Build Me Up, Buttercup -- Week 5

So week 5 has gone by and it's been one whirlwind of a week. We had some drama but we sorted it all out. We are a lot closer as a group now.
Here's the week update. I'm gonna keep it brief yo.

Saturday:
Last Saturday, we had french class and then english class. We chilled all afternoon and then we got dressed up and went out to Bethesda to see a play called Permanent Collection. It was about a black men who is put in charge of a impressionist art foundation. The underlying theme was race which provoked a lot of interesting discussion. Another highlight of the evening was getting the oppotunity to chat with the cast of the play.
Sunday:
I love lazy sundays which is basically what today was.

Monday:
We had E&L this morning. We were introduced to our case study for the week which is about economics and the new Tata Nano --"the People's Car." It's this new phenomena in India. I'm really excited for this week.

Tuesday:
Tuesday was a generally chill day of school. In the evening though, during flex period, we had our rescheduled meeting with Justin Goforth of the Whitman Walker AIDS Clinic. He had a lot of interesting things to say and it was great hearing his perspecitve about the AIDS epidemic in DC.

Wednesday:
Today was our all day session of E&L. We spent the whole day at school but it was really interesting never the less. First we had a session with Matt Ellis, who helped Noah start the school, about econ and why the Tata Nano rocks. He presented from the sellers perspective. We then had a session with Henry about peoples perspective on the Nano. He provided a lot of insight especially because he live in India for 9 months. We had a session with Noah about corporation persepective. We had a session with heather about environmental perspective.  We then went out to lunch. I went to Sweet Green with Megan, Kyra, Emily, Caity, Will, and Isabel. It's a good salad place. DC has a lot of those. They are really trendy. After lunch we met with Naharika Joe, the General Manager of Tata North America. She was amazingggg! By far my favorite speaker thus far. After her presentation, we had a nice group discussion about gender and the business world and politics. We always have the most amazing discussions here.
Wednesday's I have french class, but while I was at french class some drama went down. It was blown out of proportion, but now it's all been resolved.

Thursday:
No one really slept because everyone was up until 2 talking and trying to get everything sorted out. It helped that the alam never really got set so we were kind of free to move around the floors.  Needless to say, everyone was crazzzzzy tired all day. The teachers noticed and they did not approve. Consequently, we had an early check in that night, which was fine with me. People got off my floor earlier, making it easier for me to do my homework.

Friday:
We had a regular school day. But in the afternoon for E&L, we met with Welford Dillard, the VP of OPower. We discussed clean energy and the business world with him. I still need to figure out how our meeting with him relates to the rest of our case study. Any ideas?
Later on Friday, we went to Noah's career mentors house for dinner. She has the most amazing house ever! The outside is like a brick row house, but the inside is like a wonderful ski chalet. We had a great dinner, and we all just hung out and rebonded as a group through silly games and of course, Apples to Apples.

Saturday: I have to wake up earlier than everyone else for french class, but that's fine because I really like french class. After french we have english class where we all recited our memorized St. Crispin's Day speeches from Henry V. After class we had lunch and then we all ventured to the mall to explore the various Smithsonians. I went to the Air and Space Museum with Aaron, Teddy, Trevor, Sophie, and Nitika. It was good to hang out with them and get to know them better. Later in the evening, we all dressed up as either preps or punks, and then we went to Good Stuff Eatery again for milkshakes. All the weird looks we got were priceless. That might have been one of the funnest nights here. After milkshakes, we had yet another rave. I see a tradition arising.

Sunday:
Sunday's are chill days. All we do is hang out and do homework. It's great to be able to relax since our weeks our so hectic.

Alright. On to week 6. I'm excited for this week because I'll be meeting with my congressman on Wednesday -- yes, our case study for this week is about congress. Yay! Time is flying, but now I must go to sleep. Good night!

"to whom much is given, much is expected." week 4

Everything is seriously going by way too quickly. Week 4 is coming to a close, and here's a brief look at what all went on this week.

Monday:
Every Monday morning, as you know, we have our Ethics and Leadership case introduction. This week our case study was about education. To kick off our case study, we discussed Social Contract Theory and the veil of ignorance with Noah. He then asked us several questions about our ideal school (while we were under the veil of ignorance of course). After that Heather presented a detailed powerpoint about the different education divisons - public, charter, and private. I'm really excited for this case study because it relates directly to us! It's a hugeeeee part of our lives.  Today we also had a very interesting speaker in math and spanish class. Maylen likes to find various spanish speaking people to come speak to us so we can expand our knowledge of the language. We met with Tony Seba, a professor at Stanford. He talked to us about his work in clean energy/solar energy. He talked about the same thing when our math class met with him. Today was also one of those days when we go out to lunch. I went to Firehook, a bakery and cafe, with Winson, Jorge, and Teddy. Firehook is yummy and we get a 20% discount with our student id's.

