What are the Issues?

• Instructional Objectives: Students will identify what is an issue, what issues affect their area, and what are the most important issues for them.
• Time Required: one hour
• Advance Preparation:  Students should bring in newspapers and a dictionary. Teacher should have paper cut up in small pieces for voting.
• Materials / Resources Required: New York Times, Daily News, New York Post, Newsday. (You can find online versions of some of these newspapers at:  New York Newspapers, http://www.floridalink.com/links/newyork.htm or at AJR NewsLink New York Newspapers,  http://ajr.newslink.org/nynews.html ) These can be paper version or online edition,  although the paper version has more articles
• Vocabulary: issue, platform, election, tally, percentage
•  Concepts, Focus Questions (and responses), Generalizations, Key Points: General issues that affect students are education, money for after school programs, abortion, neighborhood parks. Students must understand that issues are problems that people in the community discuss or affect a significant part of the population in the community.
• Procedures:  
  1. Define at least 5 problems that affect the neighborhood.
  2. Make a list of student responses on the board. (Should be at least 15)
  3. Define the word issue with the class.
  4. Discuss what problems from the list of their responses are issues.
  5. Define with the class what are the 4 most important issues that affect them and their families.
  6. Hold a class vote on the order of importance of the issues. The vote should include: Gender, the four issues defined by the class in no particular order. Students should put a number from one to four next to each of the issues.
  7. Tally the results by percents. Find out how many females chose each issue. Find out the same for males.
  8. Discuss if any issues ran down a particular gender line or if there was no difference. What issues do you think would run different for a particular gender and why?
• Activities:  Students can be given 5 to 10 minutes to look at the online/paper newspapers to help determine issues that affect their communities. Student lists should be made individually, but class discussions should be open. Monitors could be set up to keep track of time on discussions. Students vote on the most important issues.
• Extensions or Follow-up: As a do now for the next class, compare the class results versus what the surveyed adults responded and find out if the issues where the same or different. Discuss why or why not. If you are working in a computer lab, you may have students go to http://ontheissues.org/default.htm and have students take one of the quizzes to determine which candidate shares most of their views. It is a fun exercise for students to do and many times are surprised by the outcome.
• Homework: Survey 10 adults and find out what are the most important issues for them.

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