Must Do's And May Do's

In my classroom, I divide each class period up into "must-do's" and "may-do's." When kids come in and look at the board, they can see what assignment or challenge awaits, and what sort of experience can be theirs if they complete the task in front of them. Inevitably, this leads to a certain amount of whining and crying about skipping to the fun, avoiding the work completely. There are some standard replies I have generated over the years, many of which center on the "dessert before dinner" model. Yes, I know what that sounds like. It is also part of living in a world in which I routinely find kids walking onto our playground before the day begins, eating a bag of hot chips with no real intent of going into our cafeteria for the free breakfast program we have for half an hour before the school day begins. Breakfast is the must do. Hot chips are the may do. If that sounds a little like surrender, keep in mind that I do insist that kids take their flamin' hot Cheetos to the cafeteria and eat them instead of sprinkling toxic dust across the playground for seagulls, pigeons and other less flight-inclined vermin to come by later to clean up after them. You have to draw the line somewhere, right?

Sigh.

This is what came to mind when I heard that our President was in Cleveland this past week, floating the idea of mandatory voting for Americans. There are currently eleven countries in the world that require that their citizens vote. There are nearly twenty more that only "require" it by having a law on the books, like Egypt and Mexico, but they don't come drag you out of your house and force you into the voting booth if you forget. Or choose not to. Mandatory sounds like some sort of inoculation program, and I guess we all know how successful that is turning out to be. One of the amusing ironies of giving folks all this freedom is that it gives them the freedom not to participate. In the 2014 midterm elections, less than thirty-seven percent of the eligible voters found their way to their polling place to cast a ballot. This minority elected a Republican majority to the Senate. Isn't that interesting? Or inevitable? That could be why Mister Obama, wandering around the nation's midsection found time in his busy schedule to suggest, "If everybody voted, then it would completely change the political map in this country." But if you force people to vote, aren't you taking away their constitutionally guaranteed right to complain bitterly about something they know nothing about? What a fascist.