The poem English Book by Jane Weir Essay Example for Free

The poem English Book by Jane Weir Essay What do you think the poet is saying about some teachers of English and the way they mark a students book in the poem English Book by Jane Weir? How does the poet present her opinions? (18 marks) Jane Weir seems very unimpressed by the way her sons English teacher marks his book. She is describing her visit to a Parents Evening and starts by plunging straight in with the pronoun they to begin the poem in the middle of the consultation. The first two lines express her surprise that they seem unaffected by their years in a classroom, all sitting upright and correctly to meet the mother. She lists the procedures that teachers have to go through and the words or so they say suggest she has little respect for the latest thinking or belief in the criminal checks that are made to protect children. One particular teacher, probably the boys English teacher, shows the mother his English book, her eyes showing a length of pity that the boys spelling, punctuation and general presentation are so weak. The mother is appalled that his writing has been butchered by the teachers red pen. The teacher has very little understanding that (according to the mother) she is killing the childs creativity by concentrating so much on his technical mistakes. The poet, probably writing from real experience, cannot get the teachers to understand that her son has ability with words and that they are not appreciating or encouraging his ideas. The whole poem is full of imagery. The teachers are compared to books: they bear no tide mark and have perfect spines probably unlike the condition of the exercise book that the mother is about to be shown. Later metaphors (lines 13 to 15) seem to describe textiles, in the same way that Jane Weir weaves fabric imagery into her poem Poppies selvedge, rolls out flecked with heartfelt perhaps to express the situation from a womans point of view. The mother is obviously very angry at the way her sons written work has been treated and an extended metaphor compares the teachers marking to the violent acts of a butcher reducing a carcass to lumps of bloody meat. Red punctuation marks have chopped up his words; circles around his misspelt words are nooses to hang his confidence; her pen is an axe to destroy his sentence structures. The resulting page is piled with offal. After the butchering, only the inedible (unreadable) parts are left, nevertheless the mother believes her son is very intelligent. She sees the oracle in his entrails and the jazz /of his sequencing would seem to describe a lively imagination at work. From the mothers point of view the excessive emphasis on the importance of technical accuracy is harming the boy and the teacher makes little effort to listen to the mothers concerns or to see anything worth praising in the boys writing. Described metaphorically as a starved lion-cub waiting for a word kill, this final image presents a child, waiting hungrily to experience and enjoy language, but being starved by a teacher who cannot see what beats at (the) centre of his writing.

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Living in today’s American society is a blessing and a curse. Never has information been so easily attainable, knowledge is literally at our fingertips, that being the blessing. However, so are advertisements, movies, songs and general media that are coming at us so fast that we have no idea how to handle it. The average American is subjected to about 3000 ads per day (Kilbourne, 2006). The curse is what it does to our generation’s ideal perception of the perfect body, advertisement being the biggest culprit of them all. Hyper sexualized women and men in the media are the reason that 80% of children by the age of ten years old are afraid of being fat. According to a recent study in Spain found that adolescents consume an average of 3 hours to 3.2 hours a day of television on weekdays and weekends, respectively (Bercedo Sanz et al., 2005). Children are still in their developmental stage, their brain and ideas are still forming which is why they are so easily targeted. Television, magazines, films, billboards, and the like frequently offer a distorted vision of the world (Bercedo Sanz et al., 2005; Shrum, 2009), and it may be difficult for children and adolescents to distinguish whether what they see is real or not, so that they are more vulnerable to the messages transmitted (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2001). Men and women are each targeted very differently in media. Although sex sells, it is the image in the advertisement itself that is what is engrained in our minds. Media tells us that wome n are supposed to be skinny, dainty and delicate. Whereas men they are supposed to be big and strong so that women will faun all over them and their muscles. These images are making young children’s self-esteem plummet way faster in th... ...ian body builder Aziz Sergeyevich Shavershian is considered a god amongst men in the body building community. He died of a heart attack in a sauna due to steroid abuse while on vacation in Thailand. Why people consider him a hero is still a mystery. In the media the seemingly over weight men never get the posy and are never taken seriously. Men must be stern chiseled and highly sophisticated. Not only that but they must also take charge and be animalistic, women in the media are often portrayed as objects for the men’s pleasure. Media is a vessel in which women and men a like use in order to try to better themselves. In trying to duplicate what they see they really are only causing themselves heart ache and emotional and psychological damage. Until we can passively look at media and still be happy with whom we are; we as a society can never be happy and healthy.

