Model Senate
Description The Model Senate was where some of the seniors came together as different senators, lobbyists, and experts to reenact what would happen inside of Congress. We write legislation, voted on what should be on the docket, and then jumped into the Congressional process as U.S. Senators would. I assumed the position of an expert on the Finance Committee as well as Senator Bernie Sanders. This process was grueling and intense, but allowed insight on how Congress really does work. As an expert, I did not write a piece of legislation, but a mock bill that we used to practice the congressional process. We reproduced what would happen in our Congress to better understand our own government and work to answer the question "Is Congress broken?"
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Speech on Finance Committee Hello, my name is Samantha Duncan, I have a Ph.D. in mathematics political science, and working towards a masters in accounting,, and I am addressing Bill 1-2015, Defense Spending Redistribution Act to the finance committee. I would like to bring to your attention the ever increasing federal debt. We are currently 18 trillion dollars in debt, and quickly approaching 19 trillion. We have been dedicated to mending this economy ever since Obama has come into office, and yet the debt continues to rise at an exponential rate. The federal government is expected to spend $277 billion on interest on the debt in the current fiscal year of 2015. That’s projected to soar to $827 billion by 2025. As a percentage of the economy, it would more than double from 1.3 percent in 2015 to 3 percent in 2025. We cannot continue to increase our spending, maintain current spending, and refuse to decrease funding for programs and technology that is out of date, and irrelevant for today’s military and civil needs.
As it is explained in the bill, we will be saving billions of dollars, redirecting some of that savings to veterans benefits, and most importantly during this great financial crisis, saving money that the government could be redirecting to recovering our economy and producing new jobs that will boost our economy and help lift us out of this national debt. If we have a healthy economy, then our nation will not need to continuously borrow money from China, from Saudi Arabia, from countries we should not be so dependent on. This bill proposes that we do not spend money on unrequested, unused, unnecessary, and old military technology and equipment. And to quote, “The government spends 53.7% of it’s allotted discretionary on the defense budget.” That leaves less than half of our budget to be put towards other discretionary spending, such as education, science and technology, veterans’ benefits, and other spending that can be put towards what a successful country needs. This bill is not asking for a lot. It is asking for common sense. It is asking for the leaders of this country to look at the defense budget, what it is being spent on, and how we can properly budget ourselves. America’s defense budget is as big if not bigger than the spending of China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, the United Kingdom, India, and Germany combined. Some say we must be big in order to be untouched, but, the removal of one Navy aircraft carrier, and one plane from their wing supply, we will save $18.4 billion dollars. Giving civilians jobs instead of hiring active duty personnel would save us $37 billion dollars. The $37 billion saved is from the money not being spent on training, boot camp, food, clothing, gun training, and other means necessary to train an active duty personnel, while average citizens will only need to be trained as they would be trained for an average job. Collectively, this bill is estimated to save a little over 161 billion dollars. This bill also asks us to reduce our military presence in some countries, which will help ease tensions with other countries that we are currently in conflict with. It is asking for the common sense of U.S. Senators, whose judgment is not based on paranoia but rather logic, and a vision that our country spends our money wisely and on new technology rather than old, and what is necessary, not wanted. However, this bill does not come without its repercussions. This bill has a deadline that is restricting, as all means and processes necessary to make these great changes must be made within 91 days of passing. This bill also does not have a steady timeline that details what will be done by which date, as changes this large is one that needs to be eased into our military, and eased into our federal budget. It is hard to expect a military as large and as great as ours to accept that we are decreasing some of their fleet numbers, and some of their jobs and replacing them with civilians in need of work. It is hard to expect that change to happen right away and all at once. This bill would prove to be great with and only with amendments changing deadlines, and adding timelines to ease our country into this change. The benefits of this bill will help aid our hurting economy, and allow the military to take the first few steps in a new direction, where we dedicate time and money to only the necessary and new. |
Mock BillReflection Interview |
Growth as a Writer
My first writing goal for this year is to work to improve the quality of my writing from the beginning to the end of an essay. Recently, I have been having a hard time with writing quality, coherent paragraphs towards the end of an essay and allowing the first paragraphs to page of an essay to fall short of that same quality and refinement. You can see that in the first draft of my honors Tocqueville writing, I used this as a closing statement in a paragraph, “Through the use of rhetoric and slipping underneath the noses of the people, they are able to successfully control the majority and thus control the vote” and this as the first sentence of the next paragraph, “To explain further, the U.S. education system is not a very high-ranked system of education, ranking at 14 in the index of cognitive skills and educational attainment”. This shows that I was not very strong in writing the beginning paragraphs of my essay, as they didn’t tie into each other very well and did not have well written paragraph transitions. Later on in my essay, I used this as a closing statement, “The system of democracy is systematically oppressing the minority, suggesting that democracy is just another form of tyranny” and this as the beginning of the next paragraph, “The government in the United States is ruled by the people, but the people themselves are not the ones in power”. This clearly shows my improvement throughout the essay, and I want to work on taking that quality and working through the whole essay.
