Monday, October 30, 2006
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82 votes thus far for Youth Leadership. Let's get to 1000.
Notice how Arnold Schwarzeneger constantly uses green in his campaign. Green
in the campaign posters, green in his commercials - perhaps he's reaching out to Peter Camejo and
his Green Party, hoping for the majority in his re-election that President Clinton lacked in 1996
because of 3rd Party candidate Ross Perot and Ralph Nader.
Good website to keep track of the 2006 Elections:
Will Harold Ford be the first black Senator in the South since Reconstruction? Will Democrat Menendez lose in New
Jersey because of the recent gay marriage ruling?
It looks likely that we will have a divided government with a Senate that will either be split 50-50
or with a slim Republican majority. Even if "incumbent" Joe Lieberman will beat Democratic candidate
Ned Lamont, Lieberman has made clear that he will caucus with the party that abandoned him (and the party
that he abandoned) if he is re-elected.
Despite President Bush's last-minute campaign stops, more than likely, the Democrats will take over the House and it
will be Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House - two deaths away from the Presidency of the United States!!!
(shocked by "Don't Vote" Campaign by the AARP - are they encouraging the youth of American NOT to vote????)
Take the test:
www.dontvote.org - YOU MUST TAKE THIS TEST! Self-report your results in my guestbook survey. I will have a rather extensive guestbook
entry that will be mandatory to sign for points. What do you think about the AARP funding a commercial to
not vote??? Are they deliberately trying to challenge yo
My results:
You scored 350 out of 350 possible points, or 100.00%
A+Not only should you vote, you should consider a career in politics.There were a couple of individuals that I couldn't recognize, but I was able to find the answer based on the process of elimination.
Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and Ken Mehlman, chairman of the
Republican National Committee are battling for control of the House and the Senate for teh respective parties.
Should the Republicans lose control of the House, it really is not big news as Presidents tend to lose control
of either the House or Senate in off-years elections, with the election of 2002 being a notable exception.
Heath Shuler, Democratic candidate for the House of Representatives, is running against
Republican Charles Taylor. Taylor is running negative ads against Shuler trying to identify him
with liberal Nancy Pelosi. Democrats also have to fight the "wussy factor" -- Shuler owns guns,
loves faith, and defends the sanctity of marriage, and is pro-life --- hmmm...... sounds ery Republican, no?
Have Democrats lost their mojo? Heath Shuler needs 11th District Democrats to come home. Is it possible
for a Democrat to be conservative at all?
Michael Dukakis, military leader? Riding a tank in the election of 1988? It doesn't
work for Democrats as they've largely ceded the issue of national security issue to Republicans.
George McGovern, Democratic candidate in 1972 was a distinguished war hero yet he is known as being
a "dove" not a "hawk."
Interest Groups & Think Tanks Link:
News Media:
These links will be helpful should I assign something that requires you to do some online research. (Special thanks to
Professor Jack Pitney of Claremont McKenna College for organizing these web sites)
11:26 pm pst
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
On Park's Presidential Peculiarities
I've always been fascinated by Presidents.
When my brother was a Junior taking AP US History, I was in 5th grade. Mr. Bohannon would require that all his
students memorize all the Presidents in order along with political party. For some odd reason, I memorized the list
as well. 5 years later when I took that same US History class, memorizing the Presidents in order and their political
parties was fairly easy.
When I was in 4th grade, I remember closely watching the electoral returns from the 1988 Presidential Elections
between George H.W. Bush/Dan Quayle and Michael Dukakis/Lloyd Bentsen. For some reason, I held to the belief
that all good Christians must be Republican, and so I must be Republican. So when most 4th graders were watching cartoons
and other such non-political stuff, I was carefully watching the news as the polls were closing. Quite odd behavior
for an elementary school-aged child, but such an incident, in retrospect, is not strange behavior for an AP Government instructor.
In 1991, I was in 7th grade. By then, my knowledge of politics was more sophisticated than my 4th grade counterpart,
and my interest in politics expanded to primaries and caucuses rather than simply the general election.
