Things Fall Apart free essay sample

The women stay at home cooking and cleaning, only to be sold off as brides to their husbands and bear children. Men are active and aggressive, fighting wars and providing financially for the family. They have the power to physically beat their wives if they’re behaving unsatisfactorily. In the book, the old Ibo proverb â€Å"Mother is Supreme† is portrayed when Okonkwo gets exiled to his motherland. This proverb shows that no matter what happens between a child and their father, the child can always run to one’s mother. This holds the truth that mothers are the loving caretakers of the children in Ibo culture. The gender stereotypes divide the men and women in the society, creating separate spheres. Given the mother is supreme proverb, it is ironic that the Okonkwo society harshly oppresses its women. â€Å"Mother is Supreme† is the idea that one can always run to their mother where they are safe from their troubles. We will write a custom essay sample on Things Fall Apart Essay or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page When Okonkwo was exiled, he went to Mabanta, his Motherland, and was accepted with open arms by Uchendu, his uncle. This point was exemplified when Uchendu explains why mother is supreme, â€Å"A man belongs to his fatherland when things are good and life is sweet. But when there is sorrow and bitterness he finds refuge in his motherland† (134). The mother is there to protect the child unconditionally against the father. Mother is supreme because she is the protector, the adult the child can always depend on. When Okonkwo gets exiled from his fatherland, Mbanta, his motherland, welcomed and cared for him. Also â€Å"Mother is Supreme is shown when after Okonkwo told Nwoye that Ikemefuna was leaving, â€Å"Later, Nwoye went to his mother’s hut and told her that Ikemefuna was going home. She immediately dropped her pestle with which she was grinding pepper, folded her arms across her breast and sighed, â€Å"Poor child. † (58). When Nwoye received the news, he fled to his mothers hut to be comforted. The Mother Supreme proverb stands in stark contrast to the way women are treated in the Ibo society. Both men and women work together in the Ibo culture cultivating produce and participating in the government. In the growing season the women weed and plant other produce while the men farm yams. â€Å"As the rains became heavier the women planted maize, melons and beans between the yam mounds† (33). The women still help with planting but in a smaller way than the men. â€Å"Yam stood for manliness, and he who could feed his family on yams from one harvest to another was a very great man indeed† (33). Here, the men are cultivating the yams but not only were yams an important staple in their diet, a mans success depended on the number of yams he could produce. Also both genders played a role in the government. Chielo, the priestess, was the advice giver of the town and the other main leaders of the community were men. â€Å"The nine villages of Umuofia had grown out of the nine sons of the first father of the clan† (89). This respected group is made up of nine male leaders, called the egwugwu. Different than normal women in the Ibo society, Chielo is a powerful authority, representing the feared Oracle. In both these instances, women and men are put into separate spheres, but both are critical in supporting their community. Although the men play a large role in providing for the family, they dominate the household with force. The men provide for the family by planting and harvesting the yams. They freely discipline their wives without recourse as shown in the texts, â€Å"when she returned he beat her very heavily† (29). Okonkwo beat his wives into submission and in their society it goes unpunished. Even when they don’t do something wrong, â€Å"As a matter of fact the tree was very much alive. Okonkwo’s second wife had merely cut a few leaves off it † Okonkwo, being hot-tempered took out his anger on Ewifiki after thinking that she destroyed the tree. He doesn’t even respect her enough to engage in a debate with her to listen to her side of the story. He just smacks her â€Å"without further argument†. These examples show Okonkwo’s dominance over his wives, ruling his house with a heavy hand. If they make a mistake, he takes his anger out on them and make sure they remember not to do it the next time. â€Å"He trembled with the desire to conquer and subdue. It was like the desire for women† (42). In this passage, it portrays that Okonkwo only values women as something to â€Å"conquer† or â€Å"subdue†, not as equals. In contrast, women in the Ibo society are expected to submit to their husbands. They are lower in society, in submission to whomever they are married. â€Å" Agbala was not only another name for a women, it could also mean a man who had taken no title† (13). This exemplifies that it is an insult for a man to be called Agbala, another name for a female. During the bride price, the brides are thought of as mere pieces of property, not as human beings. â€Å"Her suitor and his relatives surveyed her young body with  expert eyes as if to assure themselves that she was beautiful and ripe† (71) They are looking at â€Å"the soon to be bride† with objective eyes, keeping in mind the clothes she is wearing and her figure. They determine the price by her beauty and once that is decided, her husband now rules her. This point is also shown at the town hearing between Odukwe and Uzowulu. â€Å"The law of the clan is that you should return her bride price† (91). They are fighting over the woman as though they would fight over money. The Ibo women are also not always welcome are communal ceremonies and are thought of as outsiders. â€Å"It was clear from the way the crowd stood or sat that the ceremony was for men† (87). The women are clearly portrayed as being inferior to men. Chinua Achebe’s book depicts the separate spheres of genders in a culture like Okonkwo’s. Each plays a specific part in the community that was changed when the whites came to colonize. The arguable point of â€Å"Mother is Supreme† is overruled with the harsh treatment of women. While they are given some privileges, like contributing to the government and planting, the men plainly control them. They live in separate spheres and each have the stereotypes of their gender to up-hold.