Drug abuse Essay

The policy in Switzerland seems to be a success because in the last 10 years there has been an astounding reduction in new users, 82% in fact. Addicts are offered heroin on prescription, access to â€Å"shooting galleries†, needle exchanges and oral methadone. This medicalised drug use has removes its glamour, making it trivial and less appealing. The British government however takes the view that allowing drug consumption rooms risks increasing levels of dealing and anti-social crime. This is the disadvantage currently obstructing the government following suit. The doctor thinks that some users have turned round their lives as a result of this treatment. They come off heroin because of the boredom of routine and drudgery. In addition to the professional opinion, a more personal outlook given by a former addict stated that it should be done in very controlled conditions and only used as a last resort. As I saw on the video, drug abuse has been a problem for centuries and I personally do not see a situation where the world will be free of drug abuse. This is because, when the word drug is defined we mean a medication and there are many legal drugs that are medically prescribed for the treatment of the ill. Drugs such as morphine and paracetamol can also be misused, and the abuse can lead to deaths. In this sense the problem of drug abuse can never be completely eliminated because people will just find another drug to abuse. However, one must be cautious when reading the newspapers as it is likely to be biased. Not everything must be taken into account as it is not likely to be authentic or reliable. To a certain extent not all drugs are as bad as each other; some drugs bring about more harm than others. In other ways, if particular drugs are abused constantly and in heavy quantities they can cause severe consequences, such as tobacco for example. Particular notice needs to be taken of Danger Ratings and the seriousness of heroin addiction. More should be done to prevent this, by tightening rules and regulations and giving harsher punishments to put off new users and give help to existing addicts. Both sources offer contrasting methods for dealing with the problem. The first method, calling upon the government to update the system may not be taken into consideration by some politicians as they do not want to lose votes. However, if it is considered and action is taken, it is a worthwhile action. The second method calling upon softer laws can be seen as helping in some ways, but mainly making it easier for drugs to be abused. In my opinion, the government should tighten rules and regulations for drug abuse and crackdown on Drug related crime, reducing the usage of drugs, and also supply help for the addicts to stabilise their lives. Politics and the law are barriers to both approaches because each method has to gain the Governments approval prior to the action taken, this may prove difficult. This is due to the fact that political parties view their own positions in government more precious than the welfare of the public. As a result of this, they are more concerned with losing votes rather than losing lives. As a whole, drug abuse and addiction is a problem that cannot ever be eradicated completely but it can be controlled and reduced, particularly with certain drugs. As mentioned previously, there are options available to control the issue, and measures can be put in place to reduce drug abuse. The best method would be to take a combination of both options as stated previously. Maybe, in the distant future, drug abuse may not be such a huge pandemic as it is today.

