Obama Doesn’t Need a Visitor’s Pass to Speak to Students

This week, the president wanted to talk to the students of America. Evidently, his intention was to encourage students to take their school year more seriously and take greater personal responsibility for their education.

Not so fast. We (schools) needed to see an ID. Somebody should have stopped by the office, signed in and gotten a visitor’s badge before he could be allowed to speak to kids. Mr. President, you just can’t just show up and demand an audience with our students. Who do you think you are?

This idea of the president of the United States addressing school children sparked a great deal of discussion. Educators debated this speech for the past couple of weeks. It was a topic of discussion on Twitter, Plurk, listservs and blogs.

In my mind, schools reacted rather predictably: The speech was a new idea, so it must have been a bad idea.

Far too many adults seem to form their opinions based upon political beliefs. Personally, I think this idea needed to pass the Say-It-Out-Loud test. This method is tried and true. If you want to see if something is a good idea or a bad idea, simply say it out loud.

So here I go: “President Obama wanted to speak directly to school children so he can encourage them to work hard and take school seriously.”

Sounded good to me. Plus, I am willing to give him the benefit of that doubt because he is the president of the United States of America.

All too often teachers and administrators complain about schools not getting well-deserved respect. The president wanted to help by encouraging students to do better — telling them they must do better.

I say we should have given him a chance. Just this once, we shouldn’t have been overly paranoid about a stranger speaking to our students. Just this once, schools should have given a new idea a chance before we all sat around and came up with a long list of reasons why it wouldn’t work.

This was a great opportunity to not only teach students the importance of listening, but also the importance of respecting the highest office in the land.

To read more blog entries by Michael Smith, visit his site PrincipalsPage.com.