Prisons In America Essays - Criminology, Penology, Criminal Law

Prisons In America America's prisons have been called "graduate schools for crime." It stands to reason: Take a group of people, strip them of possessions and privacy, expose them to constant threats of violence, overcrowd their cell- block, deprive them of meaningful work, and the result is an embittered underclass more intent on getting even with society than contributing to it. Prisons take the nonviolent offender and make him live by violence. They take the nonviolent offender and make him a hardened killer. America has to wake up and realize that the current structure of our penal system is failing terribly. The government has to devise new ways to punish the guilty, and still manage to keep American citizens satisfied that our prison system is still effective. Americans pay a great deal for prisons to fail so badly. Like all big government solutions, they are expensive. In the course of my studies dealing with the criminal justice system, I have learned that the government spends approximately eighty-thousand dollars to build one cell, and $28,000 per year to keep a prisoner locked up. That's about the same as the cost of sending a student to Harvard. Because of overcrowding, it is estimated that more than ten-billion dollars in construction is needed to create sufficient space for just the current prison population. The plain truth is that the very nature of prison, no matter how humane society attempts to make it, produces an environment that is inevitably devastating to its residents. Even if their release is delayed by longer sentences, those residents inevitably return to damage the community, and we are paying top dollar to make this possible. Why should tax payers be forced to pay amounts to keep nonviolent criminals sitting in prison cells where they become bitter and more likely to repeat their offenses when they are released? Instead, why not put them to work outside prison where they could pay back the victims of their crimes? The government should initiate work programs; where the criminal is given a job and must relinquish his or her earnings to the victim of their crime until the mental and physical damages of their victims are sufficed. A court will determine how much money the criminal will have to pay for his restitution costs, and what job the criminal will have to do to pay back that restitution. The most obvious benefit of this approach is that it takes care of the victim, the forgotten person in the current system. Those who experience property crime deserve more than just the satisfaction of seeing the offender go to prison. Daniel Van Ness, president of Justice Fellowship, has said: All the legal systems which helped form western law emphasize the need for offenders to settle with victims. The offense was seen as primarily a violation against the victim. While the common welfare had been violated and the community therefore had an interest and responsibility in seeing that the wrong was addressed and the offender punished, the offense was not considered primarily a crime against the state as it is today. (76) Restitution offers the criminal a means to restore himself-to undergo a real change of character. Mere imprisonment cannot do this; nothing can destroy a man's soul more surely than living without useful work and purpose. Feodor Dostoevsky, a prisoner for ten years during czarist repression, wrote, "If one wanted to crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the most terrible of punishments...one need only give him work on a completely useless and irrational character" (77). This is exactly what goes on in the "make work" approach of our prisons and it is one of the contributing factors to prison violence. To quote Jack Kemp, author of Crime and Punishment in Modern America: The idea that a burglar should return stolen goods, pay for damage to the house he broke into and pay his victims for the time lost from work to appear at a trial meets with universal support from the American people. There is, of course, a reason that the concept of restitution appeals to America's sense of justice. Restitution also provides an alternative to imprisonment for nonviolent criminals, reducing the need for taxpayers to continue building prisons. (54) Working with the purpose of paying back someone that has been wronged allows a criminal to understand and deal with the real consequences of his actions. Restitution would be far less expensive than the current system. Experience shows that the cost per prisoner can be as low as ten percent of