Another writing goal I have for myself is to refine my usage of parallel structure. I have had a hard time understanding the technicalities of parallel structure, and I want to improve that during this year. To pull another example from my Tocqueville writing, I had an error in my use of parallel structure, “Through the use of rhetoric and slipping underneath the noses of the people, they are able to successfully control the majority and thus control the vote.” I clearly had a hard time figuring out how to use parallel structure, as I spoke about a few different topics in one sentence. After revisions, I cut the use of parallel structure all together because I didn’t understand how to use in in the context and from a more technical standpoint. I want to improve this because using it properly would make my writing more complex and interesting to read, and I want to expand my writing capability as much as possible before I leave for college. In the future, I will do more research on the structure and check with Lori to make sure that I am using the structure properly.
My final writing goal for this year is to work on providing both reliable evidence and using a personal voice in my blog post writings. I want to improve on this because I will not always be producing academic writing, and I want to be able to improve upon providing the evidence you would find in an academic writing, but also providing a personal tone to the writing. I have a very formal way of writing, and I have a difficult time getting my own voice into my blog posts and other forms of personal writing. For example, in my blog posts, I write very formally. In blogs where I write personally, I don’t often provide much evidence to go along with it, usually providing anecdotal evidence. For example, “Not an hour into the debate, one of the candidates was speaking to the Iranian Nuclear Deal, and claimed he would "Rip up the bill", something that the president does not have the power to do.” I wrote this in a blog discussing the GOP debate, and didn’t provide definitive evidence, but used a personal voice. And to show when I don’t use a personal voice, it sounds like this, “While it is not a constitutional right to marry whomever you please, she did not get into any major trouble for breaking a constitutional law and is even being protected by some of the candidates.” I don’t have very much of a personal voice in that blog post. So I want to be able to combine the mixture of emotionally responding and objectively responding. I could do this by taking more time between reading or viewing the content that drives my blogs and allowing myself to cool my emotional response, and rather more evidence to back up that response.
And lastly, to show how I have already grown as a writer this semester, I have greatly improved through my college essay. Writing a college essay is scary, and you have to make sure you show a college a piece of yourself, show them why you are a good candidate, and why the college should want you. All of that needs to be achieved without sounding like your bragging about yourself. So the pressure was on, but I was out sick underdoing a few medical procedures during the first three work days of the college writing intensive, giving me only three days and a weekend to bust out a whole essay and refine it. My first draft was nonexistent, as I spent the first day of work time verbally processing and attempting to get ideas for the essay. After not having an essay before the peer critique, and not having a draft for the critique, I had to come up with the essay myself. However, I busted out a first draft after the weekend was through and got a number of revisions by my peers who edited it and added what they wanted to see while the critique happened. After the critique intensive was over, I had a polished essay I was incredibly proud of. In the essay talking about my stutter, I wrote, “. It first appeared when I was under pressure, and could be avoided as long as I remained calm and collected, but it soon began to spread to my every day conversations, leaving me without a voice, wordless, silenced.” My essay went from nonexistent into a quality piece of writing over the span of a few days. My peers were very honest in saying what sounded cliché, and what needed to be completely rewritten. Being told aspects of my essay needed to be rewritten is not something I’ve had to deal with before, and that really pushed me to making a refined piece of work that I would be proud of. The reason why this shows my growth as a writer is because I take a long time to come to a conclusion of what I should write, often discarding many drafts and ideas before writing a draft I finally feel confident in. Because I didn’t have the time to do this, I was forced to think up an idea and roll with it without teetering back and fourth. I had to stick to my guns and write what I felt needed to be written for this essay, and it helped me grow as a writer, as I worked through all of the difficulties I faced in writing this, instead of working around them.
Another writing goal I have for myself is to refine my usage of parallel structure. I have had a hard time understanding the technicalities of parallel structure, and I want to improve that during this year. To pull another example from my Tocqueville writing, I had an error in my use of parallel structure, “Through the use of rhetoric and slipping underneath the noses of the people, they are able to successfully control the majority and thus control the vote.” I clearly had a hard time figuring out how to use parallel structure, as I spoke about a few different topics in one sentence. After revisions, I cut the use of parallel structure all together because I didn’t understand how to use in in the context and from a more technical standpoint. I want to improve this because using it properly would make my writing more complex and interesting to read, and I want to expand my writing capability as much as possible before I leave for college. In the future, I will do more research on the structure and check with Lori to make sure that I am using the structure properly.