In fact, I was such a political geek that I exchanged remember sending mail to a girl using the pseudoynm "Paul Danny Clinton
Tsongas," or some strange amalgam of Democratic political candidates. While I was not a Democrat at the time, the Republican
primaries was not at all exciting, so my attention was who the Democrats would select to face Bush in '92.
I'd like to think I have a pretty Bill Clinton impersonation, but back in 7th
grade I was prouder of my Paul Tsongas impersonation.
By 1996, I was confused what to think politically. I was a Senior in high school, and I had pretty good internal
efficacy. I learned a lot of US History and I devoured the text in my AP Government class, but I couldn't figure
out if I would have voted for Bill Clinton/Al Gore or Bob Dole/Jack Kemp. (I was 17 and a non-citizen during
the 1996 presidential election.) At the time, I made the conclusion that I would have voted for Clinton for the 3 following
reasons:
1) Clinton was a better "leader" than Dole.
2) The economy was doing well, or so the "pocketbook voter" would claim
3) I enjoyed Phil Hartman's SNL Bill Clinton
By the election of 2000, my political philosophies had pretty much taken shape. Most college students tend to become
more liberal during college; my situation was different probably because I attended one of the most conservative colleges
in California, Claremont McKenna College. I was in the nation's capital in 1999 and I remember watching,
with great interest -- I must add, the 1999 Republican primary debates with George W. Bush, John McCain, Alan Keyes,
Steve Forbes and my favorite Gary Bauer. One presidential highlight (besides asking Reform Party candidate
Pat Buchanan a question live on C-Span) was when I covered an NPR Gary Bauer event, shook the man's hand and wrote an executive
summary about his socially conseravative and economically conservative views about abortion and a flat tax.
Anyhow, today I mainly watch as an interested outsider, more with the perspective as a teacher rather than an enthused
political activist. The George W. Bush/Dick Cheney and John Kerry/John Edwards Presidential Election of 2004
was mainly interesting to me from an SNL debate perspective. Howard Dean and his "BYAHH" certainly
were certainly entertaining, and I suppose I'm able to synthesize what's going on a lot more because of my somewhat unique
experience in presidential politics.
That is all.
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
How to get an A in Mr. Park's class.
Posted pictures of students building internal efficacy and perhaps trusting in external efficacy
Posted Unit 2 Review PowerPoint -- this is NOT enough to get an A on my essay/multiple-choice exam. It's merely a guide as
to what you need to study. I assigned about 120 textbook pages, along with 20+ pages of reading and my lectures (that's a
lot of information). My general thought is that you need a good 10 hours of reading to soak in the material, and another
good 10 hours of reviewing to understand the materials clearly. Roughly, that breaks down to an hour a day. Some can accomplish
this within one day, or the night before. Some clearly cannot. Some can cram 120 pages worth of AP Government into one's
head in a span of 5 hours. Most cannot.
What may seem patently unfair is that some individuals are more predisposed than other individuals at mastering AP Government
concepts. While it's possible to do well, the opportunity cost of trying to get an A is simply too high. Some may
be happy with a B and don't want to really read everything that's assigned. That's well and fine. It's just my philosophy
as an AP instructor that if you get an A in my class, then I've prepared you to get a shot at a 5, or at least a 4, with a
sampling error of +3%.
Going to a political rally or helping out a campaign or working at the polls are clearly ways at not only increasing your
internal efficacy but also fulfilling your civic duty in my class and also as a proud American. Whether
you are a Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Green Partyite,
or the all-popular "Independent," I do want you to get involved in American politics. While rules do favor a "two-party"
system, there's always room for minor parties. Ideological, factional, economic-protest, one-issue parties - you name
it! Now we all know that factional parties pose the greatest threat to the two-party system. Teddy Roosevelt and his
Bull Moose Progressives split the Republican vote and put the Democrats into the White House in 1913.
Democrats, by the way, use superdelegates; Republicans do not.
