President's Speech

In his speech, the President talks about responsibility, and the things students have to do. And in the prompt given to me, I am asked to explain what I feel my responsibilities are as a student. And I honestly find that a difficult question to answer. The best I can come up with is that I feel a responsibility to just be a student and meet the expectations people put upon me, no matter what I want to do. Tough I don’t feel this is a good enough answer. It’s quite hard to put how I feel about the whole “student situation” into words. Teachers are there to teach, they aren’t like your parents. Some parents will lie to you and tell you that something you did badly was just fine, teachers won’t usually do that. They’ll tell you exactly what you did wrong, and how to fix it. Of course some parents make great teachers and they’ll tell you the same thing. Basically what I’m trying to say is that your relationship with your teachers is completely different from your relationship with your family. Of course, that doesn’t stop both entities from placing expectations on you, and I feel it’s my responsibility to meet those expectations.
    Goals. They can be so many different things, from the achievable to the impossible, and everything in between. So far I’ve read half of the third excerpt in our reader, “Suggestions for Becoming a Positive Deviant”. The author talks about being just one cog in a machine consisting of billions of other people, and about realizing that though your life may be important to you, most of society wouldn’t notice or care if you disappeared. And it made me think… I realized that it didn’t change any of my goals or plans, and that truthfully, I don’t have any plans past getting a good education and then getting a good job. One lesson that I’ve learned from my parents is that life never works out exactly how you want it to, so you shouldn’t ask for specifics past a certain point. You can’t account for the human aspect of life. Someone else’s mistake could drag you down, even if that wasn’t that person’s intention.
    Failure is something everyone tries to avoid, but as the old saying goes; everyone makes mistakes. Thinking about the President’s remarks on turning a failure into a success, I can’t honestly say I can remember a time where that has happened… I guess I tend to dwell either on the failure or on the success, while the rest of the experience fades from my memory. Now, I’m not saying I always do well… that’s quite far from the truth. I make a lot of mistakes. Things like making the wrong thing for dinner, or forgetting to do my homework, or messing up the latest clarinet repair. And a lot of the time, I get in trouble because of my mistakes.
    Responsibility, Goals, Failure, all of them are things that teachers and parents are always trying to get us to think about. Being teens, of course none of us want to listen, we want to believe that there’s no way they can understand, and that we know best, and most of all, that our opinions matter. And in truth, they don’t really… a lot of modern society feels that they have the right to impose, not just voice, and their opinions on others. And if you don’t agree, you are the enemy.
    Overall I guess that President Obama was trying to say that things aren’t always as they seem…  after reading this summer reader and writing this essay, I’ve come to believe that you should look at past events and re-evaluate them, see things how they really are, and not just how you want to see them. Because only then can you actually make a difference, in your community, city, state, country, planet, whatever…. As long as you make some difference that means a lot to you.