids, even if their home environments aren't the same. And so, yes, there's going to be differences in ability. That's true for everything, but that's not a reason not to get started with parents who say like, you know what?
I don't like how this politics is feeling. I don't like how it's functioning. I got to do something different. And that's why I, that's why it became a parenting book. Cause I think a lot of us feel like that.
Yeah. And I think the paradox of the, you mentioned maybe immigrants, is that they may know more than anybody the importance of the politics in government.
Well, they certainly have a sense of like the value of democracy or the value of being able to participate at all. And that's something that [00:24:00] American students probably just like can't value as much and part of it is, you know, they didn't live that experience But also when we look at like the time that's dedicated to history or comparative politics It's so low that they don't really even know how other systems function They kind of have this idea of like this is the There used to be kings, but now we have democracies.
The end. And they just, they don't really get the depth of how the world is very different and we have it pretty good here.
yeah. And the other thing with regards to being a little bit more mature is you realize things that you just didn't realize before because of the way that we're educated. You just take it for granted. This will always be this way. It will always happen. Um, I'm going to get back to, you know, my growing up again, so I went through the Vietnam era and so grow up in the 60s. You're wondering why are we there? What's this all about? It wasn't until September 11th, 2001, where I said, OK, now I know.
I [00:25:00] understand why we might go to war. Before that, I couldn't think of any reason why we would initiate some sort of war. So I always make a distinction between intellectually knowing things and emotionally knowing things. And I think so much of we, that kids learn about politics in government is like, What you were describing.
It's like the cartoon, you know, I'm a bill. I'm just a bill.
We were lucky that we got, I'm just a bill. The students today don't, they don't have that shared memory. Yeah. People who were born after like 1993, they don't have that. That didn't happen for them.
Yeah. So just having some shared experiences and understanding that you do make a difference. And you can make a difference. Again not to beat a dead horse here, but just, I worry about everybody needs your book. Teachers need your book. Parents need your book.
And, you know, I'm on Twitter and I read that kids that are going to Ivy League colleges have never read a book. You know, and so [00:26:00] that's my concern is, you know, are there other sneakier ways that we can get this information out to them? Well, I think doing the podcast help it, you know, getting bits out, but.
You have any thoughts on that?
I mean, I also run an Instagram that's just how to raise a citizen and it is like, you know, 30 to 90 second clips on this, but I'll tell you, I think that's something that we're all sort of dealing with. No one gets a PhD to go make 30 second videos. No one does that. You know, part of the job that we're doing is like, Ooh, someday I'm going to write a book and it's going to matter in this way.
But yeah, we are. Facing hurdles, which are like people aren't reading books or even when we think about like the time of a TED talk, I was talking with the people who run those a few months ago and they were like, look, we used to have them 16 to 18 minutes and now we like to cut them off around eight because we know on YouTube that's when people stop reading.
like watching. And so we do have this like attention span challenge, which is kind of universal. And so yes it's do all the above. It's get it to them anyway. And that's why I [00:27:00] think, you know, we're seeing in this sort of election cycle and what we'll see in the future is people saying, you know what, we have to have some influencers talk about these things.
We have to make sure there's some people who are saying register to vote who are in non traditional spaces because we know that we can't reach everyone. with books or with traditional newspapers because they just don't read them all the time.
Well, you know, you mentioned extracurricular activities, debate clubs student government enhancing that. maybe that's a great place where the kids could post their own Instagram stuff and to be able to expand and explain a little bit about why that's important.
Sure. So, you know, these are ways where kids can develop what advocacy looks like, and it's you know, low stakes, but sometimes it feels high stakes for them. They're competing or they're trying to like get everyone to agree with them so they can pass something in student government or whatnot.
And, the idea that like we try to Instagram those or make sure that other people can see that I don't dislike that idea and I know that in sort of the ecosystem that I'm in online there are like civics clubs who really do try to do like cute things online [00:28:00] they'll have like giveaways or they'll say like if you come here we're gonna have like cookies and pizza and so I know that people who want to get into this are trying and it's just like there's a lot of different threads and so no one's ever going to see the same stuff but it's not for lack of trying.
Well, I think it's a very great endeavor. It's something that, that we truly need. And I'm just disappointed because of my experience in working with very high poverty schools. That there are things that I know that the parents are working hard, they're doing the best that they can just keeping their families together.
Many of them were migrants, and I just know they don't have the capacity to do this to be able to share that with their kids. And that's who I worry about when we can't depend on the school. Because we've always depended on the school to be able to. Help create good citizens, educated citizens.
Yeah, I think that's right. And part of it is we sort of have a deprioritization that's not just, you know, we don't have a lot of curricular [00:29:00] time. When we also look at the money that's spent on this in K through 12, for every 50 that goes to STEM, only five cents goes to civics. And so like, that's quite a stark imbalance.
And, you know, yes, we want our kids to code and be able to do math and engineering is nice and so is science. But if they can't understand the systems that they're graduating into, it's not going to feel good. And you're totally right to point out that, like, places where there's higher levels of immigrants are places where there's poverty indicators that are higher than everywhere else.
