Mitch Silverberg's classroom at Pine School High School is a busy place. The walls are jammed with layers of maps, and more recently, with poster boards proclaiming the virtues of Barack Obama and John McCain. The posters have spilled out into the hallway too, and taken up a good piece of real estate there.

Silverberg teaches an honors class in social studies, and in the last few weeks they've been thinking about elections, in particular the presidential election that's only a few weeks away now. And this week, Pine Bush School District held mock elections on October 15 and 16.

Thanks to the excellent Liz Weisz, who handles press relations for the district, we were able to sit in for parts of a couple of classes last week, while Mr. Silverberg and Ed Stelmaszyk ran things. It must be said, these guys are good at this.

Mr. Silverberg's class was in the process of showing student prepared presentations. We were in time to catch Briana Mangold's pitch for John McCain and then Katie Ryan's effort on behalf of Barack Obama. Technical difficulties prevented Kiersten Carnes from showing us her Power Point presentation, but John Keshecki had a pro-Republican video ready to roll in its place.

Mr. Silverberg spoke about the tech problem: "Power point doesn't play music files, so you have to put everything, including the music into a single folder so that the school system can find it all. Otherwise the music you were playing at home will stay there. It won't be here."

Kids are technically savvy these days, yes, but perhaps not quite as technically savvy as we — or they — think.

After Mr. Silverberg's class, we took up Mr. Stelmaszyk's invitation to sit in on his eleventh grade class on U.S. Government. We even got a chance to try our hand at the Separation of Powers test.

Sample Question: What branch of government removes a dishonest judge from office? Answer: Legislative branch.

For the mock election, the district has even arranged to have voting machines in place so that students will get to turn those little knobs and pull that big red lever. How will they vote? Watch this space for the results next week.

COMMENTS about this article (1)