Monday, June 19th
Washington, DC

Now we’re cooking with gas. We spent the first part of the morning with group at a Ropes course on the campus of an all girl’s school in northern Virginia, called the Madiera School. For the those who don not know a ropes course is a basically an obstacle course, usually elevated above the ground. The challenges force groups to work together in team problem solving activities. The activities progress from easy to hard to let the groups gain confidence in each other. They also help build leadership and listening skills among the group. Younger people are much more successful at these endeavors than older ones. The students performed wonderfully. There was some initial talking over people but that subsided quickly and most of the activities went without a hitch. The debriefing of the actives was minimal, due to their facilitators not the students. I think the Bridges folk due a much better job getting more out of the activities. But I digress. We transport the kids via the BYB, “Big yellow (school) bus”. For many of the private school kids this was their first time on such a bus. Funny to watch.
After cleaning up and getting fed the students began work on introduction to the basic Constitutional foundations of the US court system and the process of Supreme Court cases. The case they focused on was Gideon v. Wainwright (1963). In this landmark case the Supreme Court ruled unanimously using the sixth and fourteenth amendments to rule the government must provide lawyers to those defendants unable to afford their own. The kids, led by other faculty members, went into a great deal procedural history and information that the handling a Supreme Court case requires. Interestingly enough one of the key lawyers in this case was Abe Fortas, a graduate of Rhodes, and his son was a classmate of mine at Rhodes also. The kids handled the studies quite well, particularly because they were working from about 7 till 9:30pm on this.