My group (Mathhew Scuderi and Julia Boyer) and I chose the 10th amendment because it was something that not everyone in the class was researching. We weren't too schooled on the powers reserved to the states and wanted to become more informed on the subject. In completing this project, we learned that the basic idea of the tenth amendment is that there are certain powers or laws, rather, that the states have control over. The nation should not interfere with the way that the states handle issues like education or gay marriage, among other issues. The tenth amendment is the reason why Obama can't forcefully demand that all states require their children to go to school until the age of 18; he has to ask the states permission to implement this law because education is a power reserved to the states. Among all of the issues that we could have dwelled on for this project, we chose to research education as a power reserved to the states. 

I liked this project because we were given the opportunity to use video as a our means of media presentation. It is not something that I, personally, usually use to present, so it is exciting whenever I can make a video for one of my projects. I also liked that we were given the liberty to speak with outside professionals about our topic and could record interviews, not only with said professionals, but also with our school peers. We were able to put the student voice into our documentary. 

As with all of the projects that we complete in school, our documentary could have used some growing room. If I were to do the documentary again, I would start on the project a little earlier and incorporate more dimensions of the issue at hand into the documentary (How we can fix the problems, the funds that we have to make changes to the way that this works, connect education as a power reserved to the state to the powers of the states under the 10th amendment, etc.) I feel like we could've done a better job connecting education back to the 10th amendment. 

We ran into a little bit of trouble with this project after winter break because I missed school for a week, as I was with my family in Puerto Rico. I was not back on time to work with my group on the project in the beginning of January, and had to wait a week before I could see them again. I worked on finding information for the group on our issue and posting it on our google doc while I was still away and after a week was able to come together with my group once again to touch base about what we needed to complete our project. My absence threw me back a little because I could not effectively find out what my group needed from me to complete the project. We fixed our problem by making sure that we all completed our designated jobs on our own time so that when we did meet, we could present what we had to import to the project. In the end we put all of our individual pieces into one project. We were all pretty on point and prompt with all of our individual tasks which helped us to complete our project on time. We also made sure to collect our c-span footage really so that when it came to put all together, we wouldn't have to spend too much downloading the videos from the site and adding them to our movie.  If I had to do it over again, I would probably begin my project before I left to Puerto Rico, so that my group could have a big bulk of it already done before the new school years starts up again. If we would have done this, we would have saved ourselves a lot of stress and time.

 I learned that the States can decide how they deal with issues like education, marriage, and gun certification. The Federal government cannot interfere with this. The problem is that sometimes, since the federal government funds the states, federal policy tends to leak into the state policy (because states need funding and support from the federal government). 

To see our bibliography, click here. 

If you are having trouble viewing the video, please click here. 

For this benchmark I worked with Ayanna Robinson we focused on the 14th Amendment. I will be uploading our citations and Ayanna will be uploading our video and then we will both make sure we have everything on both pages at a later time. Below are the sources we used. 

Mulligan, Robert, dir. To Kill A Mocking Bird. Writ. Horton Foote. Universal , 1963. Film.

 

Comer, Dawn, writ. Our Friend, Martin. Dir. Rob Smiley, and Vincenzo Trippetti. DiC Enterprises, 1999. Film.

 

Brooks, James, dir. Spanglish. Columbia Pictures Corporation, 2004. Film.

 

The Ed Show

 

Fox News

 

C-SPAN

I would like to start out by saying me and my partner Samantha have learned alot more about ourselves and our struggles with our past and our present by completing this project. Using the 14th amendment with both of us having ethic backgrounds and expeirencing discrimination in some sort of way whether it be school, jobs, or anything that we as people can come into contact where you can possibly be judged for, we deal with on a daily basis. I know that not only is the 14th amendment important to me and Samantha, but that law being written im the past has given us ample opputunities for today and will give us even more our futures. We hope that you enjoy our video.

One of the main reasons why me I choose amendent 14 is because I realized that without this amendent there would be a drastic change to,the lives we lead today. although there are many topics that fall under the 14th amendment the one that hit close to home was discrimination. We live in a time where everyone has the same equal rights but not for a second do I forget the people who fought, died and marched to get those rights granted. I did this amendment because I could relate to the feeling the desire and the privelege of people who were discriminated against but ultimately survived and knew they deserved better and got better. What I enjoyed most about this project is that it allowed me to take time out to think about the day to day things I do without even thinking about it twice and really examine if this amendment was not there, there would be many things even on my way to school that would be difficult for me to do, on the other hand the most challenging thing to do was to relate the message though a presentation even though there was a Set way you had to present it making your video unique and different was the hard part. While doing this project the most interesting fact is that people who we incuded in our video were good at explaining thier point of views on the subject and had stories as to go with our topic that was interesting. I loved doing this project but overall if there was anything I could improve it would be our timing and our editing. The timing part was good but towards we had some problems with sound and what not, but if we would have had more time that we paced ourseleves we could have had it perfect. And editing it was both our first time working with editing so that was kind of difficult. What I learned is that don't forget that life is how itbecuase of these amendments.

Bibliography

HIV/AIDS Discrimination - Recent Court Cases, Issues and Articles." American Civil Liberties Union. Web. 20 Jan. 2012. <http://www.aclu.org/hiv-aids/hivaids-discrimination>.

