SLO

So for my Service Learning Organization, WashPirg, there was a year book photo shoot last week. This consisted of having student's pictures taken that had debt because of student loans and after their picture was taken, we put all of the pictures together to make a year book format book. Underneath each person's picture, there was a caption of how much debt that they were in, and how they were going to pay it off, and estimated time that they were going to pay all of that off. The photo shoot went pretty decently. We were expecting to have about 100 people in it this year, but ended up with roughly 84. Thats a lot better than last year because they only had about 50 in it. What they do with the yearbook afther they are done with it is they give it to the state senator Reichert, who is a major person that supports the cutting back of interest rates for student loans. This helps to show senator Reichert how serious of a problem that the debt that students have is. I did not enjoy doing this outside in front of the Hub because it was slightly raining and it was freezing cold. Although I may have suffered physically, at least i contributed in making things better for people that are struggling with debt.

service learning

So far, for my service learning, I meet with my instructor for an hour every thursday and plan what we are going to do. For last week, I was given the task of finding the contact information of ASUW members, an economics professor, other faculty, some state legislature member's contact information, and many other people. It was frustrating to find all of this information because it became very tedious and it was difficult to find the all of their phone numbers, fax numbers, address, email address, and their names. Some of the people on the list didn't even have a last name, so I had trouble figuring out who the person was.
A story that I have is when I wen to meet my instructors, Nicole and Shirin. I was a little bit late to our planned meeting, and Nicole was not in her office. I was about to go home, but I saw that Shirin was coming up the stairs. We then started our meeting and Nicole joined us a half hour later. She was out of breath and very happy about something. She said that the interest rates for student loans were cut and because she worked so hard to do it, she was in the front page of the Daily newspaper here at UW. She then started to freak out and wanted to make a thank you card for State Senator Reichert, because he was the main supporter of this interest rate cut. It was really fun seeing Nicole making a very flamboyant and colorful thank you card. She even put glitter all over it. She loves glitter. The most intersting thing was that there was glitter all over the table and all over the floor. It took us an additional hour to clean that up. It was a very frustrating thing to pick up glitter. After we were done cleaning up all of the glitter, I thought that we were done. However, the card was accidentally glued shut. We attempted to pull it out, but instead, we just ruined it. So for the next 2 hours, We reconstructed the card, and had to go through the whole process of finding the news paper articles, cutting multiple sheets of construction paper, myriad amounts of gluing and pasting, and a lot of coloring and glitter application. This was a very long day.

Blog Entry 2

1.The service learning that I am doing is with Wash Pirg student debt. This is an organization with many different things that they focus on. What they do is basically try to help students have an easier and more less stressful time while going to college. I am working with the student debt part of the organization. There are many other parts to washpirg such as cutting textbook prices and other things.
2.The position that I am working is working with the media. I am assigned to contact the news, state senators, and other people to come to our forum that wash pirg is holding at the end of the quarter. At the forum, the leader of the group Wash Pirg that I am working with along with her co-workers are going to inform the people in attendence about the serious debt problem and the high student loan interest rates that exist. The task of contacting all of these people is pretty difficult to do because I have to go and find the contact information for each senator and all of the other people that I have to contact. It can get pretty frustrating because it is difficult to find some of the senator's contact information. Also, I am going to be phone banking to get volunteers to come to the annual year book photo shoot. The purpose of this is to get students with debt and have their picture taken along with how much debt in loans and etc. that they have. After all of the pictures are taken and the year book is complete, we are going to send it to state senator reichert, who is the person that supports cutting student loan interest rates.
3.My student service learning is connected to Balibar by helping to become a unified nation. I may play a minor role in cutting student loan interest rates, but if I am successfull in bringing some senators and media attention to the forum that we are going to hold at the end of the quarter, I have shared knowledge with people and informed them about a problem that they were unaware of. Also if we are successful in persuading the senators in supporting the cuts in student loan interest rates, I will have been a part of helping to put everybody in an equal plane and create what Balibar claims is a "nation."