During the Speech - Lesson Plan, Part 2

During the Speech

As the president speaks, teachers can ask students to write down key ideas or phrases that are important or personally meaningful. Students could use a note‐taking graphic organizer such as a “cluster web;” or, students could record their thoughts on sticky notes. Younger children could draw pictures and write as appropriate. As students listen to the speech, they could think about the following:

• What is the president trying to tell me?
• What is the president asking me to do?
• What new ideas and actions is the president challenging me to think about?

2. Students could record important parts of the speech where the president is asking them to do something. Students might think about the following:

• What specific job is he asking me to do?
• Is he asking anything of anyone else?
• Teachers? Principals? Parents? The American people?

3. Students could record questions they have while he is speaking and then discuss them after the speech. Younger children may need to dictate their questions.

On the surface of it, there would appear to be nothing wrong with any of this. Aren't those good comprehension questions? Isn't it helping students to focus on the main ideas of the president's speech? The answer to those questions, both of them, is yes. My concern, having watched Arbor Day turn from planting trees to saving the earth, is the discussion that will take place with these notes.

The youngest students are going to have trouble understanding, or caring about, the president's speech. That means someone will interpret for them, putting their own spin on the message, leading students in a particular direction. Older students will also be led in the direction that their particular teacher wants them led. Bearing in mind that a majority of teachers are liberals, the leading will be in directions I don't want to see happen.

The idea of *debate* will not be part of the lesson. Did you notice that there is nothing about "discussion" in these questions? Did you notice there is nothing about critically thinking? None of the questions asks, for instance, that students decide whether the president's message has a *valid* point. Nothing asks students to determine whether what the president suggests is something that will make a difference in their education.

No, the questions are merely, once again, at the knowledge and possibly application levels on Bloom's Taxonomy. Will teachers guide students to be critical thinkers? Will they even ask questions such as, "What might the education system look like if everyone did what the president asks?" They won't. They will lead students like little sheep to jump over the fences they want jumped. No one will ask, "What happens if we do what the president asks?" If they did, it wouldn't involve critical speculation. It would only be a Kum-ba-yah moment around the campfire, warming ourselves at Obama's fundamental Change for America.

President Obama's Speech to School Children

What is all the hoopla about the president speaking to children in schools across America? Isn't it a good thing for the president to encourage children around the country to do their best in school?

Yes, and no. If it were a matter only of the president speaking to children in a televised speech, and if it were only that the president wants to encourage children in their educational efforts, I would have no problem with it. However, when you look at the lesson plan put out by the Department of Education, and you can find that plan here, you discover a few interesting things about it. A good lesson plan has a before, during and after, which this does. Let's see what's included.

Before the Speech

Teachers can build background knowledge about the President of the United States and his speech by reading books about presidents and Barack Obama. Teachers could motivate students by asking the following questions:

• Who is the President of the United States?
• What do you think it takes to be president?
• To whom do you think the president is going to be speaking?
• Why do you think he wants to speak to you?
• What do you think he will say to you?

Teachers can ask students to imagine that they are delivering a speech to all of the students in the United States.

• If you were the president, what would you tell students?
• What can students do to help in our schools?

Teachers can chart ideas about what students would say.

Why is it important that we listen to the president and other elected officials, like the mayor, senators, members of congress, or the governor? Why is what they say important?

Let's take this part of the plan apart. The motivation part - no problem. That's part of background building. Notice the last two questions. No problem with them in a classroom where students are taught to be critical thinkers. (Are there any such classrooms left in America? I hope so!) But, for the sake of argument, suppose that the teacher uses that question and answer time as a springboard to guide students' thinking in a direction she wants it to go?

Most teachers are liberals. Not all. I was a teacher. Many times I've guided my students' thinking, not on political issues, but on comparing one piece of literature to another, for instance. It's an ingrained thing to do. The question that really bothers me is the second one in the middle section of this before part of the lesson plan. This is where it really starts ringing a warning bell for me. Combine the president's progressive socialist agenda with the liberal educators and then throw in this question.

Now ask yourself this. What if little Johnny Jones has conservative parents who are well aware of this lesson plan, have downloaded it, and have dissected with little Johnny? And then, what if Johnny answers the question from that conservative point of view? What if Johnny brings up the idea that the president is trying to get the youth of the nation on his side and brainwash them to believe in political policies which are against the Constitution? How do you think the liberal teacher is going to deal with that situation?

Then move on to the last question. I don't think the answer is that we need to know what our government officials are thinking so that we can let them know whether we agree with them or not. I don't think the answer is that an informed citizenry is necessary to keep the Constitution in place. No, I surely don't think that at all. I think it's far more likely that the answer goes along with the idea of the nanny state government taking care of its population, and the need to listen and follow directions of the government authorities.

Stay tuned for the other two sections of this lesson plan.