My final writing goal for this year is to work on providing both reliable evidence and using a personal voice in my blog post writings. I want to improve on this because I will not always be producing academic writing, and I want to be able to improve upon providing the evidence you would find in an academic writing, but also providing a personal tone to the writing. I have a very formal way of writing, and I have a difficult time getting my own voice into my blog posts and other forms of personal writing. For example, in my blog posts, I write very formally. In blogs where I write personally, I don’t often provide much evidence to go along with it, usually providing anecdotal evidence. For example, “Not an hour into the debate, one of the candidates was speaking to the Iranian Nuclear Deal, and claimed he would "Rip up the bill", something that the president does not have the power to do.” I wrote this in a blog discussing the GOP debate, and didn’t provide definitive evidence, but used a personal voice. And to show when I don’t use a personal voice, it sounds like this, “While it is not a constitutional right to marry whomever you please, she did not get into any major trouble for breaking a constitutional law and is even being protected by some of the candidates.” I don’t have very much of a personal voice in that blog post. So I want to be able to combine the mixture of emotionally responding and objectively responding. I could do this by taking more time between reading or viewing the content that drives my blogs and allowing myself to cool my emotional response, and rather more evidence to back up that response.
And lastly, to show how I have already grown as a writer this semester, I have greatly improved through my college essay. Writing a college essay is scary, and you have to make sure you show a college a piece of yourself, show them why you are a good candidate, and why the college should want you. All of that needs to be achieved without sounding like your bragging about yourself. So the pressure was on, but I was out sick underdoing a few medical procedures during the first three work days of the college writing intensive, giving me only three days and a weekend to bust out a whole essay and refine it. My first draft was nonexistent, as I spent the first day of work time verbally processing and attempting to get ideas for the essay. After not having an essay before the peer critique, and not having a draft for the critique, I had to come up with the essay myself. However, I busted out a first draft after the weekend was through and got a number of revisions by my peers who edited it and added what they wanted to see while the critique happened. After the critique intensive was over, I had a polished essay I was incredibly proud of. In the essay talking about my stutter, I wrote, “. It first appeared when I was under pressure, and could be avoided as long as I remained calm and collected, but it soon began to spread to my every day conversations, leaving me without a voice, wordless, silenced.” My essay went from nonexistent into a quality piece of writing over the span of a few days. My peers were very honest in saying what sounded cliché, and what needed to be completely rewritten. Being told aspects of my essay needed to be rewritten is not something I’ve had to deal with before, and that really pushed me to making a refined piece of work that I would be proud of. The reason why this shows my growth as a writer is because I take a long time to come to a conclusion of what I should write, often discarding many drafts and ideas before writing a draft I finally feel confident in. Because I didn’t have the time to do this, I was forced to think up an idea and roll with it without teetering back and fourth. I had to stick to my guns and write what I felt needed to be written for this essay, and it helped me grow as a writer, as I worked through all of the difficulties I faced in writing this, instead of working around them.
Click Here to Read My College Essay!
Street Law Mini-Project
Infographic |
Reflection My project was about how to react when the police show up to your house or a friend’s house when you’re hosting or attending a party. It explained what to do in the situation, what the police can or cannot do and why, along with helpful tips for dealing with police in any given situation. The project’s goal was to educate students on how to party safely, as well as introduce them to what the police can or cannot do in a general sense. The way I decided to portray it is through the means of an info graphic guiding them through the scenario at hand.
This project was interesting to me because we had police officers come into the classroom one afternoon to simulate what a party bust might look like. After the scenario, the officers answered our questions about the scenario and our rights as citizens. But I felt as though some things they said didn’t directly answer our questions, or didn’t address what the student wanted to know. Namely, this happened when we were asking about specifics and “what ifs” surrounding the party scenario. Seeing as my own and my peers’ questions went relatively unanswered, I felt like creating my project based around what to do in this situation was the best idea. I also feel like providing information about the rules officers must follow in regards to entering your home, useful phrases to fully state your rights, and commonly used terminology through the means of an info graphic would help my peers and become a bit of a resource in the back of their minds during potential encounters with police officers. Learning about my rights has inspired me to educate others about their rights, something that not a lot of people actively seek out until they’re in a situation where they have to know their rights or their rights were violated. I wanted to provide this information in a relevant way so that my peers would be interested, and take something out of it. My drive to educate my peers as well as myself made for a wholesome and fun investigation into our rights as citizens. |