DC

Despite all the schoolwork that's coming home to roost right now, I made the somewhat foolish decision to do almost no work Saturday. I spent the morning and early afternoon at a service project in Clifton Lake High School cleaning out their destitute vo-tech wing. It was good to feel like we were helping, but it was also depressing -- the school district is just completely overwhelmed by the demands on its limited resources. As I'm learning in our neighborhood project for class, the vast majority of people with the means to do so send their kids to private schools, of which Baltimore has an unusually large number. The resultant concentration of disadvantaged kids doesn't help the learning environment, and political support for the schools collapses among the civically engaged part of the public because they don't see themselves as having a stake in them.


Saturday evening was the IPS alumni reception in Washington. We all got dressed up and ate appetizers and consumed free drinks at a fancy restaurant called Blackie's. I talked to a very helpful and friendly alum who works at the GAO, where I would dearly like to intern/work.

A bunch of us went out to a bar after the reception. I had a long argument with a few of my (female) classmates about why Boy Scouts are better than Girl Scouts. As I recall, it all came down to their "pansy knots" (I was kidding). Rana was nice enough to let me and a couple others stay at her apartment in DC so we didn't have to come back to Baltimore last night. A good outing in all.