Tuesday:
Tuesday was pretty much a regular school day. Yay school!

Wednesday:
This week was another one of those crazy weeks where the schedule gets flipped around. Instead of having E&L, we had a regular day of school. It was another one of those out for lunch days. I went to Smoothie King/Subway with Will, Everett, Trevor, Teddy, and Aaron. We also have a new staff member! His name is Stephen, and he just graduated from WashU. He's our new food coordinator and he's really cool!

Thursday:
Today, we had E&L in the morning and regular school in the afternoon. We met with Kevin Jennings, Assistant Deputy Secretary for Safe and Drug-Free Schools. He provided a lot of insight about education and reform. This week's case study has been very interesting. We also had another Arabic lesson and we learned a lot of new words. It's really hard to learn, it's such a fascinating language. Also, I went to dinner at my Aunt and Uncle's house. It was really great to see my cousins and family for the first time since I've been in DC. We watched the olympics and just chilled. It was nice.

Friday:
Today was legit E&L class. We visited a think tank called Education Sector to meet with Kristen Amundson. She had a wealth of knowledge about school systems from her many years serving on the Fairfax county school boad.  After that we were all allowed to go out to lunch. I went to this little indian restaurant called Naan and Beyond with Kyra and Winson and then we went to Robek's. In the afternoon we did school visits to see how different types of schools work. We visited Sidwell Friends to get the private school outlook and then we visited Thurgood Marshall Academy to get the charter school point of view. Both schools were amazing! After dinner we went on a special field trip to Good Stuff Eatery, which is Chef Spike from Top Chef's restaurant. I had one of the best milk shakes that I had had in a long time.

Today, we are going to see a play called Permanent Collections. It should be really good! I'm excited!

Yupp. This is my home now! I don't want to leave. Everything is going by way too quickly.

Week 3 Comes to a Close

Heyyy! So it's late and I'm tired so this will be a very brief blog entry.

Wednesday: We were the only school open within a 50 mile radius. Sweet. We had classes at the dorm, the congressional, and via skype.

Thursday: Ethics and Leadership was rescheduled because of the snow on Wednesday. A lot of the really exciting stuff was cancelled because basically everything in DC shuts down when it snows. This city just cannot handle it. The streets weren't plowed for like 3 days and I laughed at all the horrible drivers. Anyhow, for E&L, in the morning we had a make up english class where we discussed the Plato's Allegory of the Cave. We were then introduced to an exciting part of our case study -- the proposal. We were split up into 3 groups: Haiti, India, and South Africa. I was on South Africa with Audrey, Nitika, Tracy, Teddy, and Jorge. We were to research HIV/AIDS in South Africa and formulate a proposal to PEPFAR on what they should do to help solve the epidemic. Later in the day we met with Ambassador Mark Dybul who was in charge of PEPFAR during the Bush Administration.

Friday: Things were pretty much back to normal. Although, we did reschedule our Arabic Class that was supposed to be on Thursday or Friday. We met with Philippe Leopold, a real estate developer in DC, Portugal, and UAE. He talke about starting a business in the Middle East. He also brought us some yummy Austrian snacks from his family's restaurant in Georgetown. Also we had a speaker from Global Citizen Year speak to us about their gap year program during lunch.

Saturday: French and English in the morning, per usual. Although, Noah wasn't there to teach class so Henry did. We worked on our proposals for a bit and then, instead of discussing Henry V, we staged a war modeled after the one in the play. In the afternoon, everyone walked to the Native American Museum and the Botanical Gardens. After our Chinese New Years dinner, we had a Valentines Day dance party. Woo!

Sunday: Today we had brunch at 12 and just chilled out all day and did homework. We were supposed to go ice skating, but no one wanted to go. We delivered Valentines and watched the Olympics. Sundays are very chill.

Alright, week 4 starts tomorrow. This is going by way too fast.

Week 3 Update

Hey everyone! It's wednesday morning, and I'm sitting in my dorm room, staring out the window at this ridiculous blizzard.  DC is not supposed to get this much snow. Any how, today is a weird day. It's supposed to be Ethics and Leadership, but due to the white out snow conditions, we are having our thursday classes in the dorm today.

