Monday, June 20, 2016
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Two weeks have passed. That’s 336 hours, which is 20,160 minutes, which is 1,209,600 seconds as an SPS intern. Significant progress has been made on our project. The four of us, Stephen, Lance, Victoria and I have finished our first go-through of the lesson plans, which means that they’re all in the 5E format (a standardization of lesson plans that helps clearly define the standards that are being met while giving the teacher more structure in the planning process), and have the associated standards listed and the supplementary materials complete. So we have commenced the process of re-reading all of them together as a group. Given what we have to do, we have made good time and if we keep our pace up, we should finish going through them in about two weeks’ time. This is great, because that’s when we’re hoping to have the basic structure for the website up, which we can upload everything to in order to start getting it all set up and ready to launch by the end of the summer.
They city has been livened by the Jazz concert that's going on in multiple places around the city. I went to one of the free concerts from the series Jazz in the Hoods with Victoria, where we saw Allyn Johnson, Charlie Young and the UDC Jazztet perform at UDC's Center for the Arts.
This past Friday the interns were invited to go bowling and have dinner with the Executive Committee. The food provided was fantastic, and while I definitely struggled with the whole “bowling” part of the evening (let’s just say I’m not very coordinated), it was still definitely a success. Afterwards, some of the interns went for a walking tour of the National Monuments. As always, they were gorgeous in the spotlights and the only thing that made the night better was the clear weather to match our moods.
Also, since I forgot to mention this in my last blog post, I’ll mention it here. I had the opportunity the Sunday before the internship started to meet Lawrence Krauss, a very well-known theoretical physicist and cosmologist who I had the pleasure of meeting once before when he gave a talk about astrophysics at the National Museum of Natural History my senior year of high school. When I met him before, I got a picture with him. Since I knew I would see him again, I decided it would be fun to print out the picture of us together, and take another picture together while holding the picture that was taken several years before (the technique is known as the Droste effect). Dr. Krauss seemed delighted by my idea, and after the picture was taken, promptly told me that he looked forward to the next one. I do too!
Samantha Spytek