Week 4

Wow, I cannot believe that I am already halfway finished with my internship! I feel like I am just starting to fully understand the day-to-day undertakings of our office, and am already feeling sad that the rest of the journey is short lived. I guess the one positive I have with this, is to think about all I have learned and accomplished in my first 4 weeks, and how I have 4 more weeks to learn and accomplish much, much more.

7/20/10: Today was just a normal, conference call Monday. The day started with our weekly call to Ellen, where there was not too much new to report other than just a discussion about the possible Senate markups that would be taking place on Thursday. (This we later found out was being postponed inexplicably until next Tuesday). After this call, Augustus, Jason and I headed to the hill to attend the bi-monthly meeting for the STEM-Ed Coalition, which is a coalition representing all of the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics education interests in Washington. They were discussing the hopes that their bill, the America Competes Act, would be dropped on the floor for votes within the next few weeks, and also discussed how to better publicize their national STEM-Ed day for teachers. After this meeting, we returned to the office, and I sat in on the board call, which is obviously a strategic and regular meeting for the members of the board of KA.

7/21/10: Today was one of the rare days where I got to stay in the office all day, which was nice considering that the rest of the week is going to be very active and busy. The day began with Jim, John, Jason and I held a retreat planning meeting, which was probably one of the most lengthy, detail-oriented meetings I have ever been to. The purpose of this meeting was to just sit down and flush out EVERY single detail we could think of that needed to be taken care of before the retreat happening in 2 weeks. This included ideas such as, should we order lanyards for our guests, to exactly who should be keeping time for each presentation, to how do we want the presenters to be introduced, etc., etc., etc. I definitely understand why companies hire people to plan their retreats for them, but I certainly do commend Knowledge Alliance's gusto and success thus far in planning their own company retreat. After the meeting, Jason and I dabbled in graphic design by designing our retreat materials, particularly the conference agenda. We decided to save paper and just print half sheet agendas for the meeting, which was much more difficult and time-consuming than originally expected. Once again, I can see why people hire professionals to take care of their graphic design needs, but I must say that I am pretty damn proud of the product we were able to make, because it does look fairly professionally-made if you ask me. The day ended, however, with getting the opportunity to attend the first night's dinner of our DC hill days with our members met members by attending dinner at the most well-known Indian restaurant in DC called Rasika. This dinner was an opportunity for the visiting members to get together to socialize and go over the agenda for the DC days occurring over the next two days, and it was great getting to meet many of the members whose names I have been seeing over the last month, and having the chance to finally put a face to those names. Plus, for never eating Indian food, I was pretty damn impressed. Despite there being a ton of cilantro in some of the dishes, some just blew me away, including the Dal Malsaka (sp?- Black Lentil) and Salmon dishes.

7/22/10: This morning was an early morning, since we had a breakfast business meeting for our DC days at the Monocle restaurant at 7:45 AM. This working breakfast included two guest speakers, Judy Wurtzel from dept. of ed. and David Cleary from Sen. Lamar Alexander's office. Both speakers gave fairly differing talks on the state of ed. policy from an executive point of view and a congressional point of view. Some of the main takeaways we received was that there was certainly no way that ESEA reauthorization would be taking place this year, and realistically, not until 2012; that there needs to be a much better attempt from the research community to not only make their findings accessible to legislators, but also to be able to effectively translate their findings for practitioners on the ground; and that ed. policy work is being conducted on a fairly bipartisan level, despite the fact that many Republicans do not want the democrats or Obama to receive credit for education reform, so the timetable is being for reform is being slowed down. David Cleary is a very blunt, and political speaker, and it was nice to actually bring in an opinion from the Republican side of the aisle, even if I didn't necessarily agree with everything he was saying. After the meeting at the Monocle, I got to sit in on 4 meetings with one of Knowledge Alliance's members, David Monk, who is the current Dean for the College of Education at Penn State. These meetings took us all over the hill, getting to meet with Legislative Assistant's (LA's) from Sen. Spector, Sen. Casey, Rep. Castle, and Rep. Holt's offices. These meetings were really dedicated to discussing the role that Penn State has been playing as a REL for the Mid-Atlantic region, and how the process could really be improved if more funding was available to assist with the dissemination of research. What good is conducting solid, scientifically-valid research if you do not have the ability to actually share the results with anybody? I did get to meet soon-to-be Senator Castle (from Delaware), who happened to walk into the office while we were waiting for his assistant to meet with us, and he actually already knew who we were and shook our hands. That was exciting since apparently members of Congress do not usually go out of their way to interact with those who are waiting in their offices. We also go to shake Rep. Holt's hand as well, although he was running out to catch a vote being conducted on the floor. That evening was the last dinner with our members for the DC days, which was held at a very delicious restaurant called Founding Farmer's. I probably embarrassed myself by ordering the fried chicken and waffles with macaroni and cheese and spinach...but I just had to do it. C'mon, I don't get to eat farm fresh southern food very often :)

