Teachable moments: The coalition of commies, hippies and seperatists

Well, it is interesting times like these that can make thinking of ideas for lessons much easier. Even though this whole coalition issue is not fundamentally very confusing or complicated, the political maelstrom surrounding it has caused widespread dislocation. Like we went over in class today, issues like this should be explained in straight language to your students as soon as possible to avoid propaganda and misconceptions. In fact, this is a perfect case study for the requirement in many Social Studies IRP's for source analysis. Students can analyse this bombardment of tv, radio and internet propaganda ads for: who wrote it? for what purpose? is there a bias? is it valid? is it factual? etc.
This will likely be much more interesting and useful that analysing a source written in 1778 or whatever. Also, you could organize some sort of debate surrounding the issue. Perhaps assign some students to each party, and have them debate why, or why not form a coalition, and how they would compromise their policies to form one etc.
Another benefit of students getting straight forward information on events such as this, is that they can then explain it to their possibly confused parents and friends, therefore more people will understand what is happening and fewer will be outraged.