What I said to my students on November 6, 2024
Like many people, I was feeling a lot of despair on the morning of November 6th about the result of the election. I spent nearly four years during the 2020 election cycle leading the engineering team at the Democratic National Committee to try to help kick Donald Trump out of the Whitehouse. Which we did! I certainly didn’t imagine it wouldn’t stick.
Now I’m a high school computer science teacher, so on top of dealing with my own despair on Wednesday morning I also had to decide what, if anything, to say to my students.
As a teacher—even one in Berkeley, California—I’m not allowed to make partisan pitches in the classroom. But it is reasonable, and even considered good, for teachers to acknowledge big events that students are likely to have feelings about. And anyway, I couldn’t pretend that nothing had just happened.
Below is roughly what I ended up saying to my classes on Wednesday.
I feel like I need to acknowledge the events of yesterday. Some of you may not pay much attention to politics. Some of you may already be political junkies. And today some of you may be feeling happy about the way things turned out. Others of you may be sad or scared.
As some of you may remember, I worked in politics before I was a teacher so obviously I think elections are important. I spent four years trying to affect the outcome of the last election.
Only a few of you got to vote in this election, but many of you will get to vote in the next one. And that’s important. But it’s not everything.
Democracy does not just happen on election day. Our actions every day are what really make our democracy. However you feel about what happened yesterday, you have a responsibility, as a member of this democracy, to work to try to make the world into the one you want us all to live in.
So if you’re happy about the result and think the country took a turn in the right direction yesterday, great. There’s still no guarantee that things will play out the way you hope. I hope you want good things for all of us and will work to make them happen.
And if you think things took a scary turn, and we’re now headed in the wrong direction, then it’s all the more important that you work with others to affect how things turn out.
My job is to teach you computer science. But learning about computer science is about learning how to think even more than it’s about learning Java. And democracy needs us all to both think and act. So for the next four years until the next election—and for every day after that for the rest of your life—you need to think and act.