Alright: Here's my update of the past 5 days or so. Blogs are very hard to stay on top of.

Friday:
1. For our Ethics and Leadership class, Bud Krogh returned to talk to us about one of his many ehtical dilemmas during his time on Nixon's White House staff. We talked about the BIA protest and how he resolved the problem without bloodshed. It's a really interesting story. You should look it up.
2. Later that night as  Ethics and Leadership continued, we all watched a documentary about Rwandan genocide.  The movie was  PBS production and it was called "Ghosts of Rwanda." It was a fascinating and eye opening movie. The movie certainly had a different effect on everyone. Some were furious, some were stunned and silent, some were in hysterics. It was a very powerful movie that led to us all asking the question: Why?
3. After the movie a very heated argument, or discussion if you will, occured in the foyer. Trevor and Caity were arguing about the existence of God and how he could let something so horrible happen to so many people in Rwanda. Eventually everyone got into the argument and it turned into abig 2 hour ordeal. Robbie, the RA, said that this would be the first of very many of these type of argments.

Saturday:
1. Due to Epic Snow Part 2, my french class this morning was held over the telephone. It was rather strange, but I guess it worked. My french class tonight (wednesday) will be held them same way because of Epic Snow Part 3. Thank you Washington.
2. DC basically shuts down in any snow, so, of course, the airport was closed so our guest speaker couldn't fly in to talk to us. Fortunately, skype exists. So for our english class, we skyped with Pastor Carl Wilkens, who was the last american in Rwanda during the genocide. He answered our questions and provided us with a lot of hope about the situation. He is a very powerful speaker and a very special guy.
3. The snow kind of cramps our style here at SEGL. Our saturday night plans were cancelled again -- but we made do with what we had, which was a lot of snow! So all of us ran down to the park and had a giant snow ball fight.  It ended up in a truce though because everyone was cold and wanted to go back and get hot chocolate. After that, we all watched EuroTrip in Will, Teddy, Tracy, and Winson's room. That is one funny movie and it was a great bonding time! We do a lot of bonding. After dinner, we watched Up! and then we had a spontaneous dance party in Kyra and Emily's room. It was a lot of fun. We are planning on buying some strobe lights so we can have awesome dance parties every weekend. Although, a lot of think that we needt o make some friends in DC to invite to our dane parties. 17 people isn't that much of a party.

Sunday:
1. Sunday's are chill days. We sleep in and have brunch at like noon. It's great. We also have lots of free time to sign out so we can do fun things around the neighborhood. Kyra, Audrey, Caity, Emily, Trevor, Aaron, Tracy and I all signed out so we could go hang out at Union Station Mall. I definitely remember being there in 8th grade on my DC trip. It's so weird because back then I would have never guessed that I'd be spending this amazing semester in DC right now. I love ittttt.
2. An integral part of Sundays is homework time. I'm getting to be a pro at doing my homework with lots of distractions because living in this house means constant distractions, but I wouldn't trade that for the world. We help eachother stay motivated to finish our work and we help eachother with things we don't understand. We even have giant study parties for math tests and history tests.
3. SUPER BOWL SUNDAYYYYY! We had a giant super bowl party, complete with all the unhealthy game time snacks you could ever want. Everyone pretty much cheered for the Saints, so it was awesome to see them win!

Monday:
1. Every Monday marks the beginning of a new case study. This week our case study is about the HIV/AIDS Epidemic in Washington, DC and the world.  Also, every Monday during our Ethics and Leadership block we do a simulation to kick off the new case study. This week we were all members of a tribe in Africa that had been infected by AIDS. We had viles of fluid that we had to exchange with three other people so we could see how quickly the virus spreads. We did that three times, but each time more and more people were using condoms instead of freely exchanging fluids which showed how protection can greatly reduce the spread of the virus.
2. I also had an APUSH test today. I think it went pretty well. It was a lot different than KP's tests, but I liked the format because there were no multiple choice which is what I'm really bad at.
3. Finally I got my phone fixed! Yay! I'm back to texting. Unfortuntely though, they couldn't transfer any of the software or data over so I lost all my numbers. My number is still the same so feel free to text me your number.

Tuesday:
Today was a regular school day. Although, we were given $5 dollars to go out to lunch. I went to Chop't, this great DC area salad restaurant, with Kyra, Nitika, Audrey, Winson and Jorge. It was a jolly time. Recently, the subways have been super delayed because of the bad weather -- they are calling it the "snow-pocalypse." It's blizzarding today. Sweet.

