Quarter 2 Benchmark: 10th Ammendment

For our second quarter benchmark, Natalie, Matt and I focused on the 10th amendment and how it relates to education. 
To view our work cited page, click here.

When picking the topic for our project, our group decided to find a topic that was easy so we didn't have as much to research and more time to get footage and make our project great. The 10th amendment and education stood out to us. All in all, I thought this project went well with the American Government class and making a documentary about something interesting made the project engaging. The hard part was working with the C-SPAN footage; while they provided us with a lot of material, I wish that I could have had access to the entire archive of footage. It was also difficult fitting our topic into the over-arching question: How does this amendment affect our lives? Trying to fit education into such a broad amendment was hard enough! But what we learned about our topic made the hard work worth while. 

The best information we received was from Gillian Cohen-Boyer, a member of the Dept of Education and a professor of education. She was eager to share her perspective on education reform with us but her interview via email was very challenging and slowed down our project enormously. Her answers, though thorough and full of good bits, arrived the night before the project was due in long, detailed paragraphs. Despite the setback, our group managed to produce a reasonably good documentary. I only wish we had edited so the story came through more clearly. But my education has increased during this project and that's all that matters! I now see the complex relationship between federal and state governments; it's, at times, icy and stand-offish-full of "blackmail" and polite requests with undertones of authority and warning. I also see how, as a student, I have little say in how I am taught due to the tug of war between federal, state and local governments. It's a terrifying and mesmerizing process.   

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