Fun with the Presidential Debates

I watched the Vice Presidential debate last night with our elementary and junior high school aged children. Our oldest was given some handouts to help him follow the debate. He used a vice presidential debate scorecard to rank Biden and Palin on numerous categories. They have a presidential debate scorecard posted, as well. We spent a few minutes before the debate started discussing some of the terms on the scorecard, such as “gaffes” and “appeal to party base”.

I also gave him a list (to jog his memory) of some of the fallacies we have been studying this year in The Fallacy Detective. He has learned a lot this year about Red Herrings, Faulty Appeal to Authority, Appeal to the People (Bandwagon), Ad Hominem (personal attacks), and False Dilemmas. I printed out a handout which summarizes some of these fallacies, and we intend to talk about it this afternoon. It was harder than we thought it would be to spot these things at the time, but going back over some hastily jotted notes has been helpful.

We were able to easily spot some Red Herrings (changing the subject), some personal attacks (against the presidential candidates, typically), Appeal to authority (when talking about the War in Afghanistan), Appeal to Force (again, on the War in Iraq and on the economic issues), and many hasty generalizations.

The friend who directed me to all of these sites holds a Debate Party during every presidential campaign. They print out finger puppets of the candidates to use during the debates. She also directed me to a site with bingo boards, where children can compete to find commonly used words and phrases, such as “Main Street”, “Maverick” and “Terrorist”. We didn’t use the cards last night, as we had enough to keep track of with the score card and fallacy detecting, but I am filing that away for future reference! I haven’t used the other resource ideas she sent me, but they look great. There was a Teacher’s Guide filled with classroom ideas and applications as well as a link to Student News Daily, an online news source for high school students.

My favorite part of the debate was discussing issues with our very young elementary school aged son. He is so thoughtful, and keeps us always on our toes! He repeatedly asked questions like “What do you think about taxes, mom?” and “How do you feel about abortion? I think it is evil. How do these candidates feel about abortion? Why would anyone kill a baby, anyway?”

He wanted to know what they meant when referring to our current financial crisis. When I explained it to him he said, “That’s a bummer. When we learned about the Great Depression last year I thought to myself, ‘Wow. I’m glad I wasn’t alive back then!'” I told him that hopefully crisis will be averted. He astutely said that our country’s financial future would probably be uncertain until after the election on November 4th.