Thursday, September 3, 2009

White House Changing Lesson Plans

In the face of fierce criticism over President Obama's address to school children and the accompanying suggested lesson plans, the White House is revising their suggested activities.
Now students are asked to write letters to themselves about meeting their education goals, instead of writing letters about helping the teacher.

However, they are still supposed to think about what the president is "asking me to do" and think about whether the speech "makes me want to do anything" - so it's a partial fix but not much.

The White House is blaming the original language on an "honest mistake."

2 comments:

Karen M. Peterson said...

I think this whole thing is being blown out of proportion.

I think it's kind of cool for the President to do a National Address to all the school kids. I have no issue with that.

Did the Dept of Ed go through the proper channels to schedule this? No. Should that have been remedied? Yeah. Of course. Should the text of the speech be made public for parents to review ahead of time? Yes.

I know that if President Bush had attempted this, he would have been made with an enormous amount of anger and vitriol. But that wouldn't mean that it was a terrible idea.

I'm okay with this type of mass assembly as long as it is for the purposes of helping children understand the government and the presidency a little better. If he says one word about health care, the war, or any other political issue, then I will have a big problem with this.

MDP said...

My first reaction was that I didn't have a problem with it...and who knows, it might be totally innocuous. But when I started reading the lesson plans, it really made me wonder what the whole thing was about. I am happy that they will make the text of the speech available on Monday so parents can read it.