Southern Bread

Before the Speech

• Teachers can build background knowledge about the President of the United States and his speech by reading books about presidents like The Real Lincoln, Revolution and Reassessing the Presidency. Teachers could motivate students by asking the following questions:
  • Who is the President of the United States and why do we care?
  • What do you think it takes, other than money and no morals, to be president?
  • To which teacher’s union do you think the president will be speaking, using you as cover?
  • Why would you possibly want to listen to him?
  • Extra credit: Can you think of one thing he might say that isn’t cliche’d political rhetoric?
• Teachers can ask students to imagine that they are delivering a speech to all of the students in the United States and do a thought experiment about why nobody should have that much power since it obviously corrupts the mind and ego.
  • If you were the president, what would you tell students that would be actually useful, unlike what you will hear?
  • What can students do to help in our schools, other than leave en masse and watch the system collapse?
• Why does anyone listen to any politician, especially the president anymore when there are far more meaningful things being said on TV, like on the E! channel.

During the Speech

• As the president speaks, teachers can ask students to write down key ideas or phrases that are important or personally meaningful, like how the president obviously thinks we are all stupid, and how he probably just had a Kobe beef and martini party in Martha’s Vinyard the night before while your dad doesn’t have a job. As students listen to the speech, they could think about the following:
  • What is the president trying to tell me by repetitive verbal blugeoning?
  • What is the president asking me to do, and why is each one blatantly unconstitutional?
  • What new ideas and actions, like the bueaty of fascism and government funded abortion is the president trying to force me to think about?
• Students could record important parts of the speech in their little red books that were given to them by their educational overlords. Students might think about the following:
  • Why is he asking me to do stuff when he is the president and doesn’t have that power?
  • Is he asking anything of anyone else that doesn’t involve bending over and grabbing the economic ankles?
  • Trade unions? Trial lawyers? ACORN? The SEIU? Goldman Sachs?
• Students could record questions they have while he is speaking and then burn them with a cigarette lighter after the speech. Younger children may need to dictate their questions to appropriate background music of Megadeth’s United Abominations.

After the Speech

• Teachers could ask students to share the ideas they recorded, exchange sticky notes, or place notes on a butcher-paper poster in the classroom to discuss main ideas from the speech, like how all of those items are going to cost five times more than they do now when Obamanomics finishes destroying the market price system.
• Students could discuss their responses to the following questions:
  • What constitutional authority does the president have to ask us to do anything at all?
  • Does the speech make you want to voluntarily deafen yourself with a 300 decibel soundsystem for protection against future speeches?
  • How low would someone’s IQ level have to be to actually take Obama seriously?
  • Extra credit: Is there anything you can think of to ask the president that doesn’t involve explitives. “Hell” doesn’t count.

Extension of the Speech

Teachers could extend learning by having students:

• Create posters of their goals. Posters could be formatted in quadrants, puzzle pieces, or trails marked with the following labels: liberty, freedom, free trade, peace, anarchy. Each area could be labeled with three steps for achieving goals in that area. It might make sense to focus first on personal and academic goals so that community and country goals can be more readily seen as aggressors against personal goals.
• Write letters to themselves about how they can achieve their short-term and long-term education goals. Teachers would collect and redistribute these letters at an appropriate later date to enable students to monitor their progress and calculate how much better they would have done in learning if the government had stayed out of the whole process. This could be sort of a educational misery index.
• Interview one another and share goals with the class to show that forced participation is detrimental when compared to freedom of association. Observe how none of the other students give a crap about your goals.
• Do a thought experiment about how you will never be able to get that lost 20 minutes of your life back and create a goal of how to not end up listening to another Obama speech.
• Participate in school-wide incentive programs or contests for those students who achieve their goals and observe how none of it is based on any type of observable market reality. Discuss how a boss would fire you if you asked for a raise for something stupid like “meeting a personal community goal.”
• Create artistic projects based on the themes of their goals and show how none of them qualify for subsidizing by the National Endowment for the Arts because all their parents make too much money and none of the artwork is lude enough.
• Graph individual progress toward goals and compare it to a graph of how much money you would make if you could just get out of this stupid classroom and go get a real job and get on with your life.

–Dave Jones, SouthernBread.org