That is all. Maybe I'll start to update more frequently. Bye!

History does not repeat itself, but it can rhyme. 2/1 - 2/4

Again, I'm going to try to keep this short and sweet. I'm going to list 3 exciting things that happened each day this week thus far. Stellar.

Monday:
1. We had ethics and leadership first period. It was awesome and intriuging as usual. We were divided into two different civilizations with distinct characteristics and were instructed to act like our various groups and try to work together. I was a Henxor. The others were the Alanians. The whole simulation was about how groups interact with each other, like in invasions and wars etc. It was very interesting. I'm starting to think that every Monday we will have an interesting and fun simulation to introduce our case study for the week.
2. I also got my first practice APUSH essay back. I got a pretty good grade on it which is weird because normally that is not the case. Maybe being in DC will cause me to get better grades? Hmm, but that sure would be nice. I also might now be taking the AP exam. I've got so many things to figure out now haa.
3. All in all, Monday's are rough. It's just a regular school day and we have to get up way too early for my liking.

Tuesday:
1. Tuesday is a pretty lame day too. It's just a regular day. We don't have special classes or anything. First we have school meeting, then I have a free, and then APUSH, Lunch, Spanish, CoGoPo, PreCalc, and English. During my free, I walked down to the Verizon Store on L Street with Megan and Aaron. As most of you probably know, my phone hasn't been working for the past few weeks, so I'm finally getting it taken care of. Verizon is shipping me a brand new phone and it should arrive any day now.
2. We also had a PreCalc test. It was an epic fail for everyone. We have been moving too fast, but thankfully Maylen cut down the course, so now we are moving at a much more managable pace.  This week we are starting trig. Good thing I've already learned all of this.
3. It snowed again on Tuesday night, so we decided to have a spontaneous snow ball fight. The little things like that make me absolutely love being here! Everyone is so fun and full of life which makes this experience all the more enjoyable.

Wednesday:
1. Every wednesday, we have Ethics and Leadership all day long. Generally we go out to visit various think tanks and converse with important people in DC. This week we travelled to The Center for the Study for the Presidency where we talked with Dr. David Abshire, a Special Counselor to President Reagan and the U.S. Ambassador to NATO from 1983-1987.  After briefly meeting with Mr. Abshire, we met with Mr. Egil "Bud" Krogh, one of the Plumbers who was imprisoned for President Nixon's Watergate Scandal. He made a presentation about integrity in the government. His presentation was very eye opening; he showed that he wanted to better his life after he made so many mistakes.

2. Also on Wednesday, we were introduced to another part of SEGL's lunch program, which is the ability to eat out 2-3 days a week. We are each given $5 to spend at 4 restaurants around DuPont where SEGL students have a special discount. I didn't go to one of those restaurants, instead I went to Saigon Bistro with Kya, Jorge, Winson, Teddy, Tracy, Will, and Everett.  The food was good, but it took a while to make, so we were a little bit late getting back to school. Oh well. But I'm really excited for these lunch time opportunities to explore DC.
3. An important part of SEGL is the leadership component. Wednesday afternoon we discovered what type of leaders we are. First we were split into groups by whether we made gut decisions or decisions through reasoning. Next we were split into groups by whether we were the first to talk in the group or the last.  After we were divided into groups, we were given the task of designing the perfect day. Each group presented their perfect day and then Noah explained the leadership type of each group. There are the Drivers, the Analysts, the Expressives, and the Supportives. I was a mix of Supportive and Expressive.

Thursday:
1. Thursdays are generally pretty chill days. The only exciting part is Arabic class. Today we learned more about general Arabic phrases and a lot more about writing. Today we learned how to say and write hajj. You write it like this: الحج.  I'm really horrible at writing and speaking Arabic. I think it's going to be one of those languages that I will never get the hang of.
2. I finally got mail! Today, I got two letters, one from Ellie and one from Emily. Thanks girls! Soo everyone send me mail. Please send all mail to the address listed on my facebook. :)
3. Another exciting part of today has been the power outage at the Residential building. So needless to say, I am STILL at the school. It hasn't been a very productive night since there is really nowhere quiet to study. We are leaving to go back to our cold and powerless dorm in 20 minutes. Yay!

This week has been pretty awesome. It's going by so quickly though. I wish it would just slow down.