44 Expectations

Its interesting that Obama's speech starts out with telling everyone his own personal difficulties with school. The fact that he had to be personal taught by his mother at 4am in the morning feeling tired and miserable. I am sure most of us, well from my perspective, I have the opportunity to go to school and I do not have to be forced to get up at 4am in the morning although 6:30am is bad enough. It seems like he is trying to manipulate us to think "well you think you have it bad, when I was younger..." to feel "appreciative" what education we have.

He also uses the whole idea of being responsible and how nothing else would matter, the teacher's responsibilities, governments responsibilities, or your parents would not matter unless YOU took responsibilities. It is put in our heads all the time how we have to be responsible for our own education. He makes us feel "special", how we are good enough to be someone important in the world like curing cancer but not unless we do our work in school. After the responsibility part of his speech he then blends it into helping United States. How we can help United States by maybe curing aids and junk. But to be honest, what are the chances that everyone is going to be some great researching to cure cancer and be the president of the USA just by doing that lab report in chemistry class.

In the Liberal Arts article, I understand where its coming from with how school and certain liberal arts classes teach us skills. I the worksheets or problems and junk we are given in class do help our problem solving skills, critical thinking, analysis, etc. Its the fact that the way we have to approach in learning these skills I think really unmotivated kids. In my opinion, I feel like I've learned most of the skills the best to my abilities only because I am bored. I know I am sure I can improve certain skills but feeling unmotivated or feeling like I am running a obstacle course over and over again (taking that metaphor from Andy) makes me feel tired. I know the tricks, when to jump, when to crawl, but it just gets repetitive and unmotivated.

Also being diverse is definitely not a problem for me, coming from the fact that I live in New York city and I come from a very diverse public school. And its great that Gettysburg students students can travel abroad to experience other cultural living but I doubt many public schools in New York can afford to do that if we can't even afford cups in the cafeteria for the shitty canned fruits. Why do we have to be taught later how on to "translate what they have learned into a potential career direction" when we should have the option to just get started on learning how to start the path into a potential career. I'm tired of being told that finding correlations in math has a lot to do with business companies. Why can't we just learn about business companies, how to start our own business and then about correlations instead (that's if I wanted a business career).


The License plate says "I was a high school drop out."