Anne Sullivan: A Woman of Strong Conscience :: Essays Papers

Anne Sullivan: A Woman of Strong Conscience When I think of powerful women from the past, Anne Sullivan is one of the first women to pop into my mind. Anne Sullivan was born on April 14, 1866 in Massachusetts. Her real name is Joanna, but she was called Anne throughout her life. When Anne was still young she suffered from a serious illness that left her nearly blind. Anne’s mother died when Anne was only eight and her father left Anne and her two siblings two years later. The children were then placed into an almshouse to be cared for. After a lonely and miserable couple of years, Anne had a surgery that restored some of her sight. With the regain of some sight, Anne felt revived and decided to move on to Tuscumbia, Alabama where she would become the governess of a six-year old girl named Helen Keller. It was through caring for this six-year old girl, Helen, that shaped Anne Sullivan into a woman of conscience. When Anne first met Helen Keller, she was blind, deaf, and mute since she was 19 months old. Helen was left undisciplined, ill tempered, and neglected with no contact with the outer world. Anne’s difficult job was to tame Helen. Helen screamed, bit, hit, and kicked Anne, but Anne, faithfully, never gave up. Anne Sullivan displayed the virtues of fortitude, compassion, and most importantly patience while caring for Helen. Anne had a respect for life that gave her the belief that all humans were created in the image of God, and WE ALL ARE GOOD. Anne Sullivan treated Helen with equality, just as Jesus cured the lepers when the rest of the community cast them out of society. Helen constantly challenged Anne to find new ways to make her learn. Anne constantly challenged Helen by not allowing her to give up and to be there to support Helen. After communicating by spelling the name of objects into Helen’s hands and then allowing Helen to feel the object and repeated spelling it, Helen finally discovered the connection. Anne Sullivan’s persistence and determination is what made her a perfect role model to us all. Anne Sullivan contributed so much to society. After the miraculous rescue of Helen Keller, Anne continued to go through college with Helen and sign the lectures into Helen’s hands.

Mark Twains The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn :: Adventures Huckleberry Huck Finn Essays

Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn In Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck is a person to be admired. His caring attitudes and blunt honesty prove that he is a great person. Although Huck can be seen lying, cheating and stealing, he does these things out of necessity and as a result of his poor upbringing. These negative attributes don’t affect his overall high character. Huck Finn has many great aspects, but he is fallible and capable of doing wrong. He often lies, cheats, and steals simply to survive and get out of trouble. Huck also displays this bad behavior as a result of his poor upbringing. Much of this behavior was learned from his father, as evidenced in the following passage. â€Å"Pap always said it warn’t no harm to borrow things if you was meaning to pay them back some time; but the widow said it warn’t anything but a soft name for stealing, and no decent body would do it† (65). It is this learned behavior, his desire to survive and â€Å"get out of jams,† and society’s negative influences, such as its view that slavery is right, that motivates him in doing wrong. Although Huck can sometimes be labeled as a miscreant, he is actually a very honest person. In a literal sense, Huck doesn’t always exhibit honest behavior. However, it is Huck’s realistic and slightly naive view of society that is honest--he sees things for what they truly are. One example of this honesty occurs when Huck helps Jim to freedom. While he doesn’t view his own actions as honorable, the reader can infer that they are. Huck feels guilty for his role in Jim’s escape, knowing that he was doing something society would have scorned. He says, "I couldn’t get it out of my conscience, no how nor no way. It got to troubling me so I couldn’t rest; I couldn’t stay still in one place. It hadn’t ever come home to me before, what this thing was that I was doing. But now it did; and it stayed with me, and scorched me more and more...I got to feeling so mean and miserable I most wished I was dead" (88). Huck is honest with himself and his feelings.

