<p>This is not really a problem…yet…but I wondered if others have experienced this.</p>
<p>My son’s AP Government teacher gives them info (generally through emails) about opportunities to be active in local government, which is a great thing for students, in my opinion. What I just realized, however, is he exclusively sends announcements of “conservative” or Republican events. </p>
<p>He obviously has a bias, and I hope this doesn’t translate into lower grades for kids who express a “liberal” opinion on essays and so forth.</p>
<p>I would think he would be happy to see student involvement of any kind. Your opinions or experiences?</p>
<p>^^ My opinion and experience is that these types of threads can quickly degenerate into heated political discussions like the ones on the politics subforum. I hope we can avoid that :)</p>
<p>As for your query, I guess I’d advise my daughter to be as diplomatic as possible in her essays and opinions (assuming she’s a liberal). Good luck!</p>
<p>My daughter had a similar situation, although in reverse. She is a conservative and he is very liberal and made similar offerings and suggestions as in your child’s class. However, the teacher was liberal in the most elevated sense of the word and was so open to other opinions that he actually allowed her to run the class one day and present information. Gave her a respectful listen, disagreed with some, agreed with some and actually learned some new things from her that helped nuance his position on the particular issue. It was a great learning experience for her and the class about what education should be.</p>
<p>Perhaps your son can ask friends who’ve had this teacher whether political leanings become an issue in class?</p>
<p>It’s more likely, though, that the teacher only sends out conservative opportunities because those are the ones of which he becomes aware. He wouldn’t be on the mailing lists of liberal organizations. And the reason I think this is the more likely scenario is because you haven’t mentioned that the teacher has a reputation for punishing students who disagree with his political leanings. Unless he’s a brand new teacher, such a reputation would have sprouted quickly. I don’t know about your kid’s high school, but in my kid’s, everyone would know about it in 37 seconds flat!</p>
<p>I’ve had a fair mix of liberal and conservative teachers at school – 99% of them became Government and PoliSci teachers/professors because they have a genuine love of government. So when they see any kid 18-25 interested and active in the political process they encouraged debate because the widest range of ideas in their opinion often yeilds the best solutions. I only had one teacher who graded based on their approval of the opinions of students, and it wasn’t in college.</p>
<p>But it sounds like, if this teacher is encouraging them to get involved in local government (even just conservative events), that your son should be fine.</p>
<p>If you know of liberal political opportunities, tell the teacher and ask him to send those out, too. I’m guessing he’s sending out the GOP ones because the GOP is sending them to him. You also can ask the Democrats and other political organizations to let the teacher know of things his students could volunteer with.</p>
<p>My D has a Contemporary Political Issues class with a teacher who is VERY conservative (actually more on the libertarian side). He’s put forth some rather whacked-out government conspiracy views, IMO. My D is generally pretty middle of the road and if anything trends conservative, but is still more liberal than him on quite a few issues. However, there appears to be no evidence that he is grading based on political philosophies, so there’s really nothing to do (or that should be done). I think it only becomes problematic if there is evidence that one’s politics are affecting the grade received.</p>
<p>I agree–we don’t want to argue politics here, and I didn’t mean to imply I disagree with everything the teacher draws our attention to. Like most people, our family is a mix of “liberal” and “conservative”–depending on if you are talking finance, religion, healthcare reform, the constitution, criminal law, or whatever!</p>
<p>Maybe I will send along some Dem event info, if I see any (now that the election is past, Dems are rather quiet. It is the people hoping for change over the next 2-4 years who are agitating.)</p>
<p>Two of my kids had an extremely liberal AP Govt. teacher. DD had to do a debate in his class on affirmative action. She was assigned the opposed side and, trust me, she was a kid who could win any argument. So she did a great job and the opponent was being vanquished, and the teacher jumped in and started arguing with her. She turned to him and said, “Mr. XXX, you don’t get to argue here. You are not part of this debate.” He sheepishly backed down.</p>
<p>Well, I’d probably take a different approach. I think I would complain to the administration. Tell them you are concerned that your child’s grade could suffer if you approach the teacher directly, but that you are uncomfortable that he is presenting a one-sided set of opportunities to the kids. He works for those administrators – their job is to provide feedback. Assuming you see nothing wrong with the general idea of him pushing the kids to be politically active, suggest to the administration that he should provide equal info for both major political parties & candidates in a given race, and maybe even help them focus on local races (eg, school board, sheriff, community council, etc.) that may not even have party endorsements.</p>
<p>Our HS AP Govt and History teacher made me crazy! Was so ridiculously skewed to one side of the political equation. Made terrible comments to the students. Huge ego involved. My favorite was when he tried to discourage the kids from taking dual enrollment CC instead of AP by telling them that CC kids just do that so they can leave early and go get stoned at the beach. (Hmm…maybe he was having a personal flashback there??)