Humanities

How to Create a Rubric in 6 Steps

How to Create a Rubric in 6 Steps How to Create a Rubric: Introduction Perhaps you have never even thought about the care it takes to create a rubric. Perhaps you have never even heard  of a rubric and its usage in education, in which case, you should take a peek at this article: What is a rubric? Basically, this tool that teachers and professors use to help them  communicate expectations, provide focused feedback, and grade products, can be invaluable when the correct answer is not as cut and dried as Choice A on a multiple choice test. But creating a great rubric is more than just slapping some expectations on a paper, assigning some percentage points, and calling it a day. A good rubric needs to be designed with care and precision in order to truly help teachers distribute and receive the expected work.   Steps to Create a Rubric The following six steps will help you when you decide to use a rubric for assessing an essay, a project, group work, or any other task that does not have a clear right or wrong answer.   Step 1: Define Your Goal Before you can create a rubric, you need to decide the type of rubric youd like to use, and that will largely be determined by your goals for the assessment. Ask yourself the following questions: How detailed do I want my feedback to be?  How will I break down my expectations for this project?Are all of the tasks equally important?How do I want to assess performance?What standards must the students hit in order to achieve acceptable or exceptional performance?Do I want to give one final grade on the project or a cluster of smaller grades based on several criteria?Am I grading based on the work or on participation? Am I grading on both? Once youve figured out how detailed youd like the rubric to be and the goals you are trying to reach, you can choose a type of rubric. Step 2: Choose a Rubric Type Although there are many variations of rubrics, it can be helpful to at least have a standard set to help you decide where to start. Here are two that are widely used in teaching as defined by DePaul Universitys Graduate Educational department: Analytic Rubric: This is the standard grid rubric that many teachers routinely use to assess students work. This is the optimal rubric for providing clear, detailed feedback. With an analytic rubric,  criteria for the students work is listed in the left column and performance levels are listed across the top. The squares inside the grid will typically contain the specs for each level. A rubric for an essay, for example, might contain criteria like Organization, Support, and Focus, and may contain performance levels like (4) Exceptional, (3) Satisfactory, (2) Developing, and (1) Unsatisfactory.​ The performance levels are typically given percentage points or letter grades and a final grade is typically calculated at the end. The scoring rubrics for the ACT and SAT are designed this way, although when students take them, they will receive a holistic score.   Holistic Rubric:  This is the type of rubric that is much easier to create, but much more difficult to use accurat ely. Typically, a teacher provides a series of letter grades or a range of numbers (1-4 or 1-6, for example) and then assigns expectations for each of those scores. When grading, the teacher  matches the student work in its entirety to a single description on the scale. This is useful for grading multiple essays, but it does not leave room for detailed feedback on student work.   Step 3: Determine Your Criteria This is where the learning objectives for your unit or course come into play. Here, youll need to brainstorm a list of knowledge and skills you would like to assess for the project. Group them according to similarities and get rid of anything that is not absolutely critical. A rubric with too much criteria is difficult to use! Try to stick with 4-7 specific  subjects for which youll be able to create unambiguous, measurable expectations in the performance levels. Youll want to be able to spot the criteria quickly while grading and be able to explain them quickly when instructing your students. In an analytic rubric, the criteria are typically listed along the left column.   Step 4: Create Your Performance Levels Once you have determined the broad levels you would like students to demonstrate mastery of, you will need to figure out what type of scores you will assign based on each level of mastery. Most ratings scales include between three and five levels. Some teachers use a combination of numbers and descriptive labels like (4) Exceptional, (3) Satisfactory, etc. while other teachers simply assign numbers, percentages, letter grades or any combination of the three for each level. You can arrange them from highest to lowest or lowest to highest as long as your levels are organized and easy to understand.   Step 5: Write Descriptors for Each Level of Your Rubric This is probably your most difficult step in creating a rubric.Here, you will need to write short statements of your expectations underneath each performance level for every single criteria. The descriptions should be specific and measurable. The language should be parallel to help with student comprehension and the degree to which the standards are met should be explained. Again, to use an analytic essay rubric as an example, if your criteria was Organization and you used the  (4) Exceptional, (3) Satisfactory, (2) Developing, and (1) Unsatisfactory scale, you would need to write the specific content a student would need to produce to meet each level. It could look something like this: 4Exceptional 3Satisfactory 2Developing 1 Unsatisfactory Organization Organization is coherent, unified, and effective in support of the papers purpose andconsistently demonstrateseffective and appropriatetransitionsbetween ideas and paragraphs. Organization is coherent and unified in support of the papers purpose and usually demonstrates effective and appropriate transitions between ideas and paragraphs. Organization is coherent insupport of the essays purpose, but is ineffective at times and may demonstrate abrupt or weak transitions between ideas or paragraphs. Organization is confused and fragmented. It does not support the essays purpose and demonstrates alack of structure or coherence that negativelyaffects readability. A holistic rubric would not break down the essays grading criteria with such precision. The top two tiers of a holistic essay rubric would look more like this: 6 Essay demonstrates excellent composition skills including a clear and thought-provoking thesis, appropriate and effective organization, lively and convincing supporting materials, effective diction and sentence skills, and perfect or near perfect mechanics including spelling and punctuation. The writing perfectly accomplishes the objectives of the assignment. 5 Essay contains strong composition skills including a clear and thought-provoking thesis, but development, diction, and sentence style may suffer minor flaws. The essay shows careful and acceptable use of mechanics. The writing effectively accomplishes the goals of the assignment. Step 6: Revise Your Rubric After creating the descriptive language for all of the levels (making sure it is parallel, specific and measurable), you need to go back through and limit your rubric to a single page. Too many parameters will be difficult to assess at once, and may be an ineffective way to assess students mastery of a specific standard. Consider the effectiveness of the rubric, asking for student understanding and co-teacher feedback before moving forward. Do not be afraid to revise as necessary. It may even be helpful to grade a sample project in order to gauge the effectiveness of your rubric. You can always adjust the rubric if need be before handing it out, but once its distributed, it will be difficult to retract.   Teacher Resources: Creative Writing Prompts for High School Students14 Ways to Write Better in High SchoolThe Top Reading Skills to Teach Your StudentsGreat Books to Recommend To Teens