"HIV & Your Civil Rights: Know Your Rights in the Workplace." American Civil Liberties Union. Web. 20 Jan. 2012. <http://www.aclu.org/lgbt-rights_hiv-aids/hiv-civil-rightsbrknow-your-rights-workplace>.

"History of U.S. Since 1877 Important People, Terms, and Events." Colorado Public Record Search. Web. 20 Jan. 2012. <http://coloradopublicrecordsearch.org/95/history-of-u-s-since-1877-important-people-terms-and-events/>.

Somerville voices article. web 23 Jan. 2012<http://www.somervillevoices.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/somerville_ma_schools_graduation_and_drop_out_by_race_ethnicity-1.jpg>. 

Proficiency of Black Students Is Found to be Far Lower Than Expected. web 23 Jan. 2012 <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/09/education/09gap.html>. 

How Important is Cultural Diversity at school your school. web 23 Jan. 21012 <http://www.greatschools.org/find-a-school/defining-your-ideal/284-cultural-diversity-at-school.gs 

Racial Disparity in School Suspensions. web 23 Jan.2012 < http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/education/14suspend.html> 

Milestones in African American Education. web 23 Jan. 2012 <http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0872844.html>

Created by:
Ali Ahmed
William Marsh
Tim Mamrol

My group chose this topic because it was the most relevant topic we found. As young men, the voting age is massively significant to us, especially because we will all be 18 by the next presidential election. I liked the freedom we were given in completing this project, and I also especially like working in video and digital media. I found the most difficult aspect of this project to be finding people to interview. My parents (Earl Marsh and B Hibbs) agreed to be interviewed eagerly, but Ali and I spent at least two hours asking people to answer a few questions and found all of three people that were willing to speak to us, out of dozens. I was fascinated and horrified by the Kent State shootings in response to student protest of the Vietnam war and the draft. As someone who will be going to college this fall, while not of the same era as this horrible event, it was startling to think that someone of my age had been killed by his own country for protests. 

I think that the project would have been better if we got more interviews and better stock footage to use for voice overs. I was a bit disappointed by how bland some of the images we had to use for our voice overs. I ran into issues with this project with organizing group mates and formatting the video. When changing the format of the video into flv (the preferred format), the audio consistently cut out in the same spot in three different sets of encoded video. I changed the settings around to the same settings used for the full time digital video class, but the audio still cut out. I think that our script and the interviews were done very well. If this project were to be repeated, I would try to distribute the work more evenly. I feel that I did a large amount of the work, with a decent amount of help from one of my group mates, while the other was largely uninvolved. I learned that the voting age had not always been 18, but perhaps more importantly I learned how valuable a draft can be. While I do not want to be drafted, or have the draft reinstated, the draft can be held responsible for a huge change in the politics of the nation. By forcibly taking mother's sons away from her, to be sent halfway across the world to fight in a brutal, controversial war, the draft really made people in the U.S care about the politics of the nation and the world. While I don't like the idea of the draft, I must say it is an incredible source of motivation for the youth of America, something that is seldom seen in the voting environment.

For our second quarter benchmark, Natalie, Matt and I focused on the 10th amendment and how it relates to education. 

This video was created following the guidelines for C-SPAN's StudentCam project. 

I worked with Thea Farah and Rita Willard.

If the embed isn't working, check here for a link!

At first, my group wanted to look into the ability of the president to veto bills. However, we couldn't find vetoed bills that really affect us. Instead, since our group was all female, we figured that the amendment that most directly affected us was the 19th. Once we picked a topic, our lives got a bit easier! We did have a lot of trouble choosing a method of storytelling. Although I do really like the freedom we had to pick our method, so long as it fit in the video, we ended up brainstorming for far too long and didn't have as much time to produce.

Although I appreciated that the project was formatted after the C-SPAN documentary challenge, I think that a slightly altered assignment could have been better for SLA. Maybe we could have chosen whether to create documentary videos or some other form of presentation – videos tend to be just as much about editing as about actual information. We could have had more restrictions on how much history we had to put in. My group did a lot of work on finding the history of the 19th amendment, but didn't include much of it in our project because it didn't fit with C-SPAN's requirements.

As we prepared to create our video, we found plenty of drama in the fight for women's suffrage: a constitutional amendment was brought to congress for 40 years in a row before it was passed, women wrote a "Declaration of Sentiments" that is a pointed reference to the Declaration of Independence, and more. The one point that I found most interesting was the story of the ratification of the amendment. In the end, it all came down to the vote of a single senator within Tennessee. He was in his 20s, and ended up voting for women's suffrage partly because his mother wrote him a note and told him to do so.

In the end, I liked our final project. However, I don't think it thoroughly reflected all that we learned. Instead of telling the story of the amendment, we had to think of ways to explain why the right to vote matters to us. I think that we ended up successful because our video definitely explored the reasons that the 19th amendment matters, and even tied in those reasons to the history of the amendment and an international perspective.

My group specifically ran into a lot of trouble with the scheduling and technicalities of collaboration. We had to get the video from computer to computer, and weren't able to find time to all work together at the same time. Even when we did all work together, we ended up unable to work efficiently. I did enjoy working with the group, though, because we all brought different ideas to the table. If I had to do this project over, I think I'd want to start getting video earlier. That way, we would have been able to add more pictures and other edited pieces, and I think our project would have been richer. However, I did like our overall project, and am proud of my work.