All About Me

My name is Cassie Silvester. These are my two girls Maggie, age 5 and Olivia age 4. I spend the majority of my time taking care of these little midgets. Maggie is taking piano, and they both take dance class together. We spend our summers at the pool and we love it.
I am married to Kenny Silvester, he is a correctional officer in Draper. He likes to fix old cars, new cars, or any machine really, and he likes to grow a beard.
I like to run, wakeboard, snowboard and play softball and basketball, and I am the girls sophomore basketball coach at Mountain View High School in Orem. We live in Orem, and bought our first house last year, it's great being a homeowner! We love it.
I am excited to teach political issues at the Art Institute of Salt Lake. I have been a political person my whole life thanks to my mom. She has a law degree and went to the U of U on a debate scholarship. I am a conservative because I think that the values that our country was founded on are timeless: Personal responsibility, equality, independence, hard work.  I do not know everything there is to know about politics or history. I studied history at BYU, I studied abroad in Paris, France.  Last year I got involved on a United States Senatorial campaign because my french teacher from BYU invited me to help.

It was about 7 months of work. I worked on the calling team for his campaign. I met lots of people and learned a lot about the political process. Politics is tricky business. Some people are more tricky than others... But that is for another day. Dan Liljenquist ran an all out campaign against 36 year incumbent Orrin Hatch. Hatch had NEVER been challenged to a primary. EVER. I played sports all my life, I have been in some very competitive matches. I never felt so much pressure then at convention when Dan pushed hatch to a primary with one percentage point. Crazy. We fought "machine" politics. Hatch spent millions and millions of dollars. He had a paid staff, Dan spent 150,000 of his own money, and none of his volunteers were paid. I wish I had been paid. I made phone calls from my house mostly. We worked social network sites, I got a letter to the editor published in the Salt Lake Trib and the Des News. Check it out:
My Oped in the Deseret News

I am excited to teach this course on historical and political issues, and I hope by the end of this course you will have a deeper understanding why we do things the way we do things here in America. Yes, things are messed up, things are broken. But liberty is a fragile thing. We as citizens need to critically consume the news, and become truly informed, then we actually have to get off the couch and do something. I used to watch a lot more TV before all this. We can no longer say that my voice doesn't matter, or think that someone else will do it. We need to re-learn  what it means to be a citizen.