Respiratory therapy case study asthma Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Respiratory therapy case study asthma - Essay Example P: The patient must be treated aggressively since she is presenting symptoms of life-threatening exacerbations of asthma, including: severe asthma history, poorly controlled asthma, psychological factors/anxiety, previous hospitalization for asthma, and history of intubations with mechanical ventilation. Albuterol must also be stopped as this further aggravates bronchospasm. Hence, the following respiratory care protocol must therefore be administered: (1) 100 percent nonrebreather face mask, (2) continuous SaO2 monitor/pulse oximetry, (3) inhaled short acting beta2-agonist hourly or continuously with the addition of anticholinergic, (4) IV fluid is a must since insensible water losses are increased with the work of breathing. IV hydration also helps in reducing viscosity and mucus plugging; however, urine input and output should be monitored to avoid overhydration, (5) intravenous corticosteroids, (6) CBC, electrolytes, ABG, chest radiograph, EKG, and theophylline level should be o btained (Veteran Health Administration, 2002). Leukotriene modifiers is known for its anti - inflammatory effects and should be added to the aforementioned medications (Louisiana State University database, 2006). Additionally, ABG revealed that patient has metabolic acidosis (HCO3- 19 mmol/L), an ominous sign of asthma. The patient has metabolic acidosis as a compensatory mechanism of impending respiratory alkalosis. Treating the underlying causes of respiratory alkalosis such as anxiety and asthma per se is a must to avoid further complication. It should be noted that if possible, intubation and mechanical ventilation should be avoided if at all possible, because the â€Å"underlying dynamic hyperinflation will worsen with positive-pressure ventilation† (Werner, 2001). Inspection: high fowler’s position, pursed-lips breathing, cyanotic, using accessory muscles of inspiration,

