We the People: the Citizen and the Constitution. According to Wikipedia, it is "a yearly competition for American high school students... styled as a congressional hearing. Each team is divided up into six units... Each unit focuses on a particular area of Constitutional interest - from the philosophical underpinnings and Constitutional Convention to modern day implications. ... Each unit prepares three four-minute speeches in response to formal prompts ... and a panel of three judges will have a six minute questioning period to ask follow-up questions."
At the end of the 2011 Competition, the New Jersey Team placed third in the nation. The team? East Brunswick High School.
In November, the class was divided up into its units. I, along with 3 others, was in Unit 1, the "philosophical underpinnings" of our government. Bascially we buried ourselves in natural rights philosophy, read John Locke religiously, literally memorized Magna Carta, and covered every second of Western history from the Middle Ages to Obama's administration. In the beginning, it was really hard. Our speeches were long and redundant. We flatly missed the point of the question on one of our first versions. We got into hour-long screaming matches over the difference between a claimed right v. owned right.
As a class, we were yelled at often. We couldn't keep our mouth shut. Our teacher was ready to hit us at times. We slacked.
But in January, we made top three at Regionals and advanced to States!! (a word which until then had been referred to as the S-word).
Then came more work, until February 4th, when we went down to Trenton for the States Competition, and for the 23rd time, we, East Brunswick, came out as State Champions and advanced to NATIONALS (formerly known as the N-word).
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