Pre1914 prose study Essay

A single eye opens. On the dark, damp night of November, Frankenstein’s creation at last exists. Chapter 5 shows the awaking of his creation, literally his child. For so long he toiled, working towards this moment. But for what? For when the time came, only negative attitude was expressed. And so Victor deserts his â€Å"monster†, plunging the creation into complete darkness, lost, lonely and unaware. Frankenstein wants nothing to do with it, but to his creation, Victor is his everything. He made him; he is his mother, his father, and ultimately his God. Although, to say that Victor is a parent is rather ironic; it’s such an inhumane way of creating a living human being, such a ‘masculine’ form of science cannot work, it’s not naturally correct to deny the feminine act of child birth. Also, Frankenstein never once considered what he would do with the creation once he is alive; therefore, Victor fails as a parent. Frankenstein never educated the creation, and denies loving it. In the absence of love, Frankenstein’s Monster is forced to learn the hard way. The reactions he received drives the creature to realize that appearance and physicality is an important part of the public’s vain judgments. Rejected, uneducated and even nameless, it’s distanced from humanity and branded with such names as ‘wretch’, ‘daemon’, and ‘monster’ in which most of the names are from his creator’s own mouth. Such a gentle soul never had any physical contact with the human race and therefore attaches itself to the De Lacy family. Soon developing new emotions and sensations, he gains pleasure from help the family suffering from poverty. In return, he gains a steady education, Just like a child, and with a child, his knowledge builds off the teaching of Felix De Lacey. An important factor in this is the books he reads; Plutarch’s Lives, Volney’s Ruins of Empire, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Werther and most importantly Milton’s Paradise Lost. All of them represent the idea of romantic thinking in which Mary Shelley was associated. When presenting his arguments, he quotes from one such book: â€Å"I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed† (p. 77-8) He quotes Paradise Lost and relates himself to one character. Satan. Judged by his appearance, the public see him as evil and yet he is a tragic character, isolated from the world. He sees this mirrored in Milton’s Satan. Believing that perhaps the De Lacey family may accept him as a normal person and with that only to fail, was the stimulus to the beginning of his transportation from love to hate. Demonstrated in this novel is that creation isn’t just finished at the beginning of life. Frankenstein gives birth to this child of science, but makes him what he is branded, and ultimately what he is. A monster. By deserting him, he created an isolated and suffering being. With addition to being rejected by any other living person, this makes him a tragic figure. Victor was deeply self-absorbed, never once thinking of the welfare of his creation, but rather how to distance himself further from it. But, when moved by the monster’s happenings, he agrees to make a female partner. But again, he abandons him for his own welfare, and will not complete his companion. After making his creation, he fears making another double of his regret. The creature denies this though, he only wishes for a companion for the rest of his days on earth. Yet roles are reversed in the heart of the novel. In the beginning, power is mostly in Victor’s possession but by the time of meeting, the creature dominates, leading Victor into the wilderness of the mountains.

Free Essays on Ritual

When ritual is spoken of in Western society, images of cute, charming and sometimes dangerous activities of ‘native’ societies tend to be conjured up into the mind. Television seems to be full of ceremonies which, at best, tend to be thought of as quaint, at worst, acted out for the tourist industry. Religious belief is on the decline in Western society and this also contributes to the general outlook on rituals and rites. Western industrial society has idolised ideals, rationality and a limited type of practicality and all too often regards the conscious ritual of other cultures as a frivolous curiosity (LaChapelle, 1984:1-6). We have forgotten much in the last 300 hundred years that we should remember the fact that Western society not only had, but still has, rituals and rites of passage. In this essay I will point out that whether we accept it or not, ritual is an essential part of the life course, even though the act of performing and perceiving ritual may be unconscious. Ritual can often be viewed as habit or regularities (Cohen & Taylor, 1998:46-65). The daily process of getting out of bed, washing, brushing teeth and going to work or school is an unconscious ritual that millions of humankind goes through. These microsocial rituals, or regularities, may well appear never ending and spread their way throughout life’s course. Members of any given society may well try to break away from these rituals, but more often than not the ‘escape’ is only temporary. To ‘get away from it all’ may well lead to other types of unconscious ritual. Victor Turner (1974:298) has argued that the dialectical relationship of ritual and social structure facilitates creative responses to the negative aspects of daily social structure, and that these responses include alienation, divisiveness and exploitation. Ritual can undermine social structure in that humankind can find instructions in it as to fundamental organising principles an... Free Essays on Ritual Free Essays on Ritual When ritual is spoken of in Western society, images of cute, charming and sometimes dangerous activities of ‘native’ societies tend to be conjured up into the mind. Television seems to be full of ceremonies which, at best, tend to be thought of as quaint, at worst, acted out for the tourist industry. Religious belief is on the decline in Western society and this also contributes to the general outlook on rituals and rites. Western industrial society has idolised ideals, rationality and a limited type of practicality and all too often regards the conscious ritual of other cultures as a frivolous curiosity (LaChapelle, 1984:1-6). We have forgotten much in the last 300 hundred years that we should remember the fact that Western society not only had, but still has, rituals and rites of passage. In this essay I will point out that whether we accept it or not, ritual is an essential part of the life course, even though the act of performing and perceiving ritual may be unconscious. Ritual can often be viewed as habit or regularities (Cohen & Taylor, 1998:46-65). The daily process of getting out of bed, washing, brushing teeth and going to work or school is an unconscious ritual that millions of humankind goes through. These microsocial rituals, or regularities, may well appear never ending and spread their way throughout life’s course. Members of any given society may well try to break away from these rituals, but more often than not the ‘escape’ is only temporary. To ‘get away from it all’ may well lead to other types of unconscious ritual. Victor Turner (1974:298) has argued that the dialectical relationship of ritual and social structure facilitates creative responses to the negative aspects of daily social structure, and that these responses include alienation, divisiveness and exploitation. Ritual can undermine social structure in that humankind can find instructions in it as to fundamental organising principles an...

