My capstone for this year consisted of writing and creating a children's book and to accompany it is my research paper.

Update your bill (all of them) progress.

Unfortunately none of my bills had any progress since my last bill tracking.

Reflect on:
The
current situation for the health care bill in the Senate. What is
happening? What happened over the weekend? What is the path forward for
potential passage?

HOUSE BILL~ NO ACTION

CONGRESS BILL~ NO ACTION

SENATE BILL~ NO ACTION

As far as the executive branch's role within each of these bills, I believe that the president should step in and kind of "coach" each specific one. For example, with the federal reserve transparency act, the presdient shold come and and just kind of tweak the bill so that it could be officially passed.

For my city council bill, hearing notices will be sent out on the 29th of october.

NO ACTION on my congress bill as of today.

NO ACTION  on my state bill as of today.

US Congress Bill ~ NO LATEST ACTION

PA State Bill ~ NO RECENT ACTION

City Council Bill ~  There will be a City Council meeting tomorrow (10/22/09) at 10am in room 400.

Of the three proposed bills, I believe that the City Council Bill (Towing) should be passed becausethe bill movesin the right direction. The bill proposes that vehicles reported stolen should not be towed unless warning has been given to the car's owner. In Philadelphia, there is a problem with stolen vehicles and by passing this bill, owners are able to recover their cars.

Previously, in M.E.T. the topic of conversation has been about schools and education in society today. By reading a variety of resources provided by Mr. Lehmann, my entire perspective of the educational world is somewhat different than before. The ideas proposed in each of these readings have been backed up with actual numbers and sufficient amounts of evidence. Some of the articles stood out in a sense that we as products of education in our society have to sort of come together when it deals with matters of the school system.

Take Diana Ravitch’s article for example; what she stated was “For the past century, our schools of education have obsessed over critical-thinking skills, projects, cooperative learning, experiential learning, and so on. But they have paid precious little attention to the disciplinary knowledge that young people need to make sense of the world.” I totally agree with this statement and I believe that it is so true. Most schools nowadays are so set on getting students to understanding certain answers to some problems, but that isn’t important. In the midst of all this, what’s important is the thought process in which the students need to think about in order to GET to the answer. In modern society today, some schools lose sight of this “way of education” when it should be a top priority. Here at SLA, we value collaboration and the thought process behind finding the answer to a math problem or the answer to a formula in Physics. It weighs more heavily on the actual steps and reasoning to how you arrived at the answer you have. Based on all of this, my vision of school would be an institution where students will know how to think things through and arrive at a reasonable conclusion based on thinking alone. I believe that it is just as important and crucial to know the steps in a math problem than just knowing the answer because it’s the steps that get you to the endpoint. It will include teachers who eat, sleep and breathe teaching children the concepts and well as the thought process that is involved. My school values knowledge and thinking over anything else. At the end of the day an average student will be able to fully explain a problem and give you a solution as well. This type of school would definitely be great for society because I feel that it brings traditional values back while also incorporating new and different ones too. The overall purpose of my school would be to teach children the knowledge that they need to succeed in life and the importance of that specific knowledge. Compared to a “traditional” school, my students will understand the answer more clearly and have the skills to actually explain it at the end of the day.

There hasn't been any recent recent actions on any one of my three bills since about two weeks ago. I mean with the topics that my bills include I pretty sure by the next bill tracking, I'll have some hot action to report. My US Congress bill talks about Federal Reserve and audits by the government. The reason I believe that it isn't getting much attention is because of the Healthcare Bill right now. Congress is pretty focused on America's healthcare system and proposing a better solution.

Because of the lack of action on any of bills, I decided to change them. I figured that my US Congress bill (H.R. 49) isn't going to go anywhere so I switched to H.R. 1207. This is the Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009 which states how audits are reported and how the Board of Governors in the Federal Reserve are audited. The most recent action was on the 24th of September when the Committee Hearings were held. The PA State Bill that I chose is Senate Bill 1085 which provides funds for expenses through the fiscal year July 1, 2009 to June 30, 2010. So far this bill has just been laid on the table (introduced). My last bill is the "Towing" section of the Philadelphia Code that prohibits the towing of stolen vehicles unless the police notified the owner of the vehicle. There is no similarities between my three bills because each has its on subject matter.

There hasn't been any movement with H.R.49 or my city council bill since my last blog entry. As far as my PA State bill goes, there hasn't been any new action with it as well.I
believe that the overall content of my bills contribute to the pace at
which they are moving.With the American Energy bill, there hasn't been
anyaction for months and it's most likely because of the actual wording of the bill. It's a possibility that neither of my bill will continue to move forward. I might just have to give up on them and pick other bills that have more "potential".

The US Congress bill that I am following is H.R. 49 which is the American Energy Independence Price Reduction Act. What this bill does is it requires the Secretary to establish programs thar develops and produces gas and oil resources. So far there hasn't been any recent action on the bill that I chose. The most recent action took place back on February 3rd of this year. Although the congress bill that I've chosen seems like a good bill, I don't think that it will get very far. Based on its most up to date action, I believe that it'll continue to be at a standstill.

Quarter 4 History Benchmark url: http://www.wix.com/ARollins15/What-IF-American-History?orgDocID=5Fgn2S9R...

 http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=79a1574ce4f50b19253d 

Sports teams have a huge impact on major cities and play a key role in their identities. There are some cities that represent their sports teams to the fullest and some just don't care. With the Phillies winning the World Series, some people are die hard fans that were up til the early hours of the morning just to celebrate the big win. On the other hand, I for one am not a die hard baseball fan so the win was minor in my eyes. I don't like Philly sports teams so once there is a win under our belt, it's nothing major to me.

Do you ever wonder how serious obesity is? Well according to the Surgeon General, 2 out of 3 people die because of being obese or overweight. Also, 1 in every 8 deaths are caused from conditions bought on by obesity. In order to help decrease high rates of obesity, something has to be done. The Greater Rochester Health Foundation plans to spend $50 million on a campaign and programs to address the childhood obesity issue. In the United Kingdom $739 million is being used to help fight obesity as well.

Obesity is a costly problem that the U.S. is currently dealing with. In 1999, the total hospital cost for obesity was $127 million. The cost was up from $35 million in 1981. In the year 2000, that number has jumped to $117 billion for the same costs. Of that $91 million was spent on treating type 2 diabetes. Now, the average cost to treat an obese person is $1200 more that what it was in 2002. Between 1987 and 2000, the cost was only $287 more.