Okay, as far as this test goes, I have one actual AP Question from the 2004 AP exam. You can go to apcentral.collegeboard.com
-- or something like that (google it) to find out what particular question I'm using. It should be obvious given the topics
that we're covering in class. I'll have a question for each chapter. I'll be giving you a Chapter 6 Question for you to
do if you want, so Chapter 4,5,7 are the ones you need to study for on your own.
As for the multiple choice, I'm pulling out of varioius AP books, test-bank books, my own questions, so I can't really give
you the best idea of what's in there other than that I put mostly conceptual ideas rather than factual ideas on the exam although
I do have a propensity for putting items on the test that refer to 3rd party figures (ie. Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, Ralph
Nader). I tend not to question you on older, historical stuff or things I don't clearly explain in class. I am, however,
leaning towards a Presidential Election Memory Test from 1960 - 2004... I'm also leaning on having groups perform "mock debate"
skits as a way to review the important points of each election. Also, be ready for your 4 page paper assignment starting Day
1 of the 2nd Grading Period!
Hmmm.... I'm thinking it's already 1/3 of the way through the end of the semester. We've still got a bunch to cover, but
I'm somewhat satisfied with the class format thus far. I sense that there are some complaints regarding my lack of lectures,
but it's simply that there's too much information to cover for me to put on PowerPoint and inefficient as well. My expectation
is that you are reading the material, even though I don't remind you to read the book in class. That's the norm in
college; the professor is not going to give a lick if you've read or not. It's assumed that you do. In fact, one of my favorite
history classes at Berkeley required me to read 10 different books, including my text book, and Prof. Litwack's lecture had
absolutely no correlation with one's overall grade. At first, my Whitney High School-test-taking-trained mind rebelled at
the idea that I was learning things I wasn't going to be tested on in a multiple-choice format, but I began to appreciate
sitting through a liberal lecture with 1000 students and seeing one perspective of post-Civil War US History. I also
liked the idea of being able to sleep in whenever I wanted to and not attending lecture. I paid for the right not to go to
class!
Anyhow, this is quite a long rant on my part and I've tried to weave in some key terms from the book as well as some college
tips. I'm not quite sure who reads this but I think I have approximately 10-25% (~8-10 people) of 1st period as devoted readers
to my site. To give you a brief history of this site, I originally started www.geocities.com/coachjpark for my JV baseball
kids, and then it morphed into a class website. Sure, I can go Blackboard, but I'm willing to pay a price to be able to have
my freedom to blog what I want and structure my site how I want.
That's all for now.
12:31 am pdt
Saturday, October 7, 2006
Schwarzenegger vs. Angelides
Caught the tail end of the Schwarzenegger Debate. Here are some of my thoughts.
At the end of the debate, candidates
asked each other a question. Schwarzenegger started with the first question, which I thought was interesting because A) it
would give Schwarzenegger the last word, and B) it gave Schwarzenegger the chance to define that part of the session.
So,
what does the Terminator ask? "What was the funniest moment in your campaign?" Schwarzenegger, the incumbent with the comfortable
lead, asks a Mickey Mouse question to Mr. Angelides.
The Democratic candidate, the state Treasurer who lacks both
the Governor's charisma, asks a convoluted question about why the Governor signed a bill that would get rid of police officer
pensions and what he would say to this one lady who was the wife of the police officer and why Schwarzenegger broke promises
and how he would address police officer pensions and then how he would proceed to sorta address this pension issue.
To
which Schwarzenegger responds, "My father was a police officer...."
So who won the debate?
Probably a draw,
but unless Schwarzenegger made a big blunder there was no way for Angelides to win this thing. He unsuccessfully tried to
bring Bush into the debate, but California voters know that Schwarzenegger is not the partisan figure that Bush is.
Schwarzegger
is a moderate Republican... he's liberal (relative to most Republicans) and he's moderate on economic issues. He's
conservative enough on economic issues for Republicans to support him, but Schwarzenegger is clearly not strongly supported
by the Religious Right.
Disappointing Dodgers... come back from a 4-0 deficit to a 5-4 lead and then give it right back... 7-5 Mets... let's pull
it out, Dodgers!
7:50 pm pdt