Critically analyse the proposition that Non-state actors are Essay

Critically analyse the proposition that Non-state actors are irrelevant to world politics - Essay Example According to Knutsen 2007, one of the proponents of liberalism, it was noted that the world liberalist reached a point where their contribution was no longer relevant to the world politics. As a result, the growth of non state actors was the only thing that would bring more changes to the world politics. Consequently, scholars with the same idea on Liberalism argued that those supporting Realism were longer in a position to give a comprehensive theory pertaining to world politics because numerous changes had taken place since the second world war (Levelev 2011). In this regard, it is argued that realist only come up paradigm leads to unsatisfactory results that do not give the actual analysis on world politics. Conversely, scholar associated to Realism schools of thought argue that it is through this school that analyzing of world politics have taken place in the best interest of the people. Having dated back to the period of second world war, their main agenda was to ensure that that the occurrence of another war would not be possible (Levelev 2011). In this regard, scholars assumed that states were the basic imperative actors in politics with relation to seeking power that acted as means and ends to itself. Never the less, both schools of thoughts have agreed that international politics revolve around the struggle for power (Moravcsik and Milner 2006). Reinalda 2011 argues that Liberalism is the best placed theoretical framework that has been used for over three decades to clearly demonstrate the importance of non -state actors in the world politics. Basically, non-state actors comprise of both transnational organizations and international governmental organizations, non-governmental organisations, companies, social movements. Through this theoretical framework, scholars urged their

Assignment about ethics 4 Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

About ethics 4 - Assignment Example What are the defining / distinguishing features of moral courage? Elaborate to clarify what you mean by each. By definition there are five essential parts of moral courage, which include: existence and identification of a moral situation, moral choice, behavior, individuality, and fear. By counting existence and identification of a moral situation, it is meant that without a situation to prove the presence of moral courage in a person, the virtue of moral courage cannot be vindicated. By identifying the moral situation, the onlooker gets charged to react due to one’s inherent ethical values. The inherent values and principles compel the observer to react to the emerged situation. This leads to the second distinct feature of moral courage – moral choice (Miller, 2005). A person facing a moral situation must take a decision related to the moral alternative. By invoking the moral values and principles, the person must take not a legal but morally right decision (Miller, 20 05). The third feature of moral courage is behavior because it draws a line between moral courage and moral reasoning. Just thinking what should be done to come over the moral issue and actually doing that right action are two different things. It is behavior that leads to doing the right action (Miller, 2005). ... Fear is the last quality of a morally courageous person. He or she must acknowledge to oneself that fear of the negative outcome must be overpowered to take a morally courageous action. This fear factor is not to be managed outwardly, but it is an inner realization to face the situation, decide, and behave as per the decision taken. Facing and overpowering fear means one is ready to pay the price of one’s fearless behavior (Miller, 2005). Why is moral courage important? i.e., why are scholars interested in studying moral courage? Moral courage is important to keep intact the moral fiber of our life and society. Moral courage denotes strong will power that provides support to other human virtues. Human beings can gain heightened degree of perfection or sanctity of the heart through moral courage. A morally virtuous individual dedicating life for accomplishing good deeds cannot let others use wrong means. That’s why it is all the more important to teach and develop moral virtues among children through story-telling (Miller, 2005). Question 2: Answer to part (a) Think about a time that you either (a) displayed moral courage or (b) opted not to act in a morally courageous way. Describe the situation. Indicate what occurred, what you decided to you, what factors might have contributed to your decision and the outcome. Is there anything you might do differently if you faced that situation again? Or, is there anything you learned from class that might better prepare you / help you to manage better if you faced that situation again. It happened five years back. I was traveling in a train to reach back to my hostel after spending vacations at home with my family. The compartment I was traveling was fully