Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Abraham Lincoln

Hmm, well yes, I knew Abraham Lincoln was a genius, and well yes, I knew it would be hard to translate his works to english 8th graders can understand, but I didn't realize it would be this hard! I mean, I already knew that most of my peers don't have a large vocabulary, but honestly!
Alright, so it's not as hard as I would make you believe. The project is due Thursday, and I think there's a chance I'll survive it. I decided that I'm going to shorten and make the speeches "modern" and present some facts for each. Hopefully, I can present it to the class in under 15 minutes and still make it interesting... I'm doing four speeches:
  • Emancipation Proclamation
  • Gettysburg Address
  • Second Inaugural Address
  • Last Public Address
So far so good! Maybe this will work out after all.

So very quickly, I wanted to share a few things I've learned about Abraham Lincoln. Some of you may be familiar with his famous "House Divided" speech, so named for the statement, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." Well, this is a shortened quote by Jesus in the New Testament. Mathew 12:25 "Jesus knew their thoughts and said to them, 'Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand.'" (NIV) I also wanted to share a few quotes from him that I liked:

"I now wish to make that personal acknowledgment that you were right, and I was wrong." Imagine if present-day politicians were this humble.

"Without the assistance of the Divine Being who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail." Ain't that the truth!

And finally, my personal favorite is the understandably irritated statement from President Lincoln to General McClellen. "Dear General, if you do not want to use the army I would like to borrow it for a few days."

I bid y'all good night, with a question for any Uncommon members(however many there may be left): What's up with the site?
And now... back to work!! :D

5 comments:

  1. Yay! Looks like things are on the bright side for you know! Or at least better than they were. You can do it girl! :) keep on keepin' on.

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  2. Know? Haha. Now. My brain is ready for bed!

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  3. Thanks BethAnn. That means a lot. :D Love ya, sis.

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  4. They are having server issues from what I have read. Most likely it has something to with the chat box taking up to many system resources at the peoples servers hosting the site. Other then that no idea...

    Good luck with your project!

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  5. hahaha! That borrowing the army quote is one of my favorites too! It makes me laugh every time I see it. =D

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