In my government class this year, I would say the most important thing that I learned was how to use legal documents to express what I belief in and how I should argue for a certain position. After learning how to use the legal documents to our advantage and how to argue a position, I am better suited to write an argumentative essay to express what I belief in. I think learning how to write an argumentative essay will better me in writing any kind of essay in the future, like in college. One project that could show this growth would be the Matthews Bill Project. The goal of this project was to argue for the bill, and why the bill should be passed.

To first introduce this project, it started in 2014 as an idea from one of the intervention specialist at our school. It has now turned itself into a bill and is making a run to becoming a law. The Mother of Matthew, who is a recent intervention specialists’ at our schools, has a son who has been diagnosed with multiple disabilities from birth. Matthew and his family have struggled from day one to be out in public with him and enjoy being out. Since Matthew is disabled, he wears a diaper and needs to be changed every now and then. Every human with age, comes an increase in the size and weight so it makes it hard for the parents of Matthew to change him. When he was little, it was just an easy change in the car, but now it could take up to 30 minutes just to change him. This bill is asking for all public facilities to install an adult changing table for disabled people just like Matthew. The purpose of the project was to write an argumentative essay supporting this bill while using certain legal documents to support your argument as evidence. If you did not support this bill, you would have a alternate bill to argue for. There were four objectives to be met during this project: convince the Senate State & Local Government Committee to send our bill to the Senate Floor for a vote, convince a member of the House, Niraj J. Antani (District 41, R), to introduce a campaign bill,  update all campaign materials and get more organizations and institutions openly supporting SB112. The documents that were required to use were the Ohio Constitution, Americans with Disabilities Act, Declaration of Independence and the Federal Constitution. The essay also had to be completed in APA format. Even though this may seem like a lot is was guided very well.

The first artifact to support my growth is the Argumentative essay. This essay shows how I used the legal documents to express my belief and arguments. At first when I attempted to try and find evidence for this essay, it was really challenging because I didn`t know how to effectively use the documents. I struggled finding evidences that was strong and also would work well with the essay. After getting critique outside of class from a few classmates, I was ready to compile all the evidence I needed. As the semester went on, I learned how to use the evidence that was in the documents in an effective way. That is why I am using this artifact because it shows my growth and how I used what I gained over the semester to argue my position on the essay.

The second artifact is the outline that I used to help me compile and construct evidence for the essay. This allowed me to write what I thought would make my essay stronger down and locate evidence while also tracking what source or document that I got the information from. This really helped me a lot. This proves my growth because it allowed me to gain the knowledge of the evidence that I needed to argue for.  As the process of writing went on, I continued to look back at the outline for major points that I needed and to see if there was anything else I could add.

The most challenging part of this was making sure my arguments were strong and had strong evidence to back them up. If your arguments did not have strong evidence, then your arguments were probably not that well written. This step really made me dig for a good and strong piece of evidence for each argument. I would say the success I had in this would be being confident with my arguments and being proud of my essay. This was a really long process and took a lot of effort. Although it was a long process I learned quite a bit. Some new vocabulary was introduced in this unit. One of them being necessary and proper clause. The definition of this word is “A section of the United States Constitution that enables Congress to make the laws required for the exercise of its other powers established by the Constitution.” We used this to determine whether Matthews Bill was a necessary and proper law. The next vocab we learned in this was 1-21 amendments of the constitution. This was really helpful throughout both projects because it gave us knowledge we needed about the rights that citizens of the United States have. The next helpful word I learned was a filibuster. I learned this during the legislative topic in class, when I learned how a bill would become a law. This was helpful because Matthews’s bill is a bill that my class is trying to get it passed and turned into a law. A filibuster is “an action such as a prolonged speech that obstructs progress in a legislative assembly while not technically contravening the required procedures.” It was cool how my teacher explained what a filibuster was because she gave really good examples and I even had a reading to complete about one. I feel that I invested a lot of time into it and it really paid off. This was a really fun and challenging project and I hope this bill will soon get turned into a law.