The Following feature address was delivered at the Primary School Awards Ceremony.
I would like to adopt the protocol already established.
“Setting the stage for Greatness!” This is such a bold statement and sometimes hard or difficult to comprehend.
“Greatness” is defined as a concept of a state of superiority that is associated in a person, object, or place.
I would like to site two great people who has influenced exponentially the way of life of a particular continent or the whole human race for the past century.
First is Albert Einstein, considered as the most influential physicist in the 20th century.
Einstein didn’t speak until he was 3 years old. He attended elementary school at the Luitpold Gymnasium in Munich, Germany, and he was considered as a mediocre student. He was known to suffer from a speech difficulty, a slow cadence in his speaking where he’d pause to consider what to say next. His life as a student also had its ups and downs. Einstein’s father and mother moved to different countries to find a job, and therefore he had no option but to move with them. However, his mother ensured that young Einstein got proper education so he won’t have a hard time finding a job when he grew up.
Although she tried her best, Einstein still encountered some challenges in school. He even struggled to pass most of his exams, but he excelled in two subjects which were mathematics and physics. At a young age, he developed an early interest in the field of physics and has always nurtured himself to learn from teachers and great scholars in his time. He listened to and learned as much as he could from them, and then he utilized his knowledge to develop his own thinking until he established his own concepts and theories based on his published papers which are; The photoelectric effect, Brownian Motion, Special Relativity, and The equivalence of matter and energy which is very well known by the equation E = mc2. Due to his work, we can now send astronauts to the moon and explore the whole universe.
Isn’t that great!
The second person whom I have selected to highlight in my speech “Setting the Stage for Greatness”, is President Barack Obama the 44th and current president of the United States of America.
Barack Obama was born in Hawaii of an African man and an American woman. As a youth, his family is way far from perfect. His parents got divorced and his mom got remarried and also lived in many different countries. President Obama spent a few years in Indonesia, and at the tender age of 10, he returned to Hawaii to be raised by his grandmother. He had a middle class upbringing in a strong family where the values of hard work and education were the means of getting ahead. They live within the idea that life is so blessed it should be lived in the service to others.
As a youth, President Obama studied hard and excelled in his early school years. After working his way through college with the help of a scholarship and student loans, Obama moved to Chicago where he worked with a group of churches to help serve and build communities devastated by the closure of local steel plants. He went on to attend law school until February 1990; Obama was elected the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review. He graduated from Harvard as magna cum laude in 1991. In 1996, he won as a Senator for Illinois and in 2008, he won as the first African-American President of the USA and again he was later re-elected in 2012.
The life of Albert Einstein and President Barack Obama can serve as an inspiration for us young students as we journey to become successful in the future. Based on their life story, we can learn that there are a few similarities in how they succeeded in life. First is that, at a young age, their family situation was far from perfect. They had problems and issues along the way while they were growing as a child, and yet they held on and did their best as students to overcome their challenges.
Einstein even suffered a health problem and yet, this wasn’t a handicap in his studies. Obama was raised without a complete family and grew up with his grandmother. However, they both managed to excel in their studies. Secondly, both of these men completed a high degree of education which gave them opportunities to find better jobs and even improve their knowledge. Even at the time of Einstein, his parents had already realized the importance of education as a tool to help overcome challenges and to provide them with a better future. Education therefore can help you succeed and fulfill your dreams.
I would like to mention a paragraph from a song entitled “Education is Essential” by the Mighty Sparrow. He wrote, “For employment, yes employment you must be intelligent. So it is essential, very essential to have your credentials, but if your block-headed like a mule, remember no one will employ a fool. You will be the last to be hired and the very first to be fired. Illiteracy, literally is man’s greatest enemy. It’s your duty, yes your duty to stamp it out completely. Ignorance is always peoples quest. Education saves, saves you much distress. So learn, learn as much as you can. This nations future is in your hands.”
To all my fellow students, we have all the resources to learn and make it happen. Just like Scientist Einstein & President Obama, do not let life’s failures discourage you from becoming great! Continue to study hard and follow your own stars. Strive for excellence by reading and learning regularly. And lastly, I leave these words from Gandhi – “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
Thank you!
By Angela Renise Faltado Guinto
