Coming up with personal philosophy about life and other things we value in life is the foundation of coming up with a plan that makes our desires successful. The personal philosophy of education of a teacher acts as a very significant aspect in his or her advance to guiding children along the course of enlightenment.
The students I desire to work with at this point of the course are students who have hearing impairments. This is because students who have mild to moderate hearing problems may at times work in the general education classroom setting with minimum modification. In addition, students with serious hearing losses do exploit total communication which includes formal signs, fingerspelling, facial expressions, informal gestures, spoken words, and body language in the classroom whether the classroom is self-contained or integrated which does not involve a lot of work. Finally, learners with hearing problems are capable of using some speech to communicate. Since they may not obtain the information being put across, the teacher is advised to use another method of communication such as writing out the message or using a different term to attract the student’s attention before speaking to him or her.
Explicit instruction is an important teaching technique used in special education. It provides an explicit framework for students with hearing disabilities to use as they write, study, or engage in group activities. Students with hearing disabilities gain from learning instructions that are explicit and well sequenced. As a teacher, it is important to help the student with hearing disability to learn how to use different strategies to deal with their assignments. Such strategies may involve the use of a graphic organizer that summarizes the important information from a text.
Scientific research has revealed that planning for instructional strategies and decisions on their implementation for students with hearing disabilities are frequently made based on personal philosophies and beliefs and on the ease of their realization. Researchers have examined the learning characteristics of students with hearing losses and their understanding of how these students learn, has made them come up with more advanced instructional strategies. One of such instructional strategies is explicit instruction (Swanson, 2001).
The strength of this strategy is that talented learners with hearing disabilities can systematize their thoughts and plan an approach to solve difficult problems through the use of problem-solving strategies. Based on these and other studies as well as academic models, researchers in special education have extended and certified the use of explicit instructional strategies. A study on this instructional strategy on 10 learners with hearing disabilities 4 (40%) of which were talented, showed that 50% (2 students) of the talented students were able to organize their thoughts and plan an approach to solve difficult problems by using problem-solving strategies.
Implicit instruction is another instructional strategy through which students with hearing disabilities gain from instructions that are well sequenced. The implicit instructional strategy involves learners’ participation in the class activities. Generally, it is a student-centered method of learning. This involves learning that can be found inside or outside the normal class setting. Implicit interaction is an interactive teaching approach that is capable of creating a social environment thus giving opportunities to students with hearing disabilities to be able to interact with other students.
With such interactions, especially the face-to-face interaction among students more communication strategies may be developed. This can affect the nature of the instructional strategy used by the students and also the success of the learning technologies used on the students. In order to enhance the effectiveness of learning of students with hearing disabilities through implicit instructional strategy, there is the formation of students groups in classrooms with access to high technology. The study has revealed that this method is very effective as compared to the mere lecture method.
The strength of this instructional strategy is that it gives the students opportunity to acquire for themselves different communication strategies that they can use and make the instructional technologies applied effective. A study on this instructional strategy on 10 learners who have hearing disabilities showed that 60% (6 students) were capable of acquiring communication strategies through interaction with other students. Out of the 6 students, 4 students that is 66.67% used the acquired communication strategies to make the learning technology effective (Murdick, Gartin & Crabtree, 2007).
The extended professional skills that I would like to acquire are confidence and trustworthiness; this is because confidence will enable me to provide means to seek distinctive solutions for every student and his or her family problems. Being trustworthy on the other hand will enable me to apply efforts to gain the trust of the student with a disability and become sensitive to their susceptibility and that of the families.
These skills I plan to attain through practice in addition to furthering my studies on how to serve and work with students with disabilities. In addition, I can acquire these skills through attending and participating in different seminars discussing matters on how to work and serve students with learning disabilities.
It is usually a difficult task for several people to work with and serve students with disabilities however, having personal and professional philosophy on being and doing is very important as it helps one to easily find means to care for students with disabilities and their families.
Reference
Murdick, N.L., Gartin, B. C., & Crabtree, T. (2007). Special Education Law. (2nd ed.) Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill/ Prentice Hall.
Swanson, H. L. (2001). Focus on Exceptional Children: Loooking for the Top Model for Educating Students with Disabilities. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 26(2), 358–383.
The Analysis Of The Structure Of Human Relationships
Current essay deals with the analysis of the structure of human relationships, which are those relations between different people, which occur during their multidimensional patterns of interactions. There is no denying the importance of the fact that we can speak about different types or forms of human relations.
As the entry of David’s Hawes text Dog-Tied suggests “we are surrounded by interesting, complex and puzzling relationships, which are rarely examined closely” (Hawes, 65).
As Hawes suggests, even a pet and its master have certain difficult patterns of relations, which depend on many conditions – the dog’s character, master’s behavior vis-à-vis his/her pet etc. It goes without saying that the relations between people are much more complex since they are embedded in different social interactions.
Leslie Marmon Silko (Chapter 2, p. 52) places particular emphasis on the importance of relations between different objects and subjects and especially people. This author notes that the most crucial discoveries in the world had always to do with some kind of relationship.
Human relations may be of quite different types. The most understandable and common for every human being are relations between the members of the family, the relations between friends and surrounding people. These relations may be described as personal, however they are also embedded in the social context.
The relations in family are the most