I think the following front page article taken from the Herald Journal a few weeks back should explain the position that the Herald Journal takes when it comes to Liberalism and the UN. It should also give us a clue as to where a few Teachers and Students at Logan High stand on the issue. It seems that they both favor the UN over their own country, the USA. Not good I wonder when they will have a "Model United States club" at Logan High school. Not that it would even be allowed there. We all know that the Herald Journal would shut down their paper before they would cover something like a "Model United States club" unless they could somehow put a negative spin on it.
"There are 16 students at Logan High who never thought the focus of their lives last week would be Tanzania.
And they probably didn’t realize how much the African country would teach them about being an American student as well.
For more than two months the Model United Nations club has met and studied the coastal African nation, and participants say they feel pretty comfortable representing it this week in California.
Logan’s team was invited to the West Coast Invitational Model United Nations conference in December and will be the only Utah team to attend. They were assigned Tanzania randomly and have been eager to learn, adviser Tacy Hymas says.
While the opportunity is wonderful, Hymas said, the amount her kids have learned in the past year is even better.
“I have just been floored by the stuff they have been able to talk about,” she said. “I’m just flabbergasted all the time with how smart they are.”
Logan’s MUN club has been in existence for several years, but only this year has it evolved to its current 40-plus member size. Hymas took over the after-school group toward the end of last school year and has moved full steam ahead ever since. The geography teacher won the regional high school adviser of the year award at an earlier conference and has more than quadrupled the attendance at weekly meetings.
For her, it’s about perspective.
“They have the opportunity to look at things different than a perspective of (Americans),” she said. “And, I think that helps them to understand our position even more.”
Model United Nations operates as a mock international peacekeeping group. Schools or individuals represent countries, lobbying for human rights, negotiating with neighboring countries, signing treaties and encouraging social and economic futures.
“It expands your view of the world,” ninth-grader Alisa Metcalf said.
She and several others said they have been amazed at the way they’ve learned to think of world issues from a non-American view.
Hymas said being able to think “outside the box” is something many of her MUN students have learned.
Co-presidents Chelsey Gensel and Chuck Major, both seniors, agree.
“A lot of people in Model U.N. are very opinionated, sometimes difficult people,” Major said. “You have to learn to compromise.”
Competing with all of those people at the Southern California conference that in years past has drawn students from Texas, Illinois, New York and Alaska was the focus of one portion of a pre-trip meeting last week.
“As soon as you have spoken, get on the list to speak again,” Gensel told the group after going through the trip’s itinerary. “Learn that (the judges) are always watching you.”
Gensel said over her high school years she has learned how to speak better, write more effectively and cooperate with different kinds of people because of her experiences in MUN, and Major agreed on what skills students pick up.
“You learn how to work with people,” Major said.
The students — even the ninth-graders who have just been in MUN for six months — say it’s affected their work in other classes. Metcalf and classmates Haley Manning and Katie Shervais credited the project for their improved ability to write persuasive papers in English and answer questions in geography. In geography class, in fact, sometimes they realize the lesson has become a two-way conversation with the teacher and themselves.
Most of the students say this year’s success is directly attributable to Hymas, a claim she turns right around on them.
“I think that my receiving the (regional adviser) award was just a reflection on how well they did. I totally owe it to them,” she said.
The team will head to California on Thursday, taking all the information about the southern African country they have learned with them. For more information about the United State’s MUN program, visit www.nmun.org." |