Scholarly.
A “Current Event” I wrote for U.S. History

The article “Obama Urges Students to ‘Dream Big’ in Back-to-School Speech in Philadelphia” from The Washington Post by Nick Anderson was published on Tuesday September 14th.
President Obama gave a speech to students at a Philadelphia school, while also being streamed on the White House website and C-SPAN on Tuesday the 14th of September. This speech was labeled as a non-political event. He told students to abide by discipline and to push themselves in their studies; mentioning that he hadn’t always done that himself, and wished he had. Obama also said that his mother convinced him to work harder at his studies and that had stuck with him throughout his post-high school career. Speaking so his speech would send a message to the students and people across the world to focus on their dreams and strive for them through working hard through their education and lifestyles; explaining that nothing would be “beyond their reach”.
This article had some good information about the President’s speech, though the writing was quite staggered. The author jumped between small spurts of educational information about the schools and U.S. education as a whole and reiterating what Obama spoke of in the speech. Nick Anderson could have explained a bit more on some of the educational blurbs he spoke of; some of them were quite interesting; such as the high schools known as “Drop out Factories”. However, this article did lead me to learn a few things; sometimes schools fire teachers to try to financially turn their schools around, Obama has started to do the education promotion speeches annually at schools throughout the country and that George H.W. Bush also made a speech about education in 1991. Even through the repetitiveness it did explain what happened and I suppose that was the key of this author’s writing.

Original Article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/14/AR2010091402623.html