The 10th Amendment and "Us"

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. 

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