Mathematical Properties of Waves

Mathematical Properties of Waves Physical waves, or mechanical waves, form through the vibration of a medium, be it a string, the Earths crust, or particles of gases and fluids. Waves have mathematical properties that can be analyzed to understand the motion of the wave. This article introduces these general wave properties, rather than how to apply them in specific situations in physics. Transverse Longitudinal Waves There are two types of mechanical waves. A is such that the displacements of the medium are perpendicular (transverse) to the direction of travel of the wave along the medium. Vibrating a string in periodic motion, so the waves move along it, is a transverse wave, as are waves in the ocean. A longitudinal wave is such that the displacements of the medium are back and forth along the same direction as the wave itself. Sound waves, where the air particles are pushed along in the direction of travel, is an example of a longitudinal wave. Even though the waves discussed in this article will refer to travel in a medium, the mathematics introduced here can be used to analyze properties of non-mechanical waves. Electromagnetic radiation, for example, is able to travel through empty space, but still, has the same mathematical properties as other waves. For example, the Doppler effect for sound waves is well known, but there exists a similar Doppler effect for light waves, and they are based around the same mathematical principles. What Causes Waves? Waves can be viewed as a disturbance in the medium around an equilibrium state, which is generally at rest. The energy of this disturbance is what causes the wave motion. A pool of water is at equilibrium when there are no waves, but as soon as a stone is thrown in it, the equilibrium of the particles is disturbed and the wave motion begins.The disturbance of the wave travels, or propogates, with a definite speed, called the wave speed (v).Waves transport energy, but not matter. The medium itself doesnt travel; the individual particles undergo back-and-forth or up-and-down motion around the equilibrium position. The Wave Function To mathematically describe wave motion, we refer to the concept of a wave function, which describes the position of a particle in the medium at any time. The most basic of wave functions is the sine wave, or sinusoidal wave, which is a periodic wave (i.e. a wave with repetitive motion). It is important to note that the wave function doesnt depict the physical wave, but rather its a graph of the displacement about the equilibrium position. This can be a confusing concept, but the useful thing is that we can use a sinusoidal wave to depict most periodic motions, such as moving in a circle or swinging a pendulum, which dont necessarily look wave-like when you view the actual motion. Properties of the Wave Function wave speed (v) - the speed of the waves propagationamplitude (A) - the maximum magnitude of the displacement from equilibrium, in SI units of meters. In general, it is the distance from the equilibrium midpoint of the wave to its maximum displacement, or it is half the total displacement of the wave.period (T) - is the time for one wave cycle (two pulses, or from crest to crest or trough to trough), in SI units of seconds (though it may be referred to as seconds per cycle).frequency (f) - the number of cycles in a unit of time. The SI unit of frequency is the hertz (Hz) and1 Hz 1 cycle/s 1 s-1angular frequency (ω) - is 2Ï€ times the frequency, in SI units of radians per second.wavelength (ÃŽ ») - the distance between any two points at corresponding positions on successive repetitions in the wave, so (for example) from one crest or trough to the next, in SI units  of meters.  wave number (k) - also called the propagation constant, this useful quantity is defined as 2 Ï₠¬ divided by the wavelength, so the SI units are radians per meter. pulse - one half-wavelength, from equilibrium back Some useful equations in defining the above quantities are: v ÃŽ » / T ÃŽ » fω 2 Ï€ f 2 Ï€/TT 1 / f 2 Ï€/ωk 2Ï€/ωω vk The vertical position of a point on the wave, y, can be found as a function of the horizontal position, x, and the time, t, when we look at it. We thank the kind mathematicians for doing this work for us, and obtain the following useful equations to describe the wave motion: y(x, t) A sin ω(t - x/v) A sin 2Ï€ f(t - x/v)y(x, t) A sin 2Ï€(t/T - x/v)y(x, t) A sin (ω t - kx) The Wave Equation One final feature of the wave function is that applying calculus to take the second derivative yields the wave equation, which is an intriguing and sometimes useful product (which, once again, we will thank the mathematicians for and accept without proving it): d2y / dx2 (1 / v2) d2y / dt2 The second derivative of y with respect to x is equivalent to the second derivative of y with respect to t divided by the wave speed squared. The key usefulness of this equation is that whenever it occurs, we know that the function y acts as a wave with wave speed v and, therefore, the situation can be described using the wave function.