Generally speaking at our school anyway the teachers who get the AP classes are total brown nosers who are in with the administration so complaining does no good and probably makes your kids grade suffer.</p>
<p>Teacher most likely does not have info about events on other side. Anyway, is attendance taken, do they have to write about events, are they escorted to them? If not, who can force anybody to be there? Anyway, your kid is lucky, most of the time schools invite speakers exclusively on ultra liberal side. That is true about college, I am glad that my D is not in one of them and generally stays away from political discussions.</p>
<p>The internet is a great equalizer, MiamiDAP, when it comes to info. Our state parties respectively have websites that tell about various activities coming up; the teacher could send links all the party’s websites/calendars. And almost any candidate has a website these days; what is stopping the teacher from sending links to all candidates sites for an upcoming race, and suggesting that students get involved?</p>
<p>The internet is available to students as well as teacher. I do not see any point to send any link. I assume that teacher is prbly is planning to be at some events that he recommends and that is the reason for his communication. Info is there on internet, TV, Radio,…</p>
<p>Last week the teacher sent out an announcement of an event put on by a Dem. representative. :)</p>
<p>This supports my theory that most of the events at this time of the election cycle just happened to be Republican (or “conservative”)–he was not deliberately selecting them.</p>
<p>My 7th grade son was given a group assignment for Language Arts during the last election cycle. They had to pick either of the major candidates and write a platform summary and do a protagonist poster for the candidate as a campaign banner. </p>
<p>He was “put” in a group (due to him arriving late from his HS classes) that had already decided to do the candidate opposed to our political views. Adding insult to injury, he ended up being the only person to do any of the work. Needless to say, once the poster and paper were done, it was very difficult to tell who it was supposed to be “for”. </p>
<p>I had requested that he be allowed to do his own project in lieu of the “group” project as he didn’t feel comfortable doing a propaganda piece for the opposition and also since he was doing all of the work anyways. Of course I was denied since it was supposed to be a group project and the group was allowed to “choose”. It was very clear which way the teacher’s political affiliations swung. I thus informed her, I would not be allowing my son to do any free campaigning for her candidate.</p>
<p>He did the assigment but he ended up picking some very innane features of the candidate to feature on the poster such as “he has a pulse”, “he looks good in a suit”. It ended up being a very funny piece of political satire. The teacher got the point and didn’t dare fail him though we were prepared for it. We would have gladly taken it to the school board.</p>
<p>My thing was, why they were doing this in language arts in the first place and additionally why make something as personal as politics a “group” project?</p>
<p>This is the biggest pet peeve I have regarding our high school. Not only do we have an ultra-liberal history professor (He actually announced to the class that he was moving to New Zealand because George Bush won the 2004 election, so he’s gone), a buddhist English teacher who makes the kids write papers defending Christianity, and a health teacher who decries the evils of eating meat.</p>
<p>I consider myself a liberal, but this history teacher went too far. They held a mock election in class. When my son went up to hand in his ballot, the teacher read it and said, “ToledoSon, I am so disappointed in you. I thought you knew better.” Son had voted for Bush (my husband’s influence). Commenting on his ballot was so wrong! </p>
<p>Parents complain to administration all the time, but nothing seems to change.</p>