Prison Reform, We Need Change

In today's society, we’re facing many changes. Our own family, neighbors, and countrymen are afraid of many dangers that influence their lives. In America, we have somewhat of a low crime rate as far as murders, having a rating of twenty-four of sixty-two countries. Although our drug offense rate is number two of sixty-two, in the categories of rape, assault, and kidnapping, the United States tops at number one. We find ourselves asking, why? How did this nation accumulate such high numbers of these crimes? We point our fingers to prisoners and those who are or were convicted on the street. But we aren’t considering how they got that way in the first place. Everyone grows up with a role model, parent, guardian, some kind of example or someone they look up to. Studies show those who had a childhood involving physical abuse, neglect, or molestation would re-enact those actions, onto someone else. The society needs to change itself. People who sexually, physically, and emotionally abuse their children need to be rehabilitated or put through a program. When a person endures such abuse with no counseling to alter that mind set, that is when they begin to have criminal behavior. If we made the society a better place and properly handled the people who commit wrongdoings, incarceration rates would decline enormously. U. S. prisons are a breeding ground for violence. We’ve seen what people look like and act like after they’re released from prison. Most inmates get tattoos and maintain a prison mentality. That mentality is having respect, including violent acts when disrespected, and being tough. How is someone supposed to change for good when they’re held in isolation, segregation, or population? When a harmless person is admitted into a prison, especially a high security one, they are prone to become violent. The effects of feeling and being held down instead of being pushed to be a better individual have mad inmates very violent people. If you treat someone like an animal, especially a prisoner since they’re confined to small cells, they’re going to act like one. The history of prisons and the inmates who maintain a certain reputation, and recruit other criminals to be like them, have also been a problem within the system. So many gangs within the prisons have restrained many prisoners from becoming better individuals. Once a prisoner commits an act of violence onto another, their sentence and punishment is often increased. When an inmate doesn’t join or follow the gang life once they enter, they become targets with no defense. It has been increasingly hard to prevent these gangs from going on, that acceptance of them has become necessary for survival in jail. Some inmates are incapable of change. Statistics report almost half of the people in jail have a mental illness, most are not aware they have. So for those people, a positive change and rehabilitation will be harder to overcome. How is a person supposed to want to change and become a proper citizen when they are emotionally and physically suppressed? Of course a person needs to be accounted for their actions and be punished. But to maintain focus in a negative direction, will do no good within prison walls. To provide a stronger encouraging opportunity to change for cons will give them the option of being a citizen again, instead of residing to prison â€Å"hard life. Not only do the guards and gangs within the prisons affect the possibility of reform, but the people outside of the prison. If prisoners were given positive feedback for a good deed they performed within the walls, acknowledged for the good things or steps taken towards a better life, the idea of full reform would be very possible and effective. The environment in prison is so harsh, and sometimes life threatening, it makes it hard for a persons mind to be ta ken off the idea of just surviving. When you place an inmate sentenced for a drug offense in a cell next to someone sentenced for several murders, of course they’re going to become self-defensive. This creates fear in the harmless inmate, causing self-defense and that leads to violence. To prevent anything from happening, prisoners resort to being accepted by gangs – that’s how the violence, gambling, and trading rises and continues. A man by the name Michael Santos has been serving time, in prisons of all levels of security, for almost twenty-five years. Since 1995, he has found several habits that will make a prisoner successful, and has been teaching many classes to other inmates. He states this in an article he wrote, â€Å"I lived this program and derived a sense of fulfillment in showing others how such habits could enrich their lives, assist their prison adjustments, and prepare them to emerge successfully. † The habits he encouraged were: being proactive, begin with the end in mind, take first steps first, seek first to understand then be understood, think win/win, synergize, and continuously sharpen their approach. Successful inmates created their own opportunities for growth through positive adjustments. They understand the importance of bringing meaning to their lives despite prison conditions. In Michaels classes, he focused not on being released early, but enriching their lives in the present, despite the limitations of confinement. Although those withheld in federal prisons are not given the possibility of early release or probation, these habits should be set in lower level prisons. If we taught these classes or provided more of these programs, the success level of transformed prisoners would increase. Another reason we need to push for reform is the financial factor of imprisonment. We taxpayers pay more than sixty billion dollars a year and that number will continue skyrocketing. Unless we set programs in our prisons and rehabilitate offenders successfully, our rates will remain the same and our money will be spent on housing these criminals. If we put more effort into hiring better correctional staffs and provide more rehab programs, we would be housing a lot less criminals. Our tax dollars could be spent on improving our communities, schools, government, and providing healthcare for our country. If three prisoners were released, two of those three would return to prison as re-offenders within three years. This fact should bring attention to everyone that our prison system is horribly failing with rehabilitation of prisoners. Of course the mind sets inmates have in jail often remains once they’re released. If they lived such a way for a year or many years, regardless of the crime, it would be hard to change that person of their habits. That is why we need these programs and classes activated in our prisons. These classes would bring motivation, inspiration, show inmates the positive side of confinement and focus on becoming a successful individual upon release. A prison should be a place for improving one’s self after committing a crime, not for corruption. We know it will take a long time for such programs to become effective, but as long as we take small steps towards improvement in our prison system, we’ll see improvement in crime and imprison rates. Not only must we establish reform in more prisons, but we must improve our communities that are raising these criminals as well.