National Debt

Wanna see how bad it is? Check out http://www.usdebtclock.org

Most especially, scroll down to the bottom to see the *unfunded* debt each of is owes. If your browser comes up with little f symbols, just click each one to get the numbers to appear. It has to do with your cookies setting.

If the free market were allowed to function, and we could restore our prosperity, then we might be able to handle it. But that's not happening.

Drill, Baby, Drill!

Remember that slogan? Well, Obama finally agrees with it!

Here's the problem. He believes in giving American taxpayer dollars, $2,000,000,000 of them, to a Brazillian company, Petrobras - in which George Soros is heavily invested, btw. That money is being loaned to them to drill off-shore for oil! Now bear in mind that Petrobras has $120 billion dollars in backing and earned $18,000,000,000 dollars in profits last year.

So why do they need any of our taxpayer dollars? After all, they signed a deal with China in February for 58,000,000,000 barrels of oil to be delivered.

So what is going on here? We have companies right here in our own country who have been pounding on the door to get permission to drill in and near America. So, Mr. Obama, what the hell are you thinking?

IT IS TIME

Below is something I want to share with you. I am frankly very angry, and have had enough. Don't talk to me about writing letters to "our congressmen" they are not ours, they belong to the evil that is destroying this country while we sit on our asses wringing our hands, it frankly is a waste of time, paper, and/or bandwidth. There is only one solution to this situation, and we need to follow the example of our founding fathers. I only know of 2 people brave enough to call for a revelation, let me add my name to the list. This elderly house wife is calling for a revelation. There I have said it.

Please pay particulate attention to the bold words of acting U.S. Attorney Michael Gunnison below in the body of the article.

I do not know about you but this "elderly people (person) who believe(s) in the Constitution and are (is) willing to resist an unlawful tax and refuse to immediately surrender to heavily-armed federal agents deserve to die in prison and are not fit to participate in our brave new "civil society." has no intention of dieing in prison for standing on my Constitutional rights.

Convicted "tax protesters" to receive death sentence with new conviction

July 9, 2009—Ed Brown (67) and Elaine Brown (69) were convicted on all counts "of plotting to kill federal agents during a nine-month standoff at their fort-like rural home, where they had holed up to avoid arrest on tax evasion," the Associated Press reported.

In 2007, the Browns, a successful married couple from Plainfield, New Hampshire, who had dared to demand that the government show them the law before paying income taxes, were convicted of willful failure to pay them.

Ed Brown testified during the 2009 trial that the weapons in his home were for self-defense. The conviction is malicious. The Browns never intended to kill anyone; they just wanted to prove that the government had no lawful authority to directly tax the wages of people as if they were income. When the government court agreed that the government had the authority to collect an unconstitutional tax, the Browns just stayed home. When the government came to get them, a standoff ensued. People from all over the country came to be with them. Ed conducted interviews in which he said he believed the government planned to kill him and that he would rather die than go to prison. With some bravado, Ed reportedly also said that he would take a few feds with him.

The Brown’s concerns were well-founded. The U.S. government has killed a lot of Americans for greater and lesser reasons. Gordon Kahl was hunted down, shot and burned for his belief that government was not lawful; Sammy Weaver (14) and his mother Vickie were shot though they were not wanted in connection with any crime and the government mass murdered 114 innocent men, women and children at Mount Carmel near Waco, Texas.

The standoff, which began with their conviction January 18, 2007, ended peacefully nearly nine months later on October 4.

Though Ed had a conviction in 1960 at age 18 that was later pardoned, the Browns have no prior criminal history yet both face 30-years in prison for not surrendering to federal officials after being convicted on income tax related charges. For the Browns, this conviction is a death sentence.

"By rejecting the rule of the law and substituting a personal code involving weapons, explosives and threats, the defendants committed increasingly serious crimes," acting U.S. Attorney Michael Gunnison said. "Their conduct has no place in a civil society."

The "civil society" to which Gunnison refers is one that allows the government to lawlessly extort money from people at gunpoint, allows bankers to debauch the currency and loot an entire nation’s people and their assets while reinventing the Republic into a totalitarian technocracy that is in the final stages of force-vaccinating 300 million people with an experimental vaccine containing ingredients of known toxicity—and is planning to punish anyone who objects. According to Gunnison, elderly people who believe in the Constitution and are willing to resist an unlawful tax and refuse to immediately surrender to heavily-armed federal agents deserve to die in prison and are not fit to participate in our brave new "civil society."

The Browns, who were already serving five-year sentences for their original convictions, are scheduled to be effectively sentenced to death in prison on September 3, 2009.

Town Hall Meetings + My Response

There are town hall meetings being held around the country so that Senators and Congressmen can explain the health care plan to their constituents. According to one Texas Congressman, they were give a script they are supposed to follow. Bah, humbug, is what I'd say to that.

