Obama acknowledges a smart fifth grader!-06/08/2010

06/08/2010

Obama acknowledges a smart fifth grader!

Na’Dreya Lattimore is just ten-years old. Unhappy with the educational system in the United States, she decided to shoot a letter to President Barack Obama. It's news now!



Last week, during the National Urban League Centennial Conference in Washington, the president shared her sentiments with the nation. The fifth-grader's letter dealt with the poor condition of some of the elementary schools around. She received a hand-written response from him in May, and he referred to her letter at the end of his education reform speech.



The copy of the letter Na'Dreya sent to the President.

Little Na'Dreya was happy, too. "My school called me this morning and said they heard he mentioned me," she said. "I thought it was pretty cool to be mentioned on TV by the president."



The response from President Barack Obama.

More is happening in the world of education elsewhere, too. Read on.



An elementary school student studies Chinese during class in Taipei. When Taiwanese scholar Shih Cheng-feng was a boy four decades ago, he was forced to speak a language that was not his own, and decades later he still feels handicapped by his education.

This included a difficult sound not common on the island that involves rolling up the tongue, and students who lapsed into their native Taiwanese were humiliated with a tag saying "I'm no good. I speak dialect".



Honduran teachers take part in a road blockage demandig the payment of their wages to the government of President Porfirio Lobo, in Tegucigalpa. The strike of the more than 60,000 Honduran teachers has paralized the primary school education in Honduras.



Chinese students practise under the supervision of a PLA soldier during their one week of first-year high school military service at a military base in Hefei, east China's Anhui province. Most Chinese university and high-school students are required to go through military training to enhance patriotism and self-discipline when they enter schools in China.



A girl receives a lesson via computer from a new humanoid robot called "Telenoid R1", shaped like a child and composed of minimal human features such as a head, a face and upper body, developed by Osaka University's professor Hiroshi Ishiguro in Osaka, western Japan. The tele-operated android Telenoid has nine "actuators" in the small body with enables it to be remote-controlled by sending voice and movement commands, captured with a camera. The robot, designed for remote education and elderly health care, will be sold by the robotic venture Eager in this autumn.



This crawler rescue robot "QUINCE" made by Japanese college Chiba Institute of Technology is demonstrated at the college campus of Narashino city in suburban Tokyo. Japanese emergency services are to trial the small tank-like robot that can search rubble for survivors and deliver water, food or cellphones in disaster zones.



Daryl Allen in the US Army's 82nd Airborne Division sits in a Transition Assistance Program class in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The Transition Assistance Program (TAP) helps US troops nearing the end of their military service transition into civilian life by offering job-search assistance, employment classes, and related services.



A child plays during a break at the mixed school of Roma and Romanian children in Darvari village, 30kms west from Bucharest. Victims of segregation and exclusion, Roma children have had in the past years a better access to education but unemployment remains high and the access to proper housing difficult, according to NGOs and authorities.



Visually-impaired women at the Andh Kanya Prakash Gruh school for the blind prepare Rakhis in Ahmedabad. Kanya Prakash Gruh has set a target to prepare and sell some 20,000 Rakhis of different designs for Rakshabandhan festival which falls on August 24. The school provides education plus room and board for some 200 visually-impaired girls.



Dave Ebersbach plays cards with his son Bryce, 6, at their home in Bowling Green, Ohio. Ebersbach, 43, one of 14 math teachers in the Toledo, Ohio, school district to receive notice a few weeks ago that their jobs were cut. Congress is moving rapidly just weeks before the start of the school year to speed billions of dollars in emergency education aid to states in hopes of reversing the layoffs of tens of thousands of teachers.



President Barack Obama presents the 2010 Citizens Medal to Susan Retik Ger from Needham during an event in the East Room of the White House in Washington. After losing her husband on September 11, 2001, she worked on educating and training Afghan widows and their children.



Guns N' Roses musician Tommy Stinson attends the graduation ceremony for former street youth at the Timkatec school in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Stinson helps raise funds for Haiti's three Timkatec schools that educate people in plumbing, electricity and other skilled labor.

Source: India Syndicate
Image source: AFP/AP