Each year before Election Day, students in Oakton’s Senior Seminar watch campaign ads and analyze what’s positive, negative, effective and ineffective. Eliot Waxman, the Advanced Placement government teacher who team-teaches this course with me, worked for political campaigns and was a public opinion pollster in a previous life.

Campaigns and elections might seem the purview of government and not English classes, but Eliot and I find numerous connections — most of them made by our students. The primary connection is that campaigns use language to create a desired effect. Phrased differently: Campaigns manipulate the public through carefully chosen words.

Anyone who has followed the acrimonious ads of Jeannemarie Devolites Davis and Chap Petersen for the Virginia Senate assumes there’s a story behind each verbal attack. The Washington Post illuminated what’s behind many of those accusations in a recent Metro section story, confirming that each distorts the other’s record for their own purposes.

Welcome to politics.

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“There’s nothing new here,” you may be thinking. But for our 150 seniors who are either recently eligible to vote or within months of that privilege, this is all new. Most have not followed campaigns and press the “mute” button during political advertising. They admit to changing channels when candidates debate and during news commentaries.

So giving them an opportunity to discuss these ads has the effect of transforming their view of political campaigns. They become simultaneously more appreciative of the craft involved in packaging a candidate and wiser (perhaps more cynical) in recognizing the realities of political rhetoric.

Last week, students watched 10 ads twice each and then divided into groups to scrutinize one ad before sharing their analyses with the entire class. Some were from former presidential campaigns going back to 1960. Four of the ads were contemporary: one each from Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Each class became one big focus group, putting Eliot, the former pollster and focus-group moderator, in his element. Students debated whether Romney’s ad stressing his humor (his wife teasing that he “wasn’t funny” at all) made him seem more human or was “too staged.” They noted that we all refer to Clinton as “Hillary” yet hesitate to call Obama “Barack”; that led to a lively discussion of whether that had to do with Clinton’s sex, or the fact that there are two Clintons in politics.

We found ourselves longing for more televised discussion of the issues, but then got bored when Giuliani spent several minutes on his Web site discussing 12 of his positions. We admitted our inconsistency.

In short, it was Politics 101 for three hours, the week before a local election. One participant had the most telling comment of all, just before we broke for the weekend.

“These ads are just like our college essays,” she observed. “Political candidates have 60 seconds to reveal their views and their personalities, and college candidates have to reduce themselves to 500 words. Both tasks are impossible.”

Lessons stay with students when they see personal relevance, so Sezan is now ready for Politics 102 in college. Eliot and I don’t care who gets our students’ votes; we simply aim to produce wiser voters. Mission accomplished.

Erica Jacobs teaches at Oakton High School and George Mason University. E-mail her at ejacob1@gmu.edu.