Many town hall meetings have erupted at the question and answer period, and if you watch Fox News, you've seen some of that footage.

"I look at this health care plan and I see nothing that is about health or about care. What I see is a bureaucratic nightmare, senator. Medicaid is broke, Medicare is broke, Social Security is broke and you want us to believe that a government that can't even run a cash for clunkers program is going to run one-seventh of our U.S. economy? No sir, no," she (a woman at the microphone to Specter and Sibelius in Philadelphia) said.

You can find some such events listed on Tea Party Patriots August events are toward the bottom, with September toward the top.

The constituents are being labeled, of course, as right wing nuts, and at least one person said that the protests were sponsored by the insurance companies. What a laugh. The insurance companies are in bed with the program! Those speaking out are being labeled "politically connected," whatever that means, and, once again, being dismissed.

One of the largest miscarriages of truth that the media has perpetrated recently is the one about the tea party in Columbus, Ohio, August 1, this past Saturday. The Columbus Tea Party, the Ohio Rally for State Sovereignty, was attended by, according to police estimates, 8,000-10,000 people. You can hear Keynote speaker, Judge Napolitano, on Ron Paul's site or YouTube. According to Napolitano (not Janet, BTW!), the temperatures were in the upper 80s and humidity to match, yet thousands of people stood for an hour and a half, before his speech even came up. They listened to what he had to say, and cheered him on.

The miscarriage of truth by the media? They reported 200-300 attendees. Disenfranchisement through being ignored? You decide. The people are rising up in larger and larger numbers, from all political parties, and both the media and the politicians are going to be surprised when the "right-wing nut jobs," take our country back, through the legally appointed means provided by the U S Constitution, and freedom becomes the rallying cry.

In some of the later townhall meetings, speakers who've learned from what happened at earlier ones, have told attendees they are not allowed to ask questions, they can only listen to what the speaker has to tell them about the plan. Here's my response to that.

As a body, all attendees get up and leave. The last person out the door, before turning out the light, turns to the speaker of the day and says, "You aren't listening to us; therefore, we aren't listening to you. But don't worry. We'll be back in touch next voting day." No shouting, no screaming, no protesting. Just a simple statement from our feet, exercising our God-given rights.

What Unites Us?

From my friend, Johnny's, blog used with his permission:

Recently, I've realized that we ..... at least I .... spend more time on thinking about the things that separate me, that divide me, from others than I do about what unites me with others. A friend recommended I read Glenn Beck's Common Sense. It arrived in the mail today, and I started at the back, with Thomas Paine's original common sense text.

Listen to this, from Thomas Paine's introduction to his famous little booklet:

"Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises, at first, a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason."

Knowing that he was referring to the government at the time, and it's long abuses of it's subjects in the colonies, and knowing that he speaks of rebellion against that government, do not blind me to the possibilities that go far beyond those issues. With this one quotation, I could examine everything in my life ..... my thoughts about God, about my lifestyle choices, about love ..... about almost anything.

Sticking to government, for this post, I realized that all of my life I have carried a certain picture of what America is, of who Americans are. We make mistakes, we are sometimes brash. As a nation, we tend to be more prudish than the old countries of Europe, and as a people, we tend to be generous. Perhaps we don't have the old world 'culture' and are considered by some to be rude and 'ugly' Americans. Maybe we resemble the prostitute with the heart of gold.

But there is a heart of gold. That's the important thing. We've shed our blood around the world for the rights of others, the freedom of others. Our soldiers are buried in the foreign soil of many a country which would not have the freedom to criticize us were it not so. Our dollars are spread throughout the world, as well. Over and over, as other countries have been hit by disasters, American dollars have flown food and medical supplies bought with other American dollars to the relief of those in need. Our government has done that, but so have our churches, our organizations, our volunteers, our people, out of our own pockets.

This is the America I know and love and grew up in. Today, I see the change that slightly more than half the country voted for coming to pass. And it isn't a change I like, or voted for. In fact, it isn't even a change at all, it's a transformation. I don't like what America is becoming. I don't like a president going around that same world we have saved and aided and negotiated for, apologizing for being who we are. I don't like my government turning into a controlling faction in business, banking, and especially health care.

The congress which bounced over 12,000 checks and caused the closure of it's own bank is now going to run the banks the American people use? The government that allocated money for 3 months of a "cash for clunkers" program and ran out in 4 days is going to run the automobile companies? The same people who have run Amtrak, the post office and Veteran's Administration hospitals into the ground is going to be in charge of my health care? I don't think so. I vote no.

The long habit of thinking that the government is right, that it has good intentions, that it will take care of me ..... that has come to an end. The habit of not thinking those things are wrong has come to an end. Bring on the outcry. Bring on the tumult. And then let us reason together to find a better way.