The Glade 4.0

LTISD

September 2, 2009
Dear Lake Travis ISD Parents & Community:
On August 26, 2009, Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education under President Barack Obama sent a letter to school principals across the country regarding President Obama's scheduled address to the nation's school children on Tuesday, September 8, 2009 at 11:00 a.m. Central Standard Time. In his letter, Secretary Duncan states:
This is the first time an American president has spoken directly to the nation's school children about persisting and succeeding in school. We encourage you to use this historic moment to help your students get focused and begin the school year strong. I encourage you, your teachers, and students to join me in watching the President deliver this address on Tuesday, September 8, 2009. It will be broadcast live via the White House website at http://www.whitehouse.gov at noon Eastern Standard Time.

In advance of this address, we would like to share the following resources: a menu of classroom activities for students in grades preK-6 and for students in grades 7-12. These are ideas developed by and for teachers to help engage students and stimulate discussion on the importance of education in their lives. We are also staging a student video contest on education. Details of the video contest will be available on our website at http://www.ed.gov in the coming weeks.
Over the past few days, the District has received several inquiries from parents and community members regarding whether the District intends to broadcast the Presidential address to students, including using the requisite lesson plan provided by the Secretary of Education. As a result of these inquiries, and in anticipation of more to come, we would like to communicate the following to parents and community members.

Lake Travis ISD has no plans to suggest, encourage or require teachers to revise the lesson plans they have in place for classrooms during the school week of September 7th. Thus, it will be "business as usual" in all classrooms across the District. Accordingly, there are classrooms whose course description and content are appropriately situated for integration of the President's speech and associated lesson plan into the classroom instruction. For example, it seems reasonable to conclude that social studies and government courses are particularly suited to consideration of the Presidential addresses into their lessons. The District has reviewed the requisite lesson plan materials provided by the Secretary of Education. The lesson plans appear to be rooted in the context of asking students to consider the importance of doing well in school, and the importance of education. These materials can be accessed at: http://www.ed.gov/teachers/how/lessons/prek-6.pdf
(PreK-6), and http://www.ed.gov/teachers/how/lessons/7-12.pdf(7- 12)
Perhaps most importantly, the District believes that parents should be encouraged to go to the White House website, http://www.whitehouse.gov, watch the President's address, review the lesson plan provided by the Secretary of Education, and make their own decisions regarding home viewing and discussion of the lesson plan content with their school-aged children.
If parents have specific questions regarding whether their child's teacher intends to access the Presidential address in their classroom on Tuesday, September 8th, or what the nature of the lesson will be on that day, they are asked to contact their child's teacher or the principal at their school.

Perhaps most importantly, the District believes that parents should be encouraged to go to the White House website, http://www.whitehouse.gov, watch the President's address, review the lesson plan provided by the Secretary of Education, and make their own decisions regarding home viewing and discussion of the lesson plan content with their school-aged children.

Why is it bad, that the President wishes to reinforce the importance of school and learning?

Why is it bad, that the President wishes to reinforce the importance of school and learning?

It isn't "bad." It's just unprecedented, unwarranted, unnecessary, and unConstitutional.

Prepared Remarks of President Barack Obama
Back to School Event

Arlington, Virginia
September 8, 2009

The President: Hello everyone – how’s everybody doing today? I’m here with students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. And we’ve got students tuning in from all across America, kindergarten through twelfth grade. I’m glad you all could join us today.

I know that for many of you, today is the first day of school. And for those of you in kindergarten, or starting middle or high school, it’s your first day in a new school, so it’s understandable if you’re a little nervous. I imagine there are some seniors out there who are feeling pretty good right now, with just one more year to go. And no matter what grade you’re in, some of you are probably wishing it were still summer, and you could’ve stayed in bed just a little longer this morning.

I know that feeling. When I was young, my family lived in Indonesia for a few years, and my mother didn’t have the money to send me where all the American kids went to school. So she decided to teach me extra lessons herself, Monday through Friday – at 4:30 in the morning.

Now I wasn’t too happy about getting up that early. A lot of times, I’d fall asleep right there at the kitchen table. But whenever I’d complain, my mother would just give me one of those looks and say, "This is no picnic for me either, buster."

So I know some of you are still adjusting to being back at school. But I’m here today because I have something important to discuss with you. I’m here because I want to talk with you about your education and what’s expected of all of you in this new school year.

Now I’ve given a lot of speeches about education. And I’ve talked a lot about responsibility.

I’ve talked about your teachers’ responsibility for inspiring you, and pushing you to learn.

I’ve talked about your parents’ responsibility for making sure you stay on track, and get your homework done, and don’t spend every waking hour in front of the TV or with that Xbox.

I’ve talked a lot about your government’s responsibility for setting high standards, supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools that aren’t working where students aren’t getting the opportunities they deserve.

