Casting My Primary Vote in Washington State from Abu Dhabi

As a government teacher, I have spent many a class period explaining the intricacies of the party nomination process and the Electoral College to young people: safe states, swing states, the 23rd amendment (look it up), proportional representation versus winner-take-all, why Iowa & New Hampshire go first (no, there’s no good reason), Super Delegates, contested conventions, etc. This school year, as a government teacher overseas, the number of questions I been asked has grown exponentially. Many of my students are not US citizens and have only a cursory understanding of the US system. Others are citizens, but their parents have worked or been stationed overseas their entire lives. 

One day in class, we had a discussion about the Electoral College and a student asked “why don’t people living abroad get Electoral votes? There’s more of us than there are North or South Dakotans.” The correct answer to my student’s question is that people living abroad are supposed to vote in their home states, under their state’s laws, which vary widely. After explaining that however, it occurred to me that I had no idea how many US citizens lived abroad. So we paused class and did a quick deep dive, (I love moments of spontaneous learning). We learned that according to the State Department, nine million US citizens live abroad. To put than in context, that is more people than the population of any of the states that had a primary before Super Tuesday. If Americans abroad were a state, they’d be the tenth most populace state — slotting in between New Jersey and Michigan. 

We also found out that although folks living abroad don’t get electoral votes, they do host their own primaries and are allocated delegates at the National Conventions.

Fast forward to today: I got a text from my wife asking “Do you want to leave work at 4pm or do your want to go to the library and vote?” Our school is a polling place for the Democrats Abroad Global Primary. As you may know, I have been following the elections back home closely but had not actually cast my ballot yet. I always try to hold on to my ballot, just in case my preferred candidate does something crazy like drop out after Super Tuesday. I am registered to vote in Washington State, but as an American living overseas, I have a choice of voting in my homestate or in the Democrats Abroad Primary where 21 delegates are up for grabs, (but not in both). So we downloaded, printed, filled out, and submitted our ballots to the Pierce County Auditor electronically this afternoon in about 10 minutes and thanked the folks from Democrats Abroad on our way out of school. 

Some timely reminders:

• Ballots in Washington State are due Tuesday. If you reading this back home get your ballot in — we vote by mail — there’s no excuse.

• If you are live abroad and are reading this you also have until Tuesday to cast a ballot in the Global Primary. 

• If you have friends and family living abroad, give them a nudge and make sure they cast a ballot. 

Events in the US are too dire and tumultuous for a group of citizens the size of four West Virginias or sixteen Wyomings to sit on the sidelines.

A Shanghai Travelogue: On the Merits of Dumplings, Debate, and Democracy

I have history with Zhōngguó, the Middle Kingdom, enough so that when word got out last winter we were departing the states, many people assumed we were China-bound. In 2018, we hosted two Chinese exchange students: Bob and Wong. I got a dose of being a dad for a moment; it cemented for me that I’m not cut out for parenthood. In the summers of 2014 and 2015, on the invitation from a visiting professor, we went to Chengdu in Sichuan Province to teach Chinese students in a summer program. I taught a blend of US history, American college culture and knowledge, and some theater. Each time before we began our teaching, we flew into a different city and traveled overland for three weeks. We spent time in Beijing, Xi’an, Hong Kong, and Macau. 

After our second trip to China in 2015, my school hosted a visit from President Xi and I hosted him for a lecture in my Government class. He spoke to my students via a translator -- it was surreal. If you think an urban high school is a stressful place, toss a phalanx of armed Chinese and US Secret Service into the mix. I’ve opined on that experience previously, but I continue to be struck by a line in his talk: “If you want to time travel, go to China. Go to Xi’an and see the Terracotta Warriors to understand the world 1000 years ago. If you want to go 500 years in the past, go to Beijing and see the Dragon Throne and the Forbidden City. But if you want to see the future, go to Shanghai.” 

Last week I took up his offer and made my third trip to China. As chaperones, I and a colleague accompanied a travel team of thirteen students from our school’s Model United Nations Program to Concordia International School for their Model UN conference, heretofore, CISSMUN. For the unfamiliar, Model UN is the international school equivalent of US high school debate. Over three days students… rather delegates... researched and wrote resolutions on various topics that they presented to committees to be debated, amended, and voted up or down. At this conference, there were committees on human rights (HRC), world criminal justice (ICJ), global health (WHO), economic and social matters (ECOSOC), and disarmament. Students took on roles representing various states. The conference had over 1000 delegates, from over 75 schools all over African, Asia, and Oceania. It’s a fascinating environment, an ocean of pant-suits and blazers. It felt like the NFL combine for aspiring lawyers, diplomats, and NGO workers.

CISSMUN was hosted by Concordia, a Christian K-12 international school, in an expat enclave in the city. We took an overnight flight from Abu Dhabi and landed in Shanghai at ten am. Y’all, Downtown Shanghai is Blade Runner. At CISSMUN, students did homestays with local families (awesome), so I was relieved of the usual hotel bed checks in the evening (more awesome). In my off-time, I checked all the usual Nate boxes: small talk about politics, knife-cut noodles, beef noodle soup, Shanghai dumplings (xiaolongbao), and several wanders through unfamiliar neighborhoods while listening to podcasts.

I was struck by the nature of my students’ task and how they rose to the occasion; Model UN is an amazing way for students to learn about the world. Writing resolutions requires regional specific knowledge, an understanding of recent history and international law, and the ability to present your findings in an organized, compelling manner. I had several students in my delegation who are veterans of MUN, including several who chaired sessions and were main submitters of resolutions. I think it is such a smart way of preparing students for life in an increasingly complicated world. 

