Empowering Students Through Government by Spencer

Empowering Students Through Government by Spencer - October 2016 Scholarship Essay

My day would start about as conventional as any other high school teacher: my several alarms would ring simultaneously at precisely five o’clock. I would absolutely have to leave the house by six in order to be at the school by seven to receive the students. As I would go over the last few Constitution free response questions from the night before, I would practically pass out from exhaustion and fall face-first into my own bowl of cereal. Let’s just say I’m sick of reading about the merits of Article 1 Section 2.

It takes a lot of hard work and perseverance to be a teacher. It is a foregone conclusion that instructors must love what they do and truly believe that what they teach truly makes a difference in the world. For me, that is government and politics. Without the slightest doubt or hesitation, without a single thought or consideration, and within the same exhaling breath as the inhaling question, that would be my answer. There really isn’t anything like it in all the fields of study. The policies of our government, the way society functions, interacts with the law, could quite possibly change tomorrow or decades from now. The natural sciences, math, even history stay the same and only expand in what they cover, what they teach students. A study of government teaches students the power of a fluctuating curriculum, to adapt to different situations, to think outside the box on a variety of issues. It also combines multiple disciplines to accomplish its goals and every other subject has to interact with it on some level.

Obviously, the history and social sciences are more closely related to it, but science and math are also factors in the study of the government. For example, how do you think press secretaries have been able to so accurately predict how the public will react to certain statements? Through the use of psychological tactics, where natural science meets social science, they can convince the public of practically anything. In addition, on issues involving science such as pharmaceutical morality and climate change, representatives must be able to interact with leading scientists behind such causes and be able to engage in meaningful conversations with them. On the other hand, mathematics plays a role in economic analysis, where math meets social science, so that the government can make important monetary decisions for their constituents. In addition, representatives must be able to work with local and national business interests on matters of both local and national economy.

It takes a lot of hard work and perseverance to be a teacher of such a subject. The weight that one must carry to give students such powers of analysis, reasoning, and opinion are arguably the most burdensome of all. Simply being a teacher is hard enough. If you think about it, they rise every morning with the pre-conceived expectation that they will teach the exact same lecture at selected intervals throughout the day, breaking for lunch only to have questioning students track them down like bloodhounds to the kill. Returning home, their goal, as it is every night at home, is to grade tests and papers and lab reports with the same objective accuracy as robotic scantrons. But a government teacher doesn’t have that same flexibility. Every lecture is different because every student has their own opinions in which they believe passionately. In a government classroom, students will argue their core beliefs as though their lives depended on it. And while students of government are still like bloodhounds to the kill, their powers of argumentative curiosity are not pacified with a simple yes or no. The tests and papers cannot simply be analyzed objectively- it’s just not possible. Everything is subjective and there is no right or wrong, the issues covered aren’t always black or white, for government is a class of and not or. That is why I love it, that is why I would teach it, and that is why I live by it every single day.