But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world – and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.

And that’s what I want to focus on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education. I want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself.

Every single one of you has something you’re good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That’s the opportunity an education can provide.

Maybe you could be a good writer – maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper – but you might not know it until you write a paper for your English class. Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor – maybe even good enough to come up with the next iPhone or a new medicine or vaccine – but you might not know it until you do a project for your science class. Maybe you could be a mayor or a Senator or a Supreme Court Justice, but you might not know that until you join student government or the debate team.

And no matter what you want to do with your life – I guarantee that you’ll need an education to do it. You want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a police officer? You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our military? You’re going to need a good education for every single one of those careers. You can’t drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to work for it and train for it and learn for it.

And this isn’t just important for your own life and your own future. What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. What you’re learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future.

You’ll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You’ll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You’ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.

We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems. If you don’t do that – if you quit on school – you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country.

Now I know it’s not always easy to do well in school. I know a lot of you have challenges in your lives right now that can make it hard to focus on your schoolwork.

I get it. I know what that’s like. My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mother who struggled at times to pay the bills and wasn’t always able to give us things the other kids had. There were times when I missed having a father in my life. There were times when I was lonely and felt like I didn’t fit in.

So I wasn’t always as focused as I should have been. I did some things I’m not proud of, and got in more trouble than I should have. And my life could have easily taken a turn for the worse.

But I was fortunate. I got a lot of second chances and had the opportunity to go to college, and law school, and follow my dreams. My wife, our First Lady Michelle Obama, has a similar story. Neither of her parents had gone to college, and they didn’t have much. But they worked hard, and she worked hard, so that she could go to the best schools in this country.

Some of you might not have those advantages. Maybe you don’t have adults in your life who give you the support that you need. Maybe someone in your family has lost their job, and there’s not enough money to go around. Maybe you live in a neighborhood where you don’t feel safe, or have friends who are pressuring you to do things you know aren’t right.

But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life – what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home – that’s no excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude. That’s no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. That’s no excuse for not trying.

Where you are right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up. No one’s written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.

That’s what young people like you are doing every day, all across America.

Young people like Jazmin Perez, from Roma, Texas. Jazmin didn’t speak English when she first started school. Hardly anyone in her hometown went to college, and neither of her parents had gone either. But she worked hard, earned good grades, got a scholarship to Brown University, and is now in graduate school, studying public health, on her way to being Dr. Jazmin Perez.

I’m thinking about Andoni Schultz, from Los Altos, California, who’s fought brain cancer since he was three. He’s endured all sorts of treatments and surgeries, one of which affected his memory, so it took him much longer – hundreds of extra hours – to do his schoolwork. But he never fell behind, and he’s headed to college this fall.

And then there’s Shantell Steve, from my hometown of Chicago, Illinois. Even when bouncing from foster home to foster home in the toughest neighborhoods, she managed to get a job at a local health center; start a program to keep young people out of gangs; and she’s on track to graduate high school with honors and go on to college.

Jazmin, Andoni and Shantell aren’t any different from any of you. They faced challenges in their lives just like you do. But they refused to give up. They chose to take responsibility for their education and set goals for themselves. And I expect all of you to do the same.

That’s why today, I’m calling on each of you to set your own goals for your education – and to do everything you can to meet them. Your goal can be something as simple as doing all your homework, paying attention in class, or spending time each day reading a book. Maybe you’ll decide to get involved in an extracurricular activity, or volunteer in your community. Maybe you’ll decide to stand up for kids who are being teased or bullied because of who they are or how they look, because you believe, like I do, that all kids deserve a safe environment to study and learn. Maybe you’ll decide to take better care of yourself so you can be more ready to learn. And along those lines, I hope you’ll all wash your hands a lot, and stay home from school when you don’t feel well, so we can keep people from getting the flu this fall and winter.

Whatever you resolve to do, I want you to commit to it. I want you to really work at it.

I know that sometimes, you get the sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work -- that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star, when chances are, you’re not going to be any of those things.

But the truth is, being successful is hard. You won’t love every subject you study. You won’t click with every teacher. Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right this minute. And you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.

That’s OK. Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who’ve had the most failures. JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was rejected twelve times before it was finally published. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, and he lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career. But he once said, "I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

These people succeeded because they understand that you can’t let your failures define you – you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time. If you get in trouble, that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to behave. If you get a bad grade, that doesn’t mean you’re stupid, it just means you need to spend more time studying.

No one’s born being good at things, you become good at things through hard work. You’re not a varsity athlete the first time you play a new sport. You don’t hit every note the first time you sing a song. You’ve got to practice. It’s the same with your schoolwork. You might have to do a math problem a few times before you get it right, or read something a few times before you understand it, or do a few drafts of a paper before it’s good enough to hand in.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it. I do that every day. Asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength. It shows you have the courage to admit when you don’t know something, and to learn something new. So find an adult you trust – a parent, grandparent or teacher; a coach or counselor – and ask them to help you stay on track to meet your goals.

