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Obama school speech confounds critics
Ohanian Comment: I wasn't planning on posting any articles about the ridiculous reaction(s) to President Obama's speech. Life is too short. But then Steve Krashen pointed out the part in bold. It emphasizes what I found so ironic about the ridiculous boilerplate lesson plans for the speech sent out by the US Department of Education. When curriculum is tied to standards and standards are tied to tests, then the test is the curriculum. There isn't time for anything but tests and test prep. When the test has infinitely more power than the President of the United States, what happens to the teacher's voice? The community's? Do you think students will learn the habits and attitudes the President claims to espouse from McGraw-Hill worksheets?
By Ron Barnett
President Barack Obama delivered a speech to schoolchildren Tuesday that some of his harshest critics praised — while saying he changed it under pressure.
And at least one classroom of Greenville County students who watched it, including a student who said he’s against the president on policy issues, said it inspired them to reach for their goals.
"It's really kind of amazing to me that it was a speech that I would have expected Ronald Reagan to have given, not a man that is as politically far left as Barack Obama," said Kelle Corvin, a mother of two students at Oakview Elementary who had feared the president would use the opportunity to indoctrinate impressionable young people to his political agenda.
"I think that the fact that a lot of parents complained and were concerned about what the true motivations were, that he was very careful in how they worded the speech."
Will Taylor, a 17-year-old junior at Woodmont High School, said he comes from a Republican family and disagrees with Obama on health-care reform. But he thought the speech was inspirational.
"He was talking about putting in hard work and everything to, like, become successful, and you’ve got to put in the time to get what you want,” he said. “I think he was just addressing the younger crowd on education is important."
Speaking from a high school in Arlington, Va., Obama told students about his own struggles as a young person, about how his mother woke him at 4:30 every morning to help him with his schoolwork, and about students across the country who have overcome great obstacles and succeeded in reaching their goals.
"Where you are right now doesn't have to determine where you'll end up," he said. "No one's written your destiny for you, because here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future."
He told them to use their education to find their potential and purpose.
"Every single one of you has something that you're good at. Every single one of you has something to offer," he said. "And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That's the opportunity an education can provide."
In Greenville County Schools, principals who planned to show the president’s speech to students were told to send notes home last week and give parents the option of having their kids held out of class and given an alternative assignment during the speech, district spokesman Oby Lyles said.
Many of the district's elementary schools were administering standardized tests Tuesday and didn't show the speech live but planned to record it and review it later, he said. It would only be shown if it could be tied to the curriculum, Lyles said.
He didn't know how many schools showed the speech or how many parents signed the opt-out form.
Some schools, such as Bryson Elementary in Simpsonville, chose not to show the speech.
"We just thought it would be better to allow the families and parents to make that decision to share that with their children if they wanted to," said assistant principal Danielle Shealy. "We don’t want to take away from the instructional day."
Woodmont High Principal Darryl Imperati said he doesn't like the idea of showing anything to students that he hasn’t seen first, but he left the decision up to teachers.
"Obviously we’re professionals, and we allow people to use their professional judgments," he said.
Allison Walkenhorst, a social studies teacher who showed the speech to her civics class in leadership at Woodmont High, said she didn't understand why there was such a controversy over it.
"It's a leadership class, and the ideas that he talked about — leadership and what it means to be a civic leader — it made perfect sense to me," she said.
None of the students in her class said they disagreed with the president's speech.
Sommer Owens, 17, said the speech "motivated me more to do better in school and to keep my grades up so I can go to a good college, or the college of my choice."
"He was just trying to motivate us because the economy is really bad and we need to figure out our plan so we’ll have something to do after we get out of high school," she said.
— Ron Barnett
Greenville Online
2009-09-09
http://www.greenvilleonline.com/article/20090909/NEWS/909090343/1004/NEWS01
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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