I especially appreciate the skill-set they are developing when contrasted to the HS debate experience. No shade or smoke to debate coaches out there, but Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson are champion debaters. In a debate, students are often competing, rather than cooperating and sophistry is rewarded because a person willing to lie or make stuff up has an innate advantage over a person making evidence-based arguments. In Model UN, students all have a laptop in front of them. They fact-check each other in real-time and will pounce on non-sense and resolutions lacking evidence. On day two I watched a student from Hong Kong, with an Australian accent, representing Argentina, demand specificity on a human trafficking resolution, while sipping a juice box -- like a boss.

China’s human rights record is notably complicated (and the fact my student from Pakistan was unable to obtain a visa was a frustration to me). But on this trip, I heard Chinese students talk about the importance of tolerance, defend religious freedom, and call for protection of human rights. They overtly addressed their country’s domestic politics. Like my American students and my students in the Emirates, they want to build a more just and equitable future for their states. I can mess with that.

Rethinking Social Studies for an Uncertain (Likely Dystopian) Future

With depressing regularity, since the start of the 2016 presidential campaign, I've felt a tug to blow-up large chunks of planned lessons¹ because of a morning indictment, Congressional hearing, or some norm-shattering tweet. On the days that I do, I set a timer for ten to fifteen minutes and we talk through the scandal du jour. In these moments, my students are always more engaged. They ask incredibly thoughtful questions and then groan loudly when my timer goes off to end our conversations. 

Each time I say to myself, this is how school is supposed to feel. 

No one asked me, but I believe that in teaching, particularly in Social Studies, we're overdue for a revolution in the skills and dispositions we seek to endow students with. I support the Common Core State Standards and C3 Framework, but you can drive a Kenworth Truck through the gaps they have and replicate in students' collective understanding. Standards are important, but standards are also why nearly every US 11th grader can explain the broad contours of the Industrial Revolution, but they're largely oblivious to the role of labor movements and government regulators in taming its greatest excesses. I think it's worth questioning aloud whether the current skills front and center in most Social Studies classrooms -- reading and note-taking, summarizing, answering multiple guess and short-responses -- will meet students' needs in an uncertain near-future. For the record, I believe the answer is "the hardest of nos."

I've opined previously about my leveraging of controversial police shootings and the lack of meaningful law enforcement oversight to engage students about civil liberties in my Government class. My classroom practice is imperfect, but I enjoy learning and thinking aloud. With that, here are some avenues I intend on pursuing this school year, an instructional to-do list:

Do a better job teaching media literacy. If I ever write a book, there will be a profanity-laced chapter detailing my experience visiting Istanbul last week, during the flare-up between the Turkish Military and the Kurds. Seeing events unfold first-hand was my 2,000th recent reminder that we have to do better with teaching students about navigating media.

Here's a recent example, below are two widely used graphics about media sources. One is imperfect, the other is arguably educational malpractice. If students are emerging from our classrooms believing that Vox and Breitbart are just "presenting opposing viewpoints" or worse "equally reliable," we're doing them a grave disservice in the name of "objectivity" and that's a terribly bad look.

Created by @vlotero, follow them on Twitter and use this

Never, ever let me see you put this in front of students

Emphasize the importance of local activism. Trump isn't why US cities are increasingly unaffordable to live in; he's not why people in Washington State can vote at home in their jammies, while black folks in Georgia stand in line for hours; the President isn't why low-income black and brown students attend increasingly segregated and decreasingly equipped and funded schools. These are outcomes of local governments. But how much time do we spend intentionally teaching about school boards, city councils, and state legislatures? Small groups of organized people, especially young people, can make a meaningful impact on local issues and campaigns. But they don't know that if we don't teach them and show them replicable local examples.

Modernize and contextualize teaching about the mid-twentieth century. The civil rights narrative you likely received in school was something like this: "the US was founded, there was slavery, it was bad. Then Lincoln freed the slaves and they were happy. But the South was still mean, but MLK came along and had a Dream and now we're all equal." Similarly, we essentialize World War II and the Holocaust: "Hitler was bad. He tried to exterminate European Jews, but the US Army won the war and freed them." We owe students better. Students need to understand the history of state repression in the US and the rise of fascism elsewhere. We need to mine recent history for lessons for today: Why was the civil rights movement successful? What are some unresolved civil rights issues? How can we apply our understanding of the civil rights movement to issues facing disabled people and the LGBQT+ population? Similarly with World War II: How did Hitler come to power? What institutional or societal checks failed and allowed his rise? How do we prevent violent authoritarianism in modern times? How can we effectively respond to modern fascist movements in the US and elsewhere?

I could go on². These are the kind of questions students should be grappling with and interrogating in class. 

Let's be real. Teaching Social Studies and living in 2019 is really weird. This historical moment demands more responsive models of teaching where we teach students about our complex world (our assigned task). But we also must teach them how to navigate what will certainly be an uncertain near-future (what they will really need). We're already leaving them with crumbling infrastructure, a warming planet, and mounting national debt. The least we can do is give students the skill-set necessary to navigate the (bleak) future we're leaving them.

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¹ I currently teach AP Government & Politics (college-level civics) and Global Studies (a survey of history, geography, and economics) at an International School 

² Actually, I did on a recent episode of my podcast

This post originally appeared on the blog of the National Network of the State Teachers of the Year