Electing a president in the US

The election is divided in the following steps:

Primaries - winner - national convention - nomination - vice president / platform - campaign - election (people) - election (electoral college) - president

Primaries are held in most states and these are state wide elections to choose a state party nominee for president. The winner of each state is guaranteed a delegation in the national convention. The primaries proceed and are reduced to two or three candidates. At the national convention, the final candidate for president is elected. The creation of a party "platform" is the team of candidates running for President and Vice President in the fall election. The serious campaigning starts in September till the first voting day, the first Tuesday in November. The campaigns are huge and a lot of money are spend and a lot of promises are made. The President and Vice President are not elected by the popular vote. Each state has it's own election and the winner takes it all from that state. Depending on how bug the state is and how many citizens there are, they get a number of congressmen in Parliament. The congressmen represent their states in votes. There are 435 congressmen in the US, 100 senators and 3 from the District of Columbia, these people are the 538 electoral voters and a candidate must have a majority of these votes, that's 270 votes to win the election.

The whole class collaborating

In school today, we were working on American politics. We worked in a different way than what we're used to. The class were collaborating and divided into the following groups: Front desk, research group, journalists, teachers and designers. I was in the research group with Karoline and Mikkel, we split the pages in the book by topics and I got the topic "Electing a president." At first I read about it and I searched on the internet to gather more information. I sent the information to the journalists, and they worked on rewriting, but they were not satisfied with our job, so I wrote a summery from the text in the book. I am going to post my summery as an individual blog post.

The front desk's job was to organize people and give deadlines and just talk to the different groups and make sure they didn't have any problems.

The research group's job was to find material and send it to the other groups.

The journalists' job was to write blogs about the material.

The teachers' job was to make a test and criteria for the test.

The designers' job was to make glogs and photostory with the material.

I think this way of working is not the most effective way to work, there are too many people involved and working on the same topics and it is kind of confusing. It has been fun to try out, but I don't think that this is a way that we will learn the most in. We were supposed to work in groups of two, but Ann changed her mind. I think we would learn more if we did work in that way, but it has been interesting and I know very well how they elect their president in the US.

The Road

This semester we are going to read a book in class. We got to choose between two books and most of us chose "The road" written by Cormac McCarthy. So far, I have only read the first 50 pages and I am still waiting for something to happen. It is about a man and his son who are walking through a burned destroyed landscape. We have not been told yet what has happened to the world. They are alone, but still afraid of meeting other desperate survivors. They are walking south, trying not to freeze to death in the snowy winter. All they have is a gun to protect themselves and a cart packed with some of their belongings and food.

The book is written in a difficult language and I did not quite understand the text until I had read a lot. Usually I would probably just have put the book away because it takes a long time to really understand what they are doing and I still don't know why they are walking. A brief explanation on why the landscape surrounding them are destroyed would make the book more interesting, I think.

When they are walking, they come to their old house and the father's home from the childhood. This gives him flashbacks from the earlier days, and these stories helps to keep my interest in the book, because they are something else than two people walking along a road. The names of the two people in the book are unknown and that makes it hard to relate to the people. That is probably an important decision made by the author, but I think the book would be easier to understand and relate to if we knew the names of the characters.

Ann has told us that the book will be more interesting once you get by the first 50 pages, and I am looking forward to read some action! I will probably write more about the book in the next weeks.