State of the Union speech-What did you like or dislike?

[Bubblehead1980]

I am pretty much opposed to Obama but I will admit that I liked some of what I heard so support him in a way.However, I am worried he is not really serious about getting us out of the deep fiscal pit we are in due to his further calls for "investment" since it is difficult to invest when you are basically broke.Anyway, want to know what everyone thought.Likes? dislikes? Try to keep it civil.

[Platapus]

I just wish we would have two separate events.

The first being an actual state of the union report as prescribed in the Constitution (A. 2 Sec 3)

The second a chance for the President to lay out his agenda.

The two are really not the same thing.

As an independent, I thought his speech was "ok".

It was a feel good speech and he talked pretty well on the topic of compromise and cooperation. I fear that the day after, all the congresscritters went back to fighting.

[Takeda Shingen]

Obama is a great speaker, no doubt there. However, I hate the State of the Union hoopla, and I didn't watch it last night. I did end up watching it today, largely due to the fact that I had off because of the snow. Honestly, those speeches would be 10 minutes long they didn't have to stop for applause after every three sentences.

It was nice not to see the very juvenile division between the teams where one side stands and claps while the other side pouts and scowls depending upon the speaker and the topic. Watching that divided seating is kind of like watching a middle school dance.

As for the speech itself, it was very eloquent, but not particularly enlightening. 'Good things are good, bad things are bad, and we should want good things over bad things.'

The one topic that interested me was education. Sure, it is great to return funding to the schools; a lot of them have cut back on their programs. The President talked about reforming education as well. However, the lesson from No Child Left Behind was that top-down educational reform is not possible in the current educational climate. You can design and require all of the standardized tests that you want, fund all the programs you can think of and emphatically implore the schools to 'do better', but none of that will improve so long as you have the same crappy teacher preparing the students for that test or running that program. Until you can enable administrators and supervisors to remove bad teachers efficiently, nothing will improve. This means dealing with the unions that protect bad teachers. This mean eliminating tenure. This means performance-based pay. Until those things happen, money, testing and supervision are pointless.

[the_tyrant]

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[Platapus]

I agree, in principle (principal? :DL) about the quality of teachers. But how can one measure how "good" a teacher is?



What makes a "good" teacher?

What makes a "bad" teacher?

Good and bad teachers are a lot like good and bad art. We all know it when we see it, but different people have different perceptions. Just as it is hard to come up with a universally acceptable definition of "good" art, I fear it will be even more difficult trying to come up with a universally accepted definition of a "good" teacher.

I wish I had a solution to this question. I totally agree that we need to keep "good" teachers, dump "bad" teachers, and attract "good" people to become "good" teachers. I think that we can all agree upon.

Now if we can only define "good". :hmmm:

This is not a trivial question as we are talking about teacher's livelihoods.

In my larval stages, I went through the California School System in the 70's. I had multiple teachers who were one chapter ahead of me in the text book. If you asked them any question not in the lesson plan, they were clueless. Were these "bad" teachers?

Well back in the 70's there was a shortage of teachers and an abundance of students. Classrooms of 50 kids was not unusual in my Highschool.

Teachers were drafted to teach subjects they were not prepared for. I had shop teachers teaching Lit and PE teachers teaching math. Often the teacher did not know what subject they were going to teach until the first day of school. I think the teachers did the best they could in a crappy system. So were they "good" teachers in a crappy system or "bad" teachers in a crappy system?

Which ones should be fired. And if you did fire them, would you then stick 60 students in the same classroom (if there was physical room)?

If I had the answer to these questions, I sure would not be working for the company I am at now. :D

[Takeda Shingen]

Anyone who has ever worked in a school knows who the good teachers are and who the bad teachers are. I worked in three different schools in the K-12 segment of education, and I can still name the good ones and the bad ones. The bad ones are the ones reading out of the teacher's edition; who's every class is a lecture. They are the ones sitting at their desks while the students do yet another worksheet. They are the ones that brush off the student questions, telling them to ask their peers. They are the ones sitting there, surfing the 'net when they should be teaching. And frankly, there are more of them than there are good teachers.

Trust me, we know who they are. The problem is that once they get tenured, you can't get rid of them unless the molest a kid or shoot someone.

[Feuer Frei!]

It drew a television audience of 43 million, with a whopping 91% of those viewers approving of his overall message, according to a poll released on Wednesday.
91%? That's huge.
Anyone that saw the address think that it was that convincing?
I didn't see it as i am in a different part of the world.
Apparently at last year's address, the same poll gave Obama an 83% overall approval rating.
This year 82% said they were happy with his plans for the economy, and 80% backed his deficit proposals.
62% said they expected more bi-partisanship.
For someone that didn't see it, was it that overwhelming?
I know he is a great orator.
However, the Economist's Lexington thought it was "a genuinely cathartic performance" and he goes on to say that "he
ducked all the big questions on entitlement reform and deficit-reduction."
"On foreign affairs, it was largely boilerplate, except for one striking omission: not a single word of encouragement for the stateless Palestinians" he goes on to say.

[Armistead]

I think teachers quit taking teaching seriously, today they teach kids to pass test, not teach subject matter. We could shut down several worthless government depts and put the power back with the states.

[CaptainHaplo]

There was a whole lot of smoke, but no substance.

What did I like about it? Its over - does that count?

Seriously - I liked the optimistic tone. I agree with the idea that there needs to be adjustments in spending and in the tax code.

However, the devil is in the details - and that is where I find things I don't like.

Investment is now the new word for spending. Investment is great - if its done wisely. Putting money into a sector that we have already pumped BILLIONS into - namely "clean energy" - is throwing more money at a sector that has proven its not mature enough to perform as the nation wants and needs it to. Thats not an investment, its a waste.

Tax reform. Sounds great - but again - its "close the loopholes" and make the rich pay. The problem is - its going to be rewritten by the rich - aka politicians in office - so its going to have just as many holes as it does now, if not more. If your going to reform the tax code, throw it out and move to a flat tax or more preferably, a fair (consumption) tax.

Education reform. This was pure bullocks. Like he is going to take on the teachers unions to get rid of bad teachers. Why not stop giving lip service to stuff and start doing by calling for a competitive school system that allows parents to chose where to send their child for schooling? Oh wait, that would mean that successful schools would get all the money and all the kids.

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs.... That's his new focus right? So why did he spend so much time talking about other crap - like "improving" his signature health care program? Could it be that, in the rush of pushing in through against the will of the people, ramming it down their throats when they didn't want it, that no one took the time to actually think about what it all meant and slow things down to get it right? OH - thats right, we needed to have it passed and signed so we could see what was in it. Now he wants to "improve" it - instead of focusing on the real problems of the day which are the negative impact on health care that the thing will have, the ballooning deficit, the unemploymet numbers, etc.

Notice he really didn't come up with one thing that is going to create jobs. Education is great - but that doesn't help NOW. "Investing" in technology that MIGHT be the answer in 2 or 3 decades doesn't help NOW. Freezing spending to where we add ONLY 1.4 TRILLION to the deficit doesn't help NOW.

What did I like? Not much at all.

[Weiss Pinguin]

@ Tyrant: love Cracked :haha:

http://cdn-www.cracked.com/articleimages/ob/SOTUJconnor.jpg
Seriously though, it's been ages and I still don't have my plasma rifle. :stare:

[Kaye T. Bai]

Better than I thought it would be, but certainly not Oscar-worthy. :O: