Parents and lawmakers speak out against Obama's speech to students

[UGAalum94]

Originally Posted by deepimpact2

I agree that there is nothing fundamentally threatening about the topic of the President's speech. However I disagree about teachers needing that much advance notice. Part of being a good teacher is being flexible. There may be days when your lesson plan won't go according to "plan." A teacher should always be prepared for that. Furthermore, with the way things happen in schools nowadays teachers should be prepared for unannounced interruptions (fire drills, bomb drills, sudden visits from dignitaries). When Chief Justice Roberts interrupted my Torts class the professor was mildly taken aback but he wasn't going to tell Roberts he couldn't come in because he didn't have time to incorporate it into the lesson plan. And besides, based on the topic of the speech, what would be so difficult about incorporating it into a lesson plan?

The difference is that Obama could have easily given more advance notice. It didn't need to sprung on people the week before.

And I don't know what your education was like, but a generic "stay in school, kids" wasn't part of my lessons very frequently.

There are a lot of ways the logistics could have been a lot better to get closer to 100% participation.

Think about it: if this had been well-planned and the specific content explained by the White House or DOE a month or two ago, there'd be pressure on districts to figure out how to show it. Instead, I suspect that the participation rate for any state that this isn't the first day of school will be far from 100%.

If this is the first day for a district, they had all last week to work out how and where they would show it. If it wasn't the first week, they were actually teaching, planning, grading, dealing with discipline, and probably didn't have as much time to devote to this. I know my district didn't. I think most of the districts around Atlanta figured out how to handle it in a way that didn't make parents mad; permission slip etc, but didn't send out any information about how to make it work with the lunch schedule or any of the practical concerns if a teacher wanted to show it. That will leave many teachers with the impression that it's much easier just not to fool with showing it.