Wednesday, July 5th
Washington, DC

The first speakers that the student had this morning spoke to them about careers in the Sate Department. The husband and wife duo of Sharon and Kerry Wiener have worked in the Department of State for over twenty years. They both work at the US Embassy in France. He is the Counselor for Administrative Affairs and she is Counselor for Political Affairs. They spoke about getting started in their respective careers, the ups and downs, and what the state department is looking for in prospective employees. It was quite interesting and the students asked a LOT of questions.

The next speaker was a gentleman named Will Gunn; he is the CEO of the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Washington. He is a 25 year veteran of the Air Force and has quite impressive resume. He is Air Force Academy and Harvard Law graduate. His most recent post was the Chief Defense Council for the Department of Defense. He spoke about leadership in general and specific terms. Mr. Gunn spoke of a commitment to the greater community. A person of his stature could have easily retired from the military and made fat cash working for a defense contractor but he instead took on a more principled role of working for the Boys and Girls club.

After lunch we went to visit the Federal Reserve for a tour and a Q and A with Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. The tour was quite interesting. First of all the security at the fed seemed a great deal more extensive than the White House. I found it ironic that in the lobby of the Fed that there was art exhibition titled, “Masks”. I mean here is “Communist” country who owns a ton of our country’s bond debts. I put communist in quotation marks because they operate on some hybrid system of free enterprise and command economy. I guess they put the word command in Command Economy. They have repressive domestic policy and the Yuan (Chinese Currency) is severely undervalued. Oh well I just teach middle school, what do I know?

The room for the Board of Governors is quite impressive in that is quite palatial and ornate. We spoke to a policy analyst for about an hour and then watched a video about the Fed narrated by Charles Osgood that was nearly a decade old. Imagine School House Rock without the rock being shown on CBS Sunday Morning. It was hokey but none the less informative.

Mr. Bernanke spoke for about a half an hour then did Q and A for 45 minutes. He is a former professor and seemed quite at home in this classroom setting. Once he realized the students knew what they were talking about the intellectual level of the answers was aped up quite a few notches. He seemed pleasant and was great to meet the person controls the valves on our economy. I still would have loved to meet the legend, Alan Greenspan.

After the day’s content filled curriculum the students watched the movie “Usual Suspects” and prepped for the next day’s class. After that movie I took off and grabbed a couple of beers and saw the new movie, “Superman Returns”. No matter how old I get, whenever I here the theme for Superman I want to put a towel around my neck and run around like I did when I was kid.