7/22/10- At the beginning of the day, Augustus and I headed to the hill to attend 2 meetings with another member, Peter Hofman, from Measured Progress. The first meeting was held with the education LA for Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), and the second meeting was held with the very important (and ridiculously busy) Jamie Fasteau, who is the head education staff member for the House Ed. Labor committee. (Basically, she is the lead drafter of the ESEA bill in the house). Both meetings were very interesting for me because I got to learn about what Measured Progress does, which is creates assessments for states and school districts that are standards-based. What Mr. Hofman was trying to establish in both meetings was that the current ESRA bill does not contain strong language for assessment literacy, or professional development that aims at improving teacher's assessment literacy skills in the classroom. Assessment literacy basically refers to the teacher's ability to actually understand how to create and teach students on how to test properly. One of the ideas I heard that I found to be very intriguing was this idea that Measured Progress has begun to create tests that contain a "hint." Students who miss an answer will be provided a hint, but they will receive less points than if they were able to answer the question without one. The idea behind this is that students should feel as though we want them to succeed on tests, rather than just giving them "gotcha" questions. One thought that was brought up that I found to be very thought-provoking was this idea that a student will fail an algebra test, and automatically be down on him/herself and say that they are bad at math. This lack of confidence can in some cases cause that student to forever lose interest in the subject and give up at trying (trust me, I have seen this with my students many times). However, this same student in many instances will go home and play a video game that they will fail at many times, but continue to try to pass levels, because they know they can learn from their failure. How can we as educators replicate this same mentality at school? This is just something that I would like to think about as I begin my third year of teaching in the fall. Anyways, after the meetings, Augustus and I got to try Spike Mendehlson's (from Top Chef) restaurant, Good Stuff Eatery, for lunch. The line was ridiculously long for this burger joint, but wow, what a great burger. I got the Good Stuff melt which contained cheddar, meunster cheese, mushrooms and carmelized onions, and it was pretty tasty. Both Augustus and I promised not to tell Jason who was stuck back at the office that he missed such a tasty lunch. In the afternoon, Jason and I finished putting some final touches on our agenda that we had been working on, and had a very lengthy discussion over which logo to use. We asked our boss which one he liked better, and I'm proud to say he chose mine. This day was also memorable in the fact that Kevin and I got to meet our neighbors across the hall, Jeremy and Christina, and they were so nice. It was great to have social interaction with them and a small group of their friends, and we ended up karaoking with them until 3AM (on a work night, nonetheless)! It was a blast, and I'm very glad that I've decided to make this summer the "summer of yes." It would have certainly been easier to just sit at home that night since I was exhausted, but I'm very glad that we decided to step out of our comfort zones and join a group of strangers in their festivities. The people in our apartment are some of the most accepting, open-armed people I have met in a long time, and it certainly made me realize that I wish we lived in a place in LA where we actually spoke to our neighbors, or at least knew who they were.

7/23/10- Surprisingly, I was not too tired today despite my 3AM stint at karaoke. The morning began with the weekly CEF meeting, where it was very evident that the membership was furious that the Senate had decided to cut the education jobs bill out of the supplemental the night before. There is really no way that the $10B in education jobs will be put through this year, which will undoubtedly mean that school districts will be forced to cut many teacher jobs this year. The guest speaker was Gideon Bragin, the education LA for Rep. Honda (D-CA), and former Bay Area TFA alum. Mr. Bragin filled the members in on how active Congressman Honda is in the education sector, and is hopeful that ESEA reauthorization will be coming soon. After this meeting, Jason and I headed down to the Center for American Progress, where we got to sit in on a speech from the House Majority Leader, Steny Hoyer (D-MD). This speech was meant to be a forum on "job creation," but unfortunately all of the ideas Mr. Hoyer had were very long-term solutions, and did not seem to be very quick fixes. I think the idea that I am most counting on, and one that will be heating up very soon, is the idea of allowing the Bush tax cuts expire for the wealthiest Americans (those making >$250,000/year). It just does not make sense to allow these to continue, when they will just be adding another $1.3 trillion to the deficit. I guarantee that this will be the most contentious issue of the November elections, and I am confident that the Democrats have the more convincing argument in this case...but of course, raising taxes is never the most popular stance to take, but I doubt many Americans would condone the deficit increasing so that the wealthy could earn tax breaks...I mean, heck, politicians just recently blocked unemployment so that it wouldn't add to the deficit. Anyways, off of my soap box...Jason and I were not too impressed with Majority Leader Hoyer's speech, but it was certainly neat to hear him speak and see all of the video cameras from C-Span set up to film him. The rest of the day was spent returning to the office and working on more retreat planning tasks.