And even when you’re struggling, even when you’re discouraged, and you feel like other people have given up on you – don’t ever give up on yourself. Because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.

The story of America isn’t about people who quit when things got tough. It’s about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.

It’s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.

So today, I want to ask you, what’s your contribution going to be? What problems are you going to solve? What discoveries will you make? What will a president who comes here in twenty or fifty or one hundred years say about what all of you did for this country?

Your families, your teachers, and I are doing everything we can to make sure you have the education you need to answer these questions. I’m working hard to fix up your classrooms and get you the books, equipment and computers you need to learn. But you’ve got to do your part too. So I expect you to get serious this year. I expect you to put your best effort into everything you do. I expect great things from each of you. So don’t let us down – don’t let your family or your country or yourself down. Make us all proud. I know you can do it.

Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America.

I'm curious, is the above the first ad hom of the new board?

If it's unprecedented, you should tell that to George Bush SR and his heir, GW Bush. They both made such speeches to schools, and in *their* speeches, they actually pushed their political agenda.

If it's unprecedented, you should tell that to George Bush SR and his heir, GW Bush. They both made such speeches to schools, and in *their* speeches, they actually pushed their political agenda.

What bothers me the most was the "extra" curricular activities that his administration released and pushed on schools to coincide, and support, his political agenda. Fortunately, at least some of it was rescinded after the expected uproar. However, if my kindergarten age son comes home with some of the "suggested" work, he won't be doing that assignment, but something else instead.

That said, in reading his speech, its unfortunate he chose to so completely politicize the message when it could have just been about encouraging children to do their best in schools.

You certainly call it an ad-hom, but seriously, the furor over this speech is nothing short of crazy. Before anyone had any text of the speech on hand, knew what was going to be in it, or really had *any* evidence to back up their soon to be demonstrated-as-insane claims about indoctrination, they began prosecuting a fear campaign about the speech.

Insulate them from a black, liberal democrat making good points about personal responsibility. Can't have that sort of thing messing with the frame. Make sure they never hear anything come out of that man's mouth that might lead them to believe something other than what Rush Limbaugh spews at them in the morning on the way to school.

You're aware that a lot of that stuff came from the local school districts, and not the Obamae DOE, right? That he had no control over that, that some of it was silly, but some of it was also pretty cool. "Write a letter to the president" is something that school students have been doing for a very long time.

Obama didn't politicize this, the right did. They saw that he was speaking to school children, and then the right wing nutters on the radio went ballistic about indoctrination, and it trickled down to the base and then up to actual supposedly-serious congresspersons and RNC members.

You certainly call it an ad-hom, but seriously, the furor over this speech is nothing short of crazy. Before anyone had any text of the speech on hand, knew what was going to be in it, or really had *any* evidence to back up their soon to be demonstrated-as-insane claims about indoctrination, they began prosecuting a fear campaign about the speech.

It's a good speech, something conservatives, liberals, and everything in between and around them can get behind. Stay in school. Work hard. These are good, solid values.

But because Obama was going to deliver it, every lunatic on the radio was howling about socialist indoctrination, marxism, and any other big scary word they could find. Before they ever knew what was in it, they just up and lied about what was in it, and now, they are trying to say that it was somehow severely changed as a result (a claim entirely without any proof, and a claim of course that cannot be disputed).

Does the president have some sort of magical ability to turn your children into little liberal Marxist secret islamofascist sleeper agents through the power of the tee vee? Seriously? because that's the kind of fear mongering that people are using about this speech.

Sure, keep your kids at home. Insulate them from a black, liberal democrat making good points about personal responsibility. Can't have that sort of thing messing with the frame. Make sure they never hear anything come out of that man's mouth that might lead them to believe something other than what Rush Limbaugh spews at them in the morning on the way to school.

20 posts in and you need to banned. Does this board have an ignore feature?

It's a good speech, something conservatives, liberals, and everything in between and around them can get behind. Stay in school. Work hard. These are good, solid values.

Obama didn't politicize this, the right did.

I know that feeling. When I was young, my family lived in Indonesia for a few years, and my mother didn’t have the money to send me where all the American kids went to school. So she decided to teach me extra lessons herself, Monday through Friday – at 4:30 in the morning.

I’ve talked a lot about your government’s responsibility for setting high standards, supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools that aren’t working where students aren’t getting the opportunities they deserve.

You’ll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You’ll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You’ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.

We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems. If you don’t do that – if you quit on school – you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country.

Facism is not a school of thought, it is a racial slur.

That speech doesn't sound anything like the audio of the video they played on the radio the other day...apparently some video that was to go along with the address?