Birth Order and Aggressive Behavior Essay

ABSTRACT The purpose of this research is to determine if birth order correlates to a demonstration of aggressiveness in kindergarten aged children. It is hypothesized that middle born children will demonstrate the most aggressive tendencies, last born children would experience less than the first born, and only children would have the least when compared to all other birth orders. This quasi-experimental methodology will involve a field study of children from the ten kindergarten classes at the Seoul American Elementary School (SAES). Teachers will be asked to complete the Child Behavior Scale (CBS) inventory on each child, used to measure six behavior categories related to aggression. Each CBS inventory will include birth data for the student whose behavior was observed. The findings are expected to show a correlation between birth order and a tendency toward aggression. INTRODUCTION Everyone who is born into a family arrives relative to other children who have already been born or will be at some point in the future or perhaps as an only child. Birth order does not permanently mark each child such as race or gender, but it can impact on the way a person responds to the environment. There have been a number of studies done on the relationship of birth order to personality, intelligence, anxiety and other characteristics with the belief that each child born into a family is treated differently based on their birth order, family interaction and subsequent challenges. Some birth order theorists believe that a child’s position in the family greatly influences their personality characteristics which directly affect their behavior both inside and outside of the home (Morales). Not every theorist has the same view and there are those that believe a psychological birth order has more impact than the physical birth order on the development of personality characteristics (Campbell, White & Stewart, 1991). In his book, Born to Rebel, Frank Sulloway describes how birth order influences our lives in many different ways from achievement to rebellion and from conformity to creativity (The Edge, 1998). While firstborns and laterborns are not much different in overall levels of creativity, the differences in how that creativity is exercised is very different. Firstborns are more likely to win the Nobel Prize by intellectual achievement within the system while the younger siblings will be more inclined to accept radical innovations in science and social though. His findings showed that revolutionaries and those who supported them were disproportionately likely to be later-borns (Sulloway, 1999). While not every social scientist agreed with Sulloway’s research (Harris, 1995; e.g., Falbo, 1997 ), others conducted follow-up studies that confirmed the original findings (Zweigenhaft & Ammon, 2000), and Freese, Powell & Steelman discovered measures in addition to birth order to help explain reasons for various behaviors (1999). This study hopes to build on previous research to determine whether a correlation exists between birth order and a child’s tendency to demonstrate aggressiveness. METHOD Coordination with the Seoul American Elementary School (SAES), a Department of Defense Dependent School located on Yongsan Army Base, Yongsan, Seoul, Korea, will be done to get permission for the study. Permission from the school and the parents of the children selected will be obtained prior to the start of this study. PARTICIPANTS This study will be conducted in the classroom during normal school hours for all students attending the ten full day Kindergarten classes at SAES during a specified 30 day period of the school year. There will be approximately 360 students for this study with an equal number of girls and boys, with 45% of the class comprised of Asian-Americans, 20% African-Americans, 15%  Latin-Americans and the remainder Caucasians. APPARATUS/MATERIALS Teachers will be provided the Child Behavior Scale (CBS) inventory as a means to assess aggressive, prosocial, and withdrawn behaviors of children ages 5-6 years of age. The CBS contains 59 items for which the teacher must respond using a 3-point response scale (1=doesn’t apply, 2=applies sometimes, 3=certainly applies) (Ladd & Profilet, 1996). The CBS measures six categories of behavior as follows: aggressiveness with peers, prosocial behavior with peers, exclusion by peers, asocial behavior with peers, hyperactive-distractible behavior, and anxious-fearful behavior. Copies of the CBS inventory and permission for its use will be obtained from its author, Dr. Gary Ladd, at Arizona State University (an email request has been sent copy of email attached). PROCEDURE Teachers from the 10 Kindergarten classes will observe their students for a specified 30 days during the school year, completing