16 = Voting???

Today in class we had a seminar based off the article of text that we read in preparation for our discussion. The article that we read and annotated was titled “You’re 16, You’re Beautiful, and You’re a Voter”. This text was all about Anya Kamenetz’s (The author) thoughts on lowering the legal voting age. The reason that we read this article was because we have been looking at the presidential election for about two weeks now. It seems only right to discuss topics that relate to voting, that will be affecting us in the near future.
After we read this, we combined all of our own thoughts and had a discussion on it. The class was split into two groups based on gender, and held two different conversations. In our group, I was the discussion leader. The point of having a discussion leader is to guide the conversation along. There were often times in the conversation were I was needed to bring it back to the text. I actually liked being the moderator for our group because I like having the responsibility of where our conversation goes.
Some of the most important ideas that were contributed to our conversation were; Lower voting age but still keep restrictions, Only allow devoted teens to vote, Not only test underage voters but voters of all ages to insure people actually know what they are voting on. During our actual seminar, everybody was very polite and was conscious of everybody thoughts. The only thing that could have changed was there were a few times were people weren’t waiting for others to talk, and shooting down ideas. That is not the point of Socratic seminars, the whole intentions of doing this activity is to learn about all the points of view regarding multiple topics.
Definitely there were some things that needed to be changed on the teachers end. One of which being, next time the teacher needs to tell us when to start wrapping up our conversations. We were late to our next class because our teacher lost track of time. Also, i don’t think that we should of split the groups up based on gender, only because each gender has different points of views, that should be integrated with others.
Overall I think that this was one of my most enjoyable seminar. Only because everyone was for the most part respectful of others, and we brought many great ideas to the table.