Monday, December 28, 2009

Today we started off by eating pizza. It was difficult, seeing as how there were only five of us this time around...Rich ordered pizza for twelve. Not a good idea.

Our icebreaker commemorated the holiday season---we talked about the worst presents ever received, our family traditions, and what holidays mean to us.

We got a chance to make fun of ourselves with another game focused on public speaking. We discovered that we had forgotten our abc's when we were forced to recite a speech using only those beloved twenty-six letters. Let's just say it was time for a refresher. Brian kicked our butts with his amazing eloquence and appreciation for the alphabet.

We then proceeded to discuss plans for our CAN TV appearance in late January. We settled on having two teams: 1) one group to talk about campaign issues; 2) the other to discuss youth campaign involvement.

We summed up the meeting with a review on our own experiences, advice to give to future Mikva campaigners, and reflections on our favorite memories with Mikva.

P.S. Rich now knows that students aren't always in their beds at midnight. We suggest that you should watch your back the next time you're in New Hampshire.

12-14-09

So as always, we started our meeting by stuffing our faces. This time it was Mediterranean food, yum! Even though we were all a bit sleepy we started on our agenda The bulk of the meeting was of the us taking a stand and declaring our interest on the races of the cook county board president, senate, and Governor. We also took a walk in the shoes of politicians in declaring our stand on issues concerning healthcare, immigration, education, and yellow starbursts. Not straying away from our CANTV appearance, we threw around ideas on how we should go about conducting the show. There were ideas from The View, gameshows, pro and con debate, open minded perspectives, and an extenstion of time.

November 30, 2009

This meeting was all about research. We divided up into three groups (one for each race) and compiled a list of candidates' positions on campaign issues. We then generalized the most important issues and compared this to previous elections. We talked about why certain issues have emerged and others have been forgotten. We talked about media's role in shaping campaigns, both with issues and candidates.

We will start next meeting by presenting our ideas on what issue we will focus on for the TV show.

November 16, 2009

At our first meeting, we talked about expectations for the next few months. We decided to focus on three races (Governor,US Senate, and Cook County Board President)meet every other Monday to prepare for our final project: hosting a call-in show on CANTV a week before the election.

As Mikva tradition would have it, we played a few icebreakers to get to know each other. We then played a game to match more than 20 candidate names to the elections they were running for.

Our last activity was watching some ads that had already aired and critiquing their effectiveness.