the CBS inventory for each student during that time. The teacher will indicate the birth order of the child on the completed inventory which will then be turned in to the SAES front office to be picked up by the study group. RESULTS The expected results will validate the hypothesis that middle born children will tend to demonstrate more aggressive behavior than either first born, last born or only children. Tables are expected to be used for this study and will include a listing of the CBS subscale items related to firstborn, middleborn, lastborn and onlyborn, further identified by girl and boy. An example follows: DISCUSSION Apart from the effects of birth order, there is little information about the ways in which the nonshared environment influences human development, mainly because psychologists have not been successful in developing direct measures of this environment. The challenge for future researchers lies in devising ways to test competing hypotheses that bear on the nature and influence of this elusive environment. Peer groups are an important aspect of this type of environmental influence, but so is the family environment and life experiences as well (Sulloway, 98). REFERENCES Campbell, L., White, J., & Stewart, A. (1991). The relationship of psychological birth order to actual birth order. Individual Psychology, 47: 380-391. Falbo, T. (1997). To rebel or not to rebel? Is this the birth order question? Contemporary Psychology, 42: 938-939. Freese, J., Powell, B., Steelman, L.C., (1999). Rebel without a cause or effect: birth order and social attitudes. American Sociological Review, 64: 207-231. Harris, Judith Rich. (1995). Where is the child’s environment? A group socialization theory of development. Psychological Review, 102: 458-89. How is Personality Formed? A Talk with Frank J. Sulloway (1998). The Edge Foundation, Inc., Third Culture. Accessed on 13 Feb 2004 at: www.edge.org/3rd_culture/sulloway . Ladd, G. & Profilet, S. (1996). The child behavior scale: A teacher-report measure of young children’s aggressive, withdrawn, and prosocial behaviors. Development Psychololgy, 32 (6), 1008-1024. Morales, C. (1994). Birth Order Theory: A Case for Cooperative Learning. Journal of Instructional Psychology 21: 246-250. Rubin, R. & Hubbard, J. (2003). Children’s verbalizations and cheating behavior during game playing: the role of sociometric status, aggression, and gender. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 31: 65-78. Solo, R., MacLin, M., (2002). Experimental Psychology. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Sulloway, F. (1999). â€Å"Birth Order† in Runco, M. & Pritzker, eds., Encyclopedia of Creativity, 1:189-202. Zweigenhaft, R., Ammon, J., (2000). Birth Order and Civil Disobedience: A Test of Sulloway’s ‘Born to Rebel’ Hypothesis. Journal of Social Psychology, 140: 624-628.

Macroeconomic Analysis Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Macroeconomic Analysis - Essay Example In the short run there would be relatively high rates of unemployment due to reduced money supply in an economy (Piros, 2013). Borrowing of funds will be quiet expensive as the rates of interest would be hiked to discourage the general public from holding more funds as the population remains relatively low decreasing the demand. Since the central bank offering more interest at present, the general public will have desire to invest in the feds proposal and limit other wants as it would be profitable to hold the government securities than to hold money (Mariathasan, 2010). The population in the nation is relatively low with little income at their disposal and with an increasing levels of unemployment, an increase in supply to any public commodity will not yield profits rather losses. Even if the feds invests the money for the improvement of the society, in the short run the economy will have to bear with increasing rates of inflation due to the reduced circulation of money Due to the economic changes above, I would advise my uncle not to invest in the shops and houses as it would be relatively expensive as the rates of construction will be relatively high due to the high interest rates (Mariathasan, 2010) Furthermore, the demand for the commodities will be highly reduced due to the decrease of money that circulates in the economy leaving consumers with relatively small amounts to spend on utilities like new housing. Housing construction are investment that is majorly determined by the population of the country. A small population will make the venture unattractive while taking a much longer time to recover its cost which will only results in holding capital that would have been otherwise invested elsewhere like in the government securities which would bring instant income in the present and the future. The economy will also

