Every year, the American Academy holds elections to give students an opportunity to choose the vice-president and the president of each class. As the coronavirus has turned the whole world upside-down, students have to experience everything online. The questions that pop up in our minds are: how are the elections going to take place? How different will it be from the previous years’ elections? And, what are the students’ expectations? As this year's elections ended up taking place in a different format, there is no doubt that the whole experience was not the same. To understand better the differences between online and last year’s elections, I interviewed the 9th graders’ vice-president, Natashka Nakaidze, asking a few clarifying questions.
Reporter: Did people nominate you, or was it your choice to be part of the elections?
Natashka Nakaidze: This year, during October, students received the email from Simon Janashia to nominate the candidates, but last year nothing similar happened. If someone wanted to be involved in the elections, all they had to do was to inform their advisory, so that's exactly what I did.
Reporter: How was the whole process organized? What did you have to do to grab the students' attention?
Natashka Nakaidze: Candidates had a few weeks to write their speeches for the audience and present them in front of the 75 students and teachers in the library. But before performing their speeches, they had to make campaigns. They could do whatever they wanted to grab others' attention. For example, some students brought cookies with sayings "vote for me", others gave their classmates papers showing what they would do if they became presidents, but I made flyers and put them everywhere. I do believe that this is one of the best ways to spread your message and be at the center of attention.
Reporter: What are the advantages and disadvantages of online elections?
Natashka Nakaidze: Well, online elections will be different. Making campaigns won't be easy. As it is planned to be online, candidates will not be able to bring posters and food with sayings "vote for me" at school. All they can do is to create pages on different social media and send us some information via email. But I believe students will show creativity and will impress us online too. What I like about elections being in this format is that students will not be as nervous as me during speeches. From my own experience, I can say that it's hard and at the same time stressful to talk in front of the whole class and look them in the face. As the meeting will probably be held in the zoom, candidates won’t look at each of the student's facial expressions and reactions, since there will be many people attending.
Reporter: Thank you for your time, Natashka!
To find out students' expectations of the online elections, I conducted a survey in which some 9th graders shared their thoughts. The minority thinks the election in such a format will be much fairer, organized, and interesting because people will vote "without the hype" and the new reality will help the students to gain experiences. But others have the opposite ideas. According to them, the presidents and vice-presidents will have nothing to do, and as it is the first time the online elections take place at GZAAT, it will cause a lot of chaos. The other question was the following: What is the reason that you aren't participating in online elections? The results were quite surprising. It turns out that many students refused to take part because of its format. Here is the graph, which shows the percentage of the answers: the blue part shows that 64% percent of the students didn't want to run for president and the red part indicates that 34% percent didn't take part because elections of being online.
Above all, the online elections and elections in person are not the same, but it’s interesting to see if the student’s expectations will be true and how the whole process will develop.
Edited by Elene Jakhutashvili
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