This is some of the most challenging environments to get this work done. Something that I like about New York city is we do have a civics for all curriculum here where K through 12, you're going to get this. And this last year I got to go to the East Bronx Academy, which sits in, you know, a school population that has a lot of English as your second language.
There's plenty of students who are going to be going home to families that are having a hard time affording living in New York city. And there was a concerted effort to say like, Hey, Let's get these kids together to do action civics, which is like go find something in your community that you wish [00:30:00] was better and figure out what's the process by which you would fix that.
These are excellent things that we can do in schools and they are, you know, one off things, but it does really let people interact with systems in a way where like they can see, Oh yeah, there are ways to change. And I'm a part of that. It's not just a history that I'm a spectator in. I'm a participant here too.
Well, I know that you talk about STEM and you work at at an engineering university, right? Okay. And so I hadn't thought about till this minute. So if you think this is a good idea, here's what I always tell people when I share my ideas. If you like it, then you smile and say, Gene, I like that idea.
And if you don't like it, just smile. So, here is the idea as you're talking about STEM, money for STEM, because you have STEM programs, you have project based learning programs, and I don't know if it's in your book or I heard you say it someplace else, that in your university where you have mostly engineering students, or I don't know if you said mostly engineering, but not political science students, you ask them, [00:31:00] you know, how is government affecting your life?
How is your PEC? I could see that as a question for a STEM project or a project based learning project that you don't have to have a formal curriculum per se, but it's just kind of this ancillary thing that they do that's part of their project proposal. And I don't know of a school that's not doing some sort of STEM, or.
project based or something like that. Even, how about in the arts? That would be another, that would be another place. how could you be involved? So, you're going to smile or you're going to say smile or you say,
Jean, I like that idea. And I will tell you, you know, something that I do with my students in my intro class is when it's not an election year, they have like a very open ended final project. And I asked them, find a place where politics and government overlaps with your life and let's research it and figure out something there that you can share with the rest of us.
Because a lot of times they'll come in and they'll be like, [00:32:00] You know, I'm in a discipline that's a meritocracy. There isn't really politics that affects us. It's whoever's better at the math, whoever's better at the computer coding gets
And I tell them, well, that's not true. And even if that were true, you all go on to make systems like Google and meta and you know, all sorts of technologies that change the way our politics happen.
So you owe it to us to understand it a little bit. Like you kind of should understand the underlying basics. And they do mostly get that. By the end of the 16 weeks, they're like, Okay yeah, government's and everything's political. And I just level with them. I'm like, look, politics is gonna happen to you whether you like it or not.
So you might as well know a little bit more about the process so you can get the outcomes that you like or at least can live with.
To live with. You said something, I think I was listening to you on another podcast and you were talking about one of the benefits of this knowledge of our politics and government is not having to be so stressed about decisions and outcomes because you can anticipate it.
Yeah, so much. I [00:33:00] remember, you know, when we were having Donald Trump impeachment, talk for a long time. I think it was like nine weeks it was in the news. And I kept saying, guys, unless the Senate is overwhelmingly controlled by Democrats, this is not happening. Like this is, we're going to go through this political theater, but I'm like, not afraid that we're going to have a President Mike Pence because someone's impeached and forced to leave office.
And it's also something I remember when like the Dobbs decision came down and I had people were like, can you believe it? Roe v. Wade got overturned. I was like, yeah, I can believe it. There's, Six justices who would be okay with that. Like I'm not stressed about, I mean, you could be stressed about the outcome, but it's not something that's like outrageous.
And I think I moved through my political world in a very peaceful way because it is you know, how many votes do we have on each side of the aisle? What are the anticipated outcomes? If this person's appointed or not. versus being like bewildered by things and I think that ability to be bewildered or even misinformed is just greater if you don't know as much.
If you know more, you can't get that bothered because you anticipate it correctly or at least mostly accurately.[00:34:00]
Yeah. Lindsay, is there anything that you would like to leave our listeners with?
The only thing that I like to leave people with is the notion that they can do this because I think we have to. Like when we're raising our kids, I like to think about us as raising a child. athletes, not spectators in politics, because we all are sort of participating. And if you were trying to raise a good athlete in whatever sport it would be, you would say, here's the rules.
Let's do some training. Let's do some conditioning exercises. That way you can play better. The same thing is true for politics and government. Learn the rules, practice, figure things out, talk it through. And that way by the time that they're adults capable of doing this, they have a good push to get it done in a better way than we've been doing it.
wow. Dr. Lindsay Cormack, her new book, How to Raise a Citizen and Why It's Up to You to Do It. Thank you so much. And it has been a pleasure, Lindsay.
Thank you. This has been really nice. If you are enjoying these podcasts, please [00:35:00] give us a five star rating on Apple Podcasts, and you can find me on Twitter, x at G Tabernetti, and on my website, tesscg. com, that's T E S S C G dot com, where you'll get information about how to order my books, teach fast, focused, adaptable, structured teaching, and maximizing the impact of coaching cycles.
Thank you for listening. We'll talk to you soon