Apple Inc Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4000 words

Apple Inc - Essay Example As for the software products, Apple offers a complete portfolio of consumer and professional software applications which include iOS and Mac OS X for its operating system; and iCloud for its online content tool. Moreover, Apple sells and delivers digital content and application such as music and literary art through iTunes Store, App Store, iBookstore, and Mac App Store. In line with its unique offerings, Apple sells a variety of third party compatible products such as printers, storage devices, speakers, and headphones; as well as applications of software programs. In terms of customers, Apple caters to private consumers, small and medium-sized businesses, and the education sector. Demographically, Apple’s private consumers are mainly consisted of young, early adopters who are technologically-savvy and are followers of media trends, as described by David Appleyard in his online article entitled Profile of an iPhone User: Interesting Statistics about  Yourself. Being heavy u sers of the web and mobile devices, they always want to get updated with the current social happenings. Apple also caters to small and medium-sized business by providing hardware and software products that aim to simplify its business operations through easy-to-use computer products and software applications. As for the education sector, Apple is also committed to bringing the effective integration of technology into the classroom set-up to attain higher levels of student achievement. As such, Apple supports mobile learning and distribution of education materials through iTunes U. Apple’s company vision is driven by its commitment to bring the best customer experience through valuable product innovation. As such, the company’s business strategy focuses on its â€Å"unique ability to design and develop its operating systems, hardware, application software, and services to provide its customers new products and solutions with superior ease-of-use, seamless integration, and innovative design† (Apple 1). In line with this overarching goal of delivering innovative products and services, Apple invests heavily on research and development, as evidenced by its expenditures of $2.4 billion, $1.8 billion, and $1.3 billion for 2009, 2010, and 2011, respectively. This is grounded on Apple’s belief that in order to compete successfully, it must ensure a continual and timely flow of competitive products and services to the market. Keeping with its mission of driving innovation, Apple consistently manufactures hardware and software products that are known for its simplicity and beauty. In this light, functionality and form essentially constitute the key attributes of all its products. As highlighted in an online blog entitled 7 Strategies that You Must Learn from Apple Marketing, Apple’s success banks on turning the ordinary into something beautiful. But developing a good product and service is not enough. It must be delivered and communicat ed well to the consumers. Thus, as part of its business strategy, Apple also emphasizes on enhancing the customer experience and creating relevant marketing communications. Firstly, giving valuable customer experience relies on ensuring a smooth and unique point-of-sale service. Thus, having strategic distribution networks is important. Currently, Apple manages its own retail and online stores;

The Effects of Psychoactive Substance Abuse on Young People Essay

The Effects of Psychoactive Substance Abuse on Young People - Essay Example Drug and alcohol abuse have adverse effects on the mental health of young people, impacting on their ability to learn and to progress normally in the education system. Cannabis, for example, impairs cognitive development, in particular associative processes and recall, and affects the intoxicated student's ability to concentrate (WHO 2006), while cocaine consumption results in a range of cerebral complications, ranging from hallucination to paranoia (Wikipedia 2006). Many studies reveal a correlation between drug/alcohol abuse and poor grades, as well as with other behavior that inhibit learning, making substance abuse one of the top problems in youth education today. Psychoactive substance abuse also has a negative impact on the body. Both cannabis and alcohol impair psychomotor performance and visual perception, resulting in many fatal motor vehicle accidents, as well as complications such as seizures, and lung, kidney and brain damage (WHO 2006).