Forgiveness Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Forgiveness - Essay Example The research being accessible to everyone on internet has changed the general perspective to a realistic one also introducing the benefits of improving intrapersonal health and thoughts. When it comes to utilizing the benefits of forgiveness, it can be seen in two different ways, religious and psychological; even though both overlap. Forgiveness ensures that intrapersonal and interpersonal troubles of a person are resolved, which is the reason forgiveness cannot be taken as a responsibility or duty. Forgiving by force might shortly suppress the issues but does not resolve them, as per Baker (2012). To truly forgive, one needs to let go from the heart and release the resentment; religiously explained by McMinn et. al (1999), it might be an altruistic gift to the receiving individual; while from a psychological point of view it is seen as means of regaining personal health. This contrast of approaches of forgiveness shows two different perceptions of forgiveness with respect to intrape rsonal characteristics and interpersonal relations. Where religion finds forgiveness to be a trait of God and a way to thank God for His forgiveness, psychologists find it as a therapeutic tool that helps an individual get relieved of his anguish. Reconciliation after forgiveness involves parties to re-establish the relationship but is unlikely to be always synonymous to forgiveness. As alluded by Baker (2012), forgiveness and reconciliation together might be a good combination in case of loved ones but they don’t always go together. This can be due to a number of reasons. For example, the forgiving individual might want to forgive the perpetrator but not have anything to do with them anymore, on the other hand the perpetrator might not even have any remorse in the first place or even being repeatedly injurious making reconciliation impossible whereas the victim might still want to forgive the person. Such situations define the differences between forgiveness and reconciliati on. It might also be a point to note that acknowledgement of offense is also not equal to remorse while on the other hand, forgiveness being a choice still enables the victim to want to forgive an unrepenting perpetrator. The Gale Encyclopedia (2009) article on reconciliation also refers to forgiveness being both a psychological and a religious approach to emotional healing; both being in contrast, still aim the same thing - improvement of interpersonal relations and intrapersonal health. From another point of view, forgiveness might be seen as a unilateral act while reconciliation takes both (or all) parties involved. Forgiveness might also involve foregoing indebtedness so that the victim does not have to go through the ordeal of reconciling with the perpetrator. The senior citizens are also alluded to have found forgiveness and reconciliation an important part in the last phase of their life. The Gale Encyclopedia (2009) terms it as an ‘end of life concern’ for those in the last phase of their life. It is also sometimes the case that tolerance is confused with reconciliation. Tolerance and forgiveness might both be helpful in reconciliation but are not equal to it. Reconciliation involves people on two sides of a divide to uncover the ordeal they’ve been put through and sacrifice in order to re-establish a relationship. Tolerance also does not require the same level of honesty as for forgiveness while reconciliation requires both. This differentiates forgiveness to be unique in the way that it is not