The 10th graders in Aedrin Albright's civics class at a rural North Carolina high school had done their homework, and now it was time to decide: Should President Donald Trump be impeached? The students dragged their chairs across the room, those who opposed removing Trump from office on one side, those in favour on the other. Undecided students were in the middle.
"Your job is to try to persuade your classmates in here to come to your side, to your understanding," Albright told the teenagers at Chatham Central High School.
The House impeachment inquiry into Trump's dealings with Ukraine has become a teachable moment in classrooms around the country as educators incorporate the events often hundreds of miles away in Washington into their lesson plans.
They are using the debate in Congress to teach students about the Constitution and presidential power, provide history lessons about earlier impeachment cases and hold mock votes that mirror the divisions in American politics.
In Albright's first class on impeachment in October, students read articles and then drew posters explaining the process without getting into the politics. That changed on Tuesday, when the students took sides, coincidentally as House Democrats were releasing transcripts of closed-door testimony in the impeachment probe.
Like many members of Congress who will decide the Republican president's fate, most of the students in Albright's class had already made up their minds and wouldn't be swayed.
The tally at the start of class Tuesday: 15 against impeachment, three for and 10 undecided. The six precincts in Bear Creek, where the school is located, voted almost 55 percent for Trump in the 2016 presidential election, while Chatham County went for Democrat Hillary Clinton. Both candidates were represented in campaign signs hanging in the classroom.
"The Democrats have just been slamming Trump and trying to find every little thing, ever since he got into office," student Bryce Hammer said. "Just to try and get a reason just to kick him out and impeach him." Arguing for impeachment, Francisco Morales said, "He's accused of asking foreign help to interfere with elections. And then the day after (special counsel Robert Mueller testified before Congress), he asked foreign help to help him in the next election. So, for me, it kind of shows that he doesn't really care about how people think about what he does with foreign countries."
They were "quick to argue that he has done so many illegal things, but when I asked them to describe the things he has done and how those things violated the law, they slowed down a little," said Westpfhal, who frequently brings current events into his lesson plans. "We discussed how emotion and partisanship can dictate our views."
Disclaimer: No Business Standard Journalist was involved in creation of this content