What’s Our Sputnik?

It seems to me that the youth of today are more concerned with the latest video game, cell phone, or facebook post. It is hard to pull their minds out of the new technology and into the classroom. From reading about the past, it sees the people of the United States loved their country, they found pride in making this country better. Today, it feels like each person is in it for themselves or find a way to take from someone else’s hard work. The terrorist attacks happened at the beginning of my senior year of high school and the war followed soon after. At the time, I felt these attacks would spur our country into World War III which would pull our country together to fight the terrorists. Yes, a war did start, but I did not have a personal connection to it. In order for our school system to prepare students to solve our nation’s problems we need to create a sense of unity in our country. As teachers, we need to get our students to see the importance of creating alternative energy resources, creating new war technology to save our troops, and find ways to make our country less dependent on others. In my classroom, this means we need to spark s person’s natural feeling of competitiveness. We need to get our students thinking outside of the box looking at our nation and start thinking of solutions to our problems. Other countries either want to be us or want to beat us and the way our nation is headed it is going to be easier than ever before.  Hopefully it does not take another World War or another country taking over America to inspire people to look at the bigger picture to motivate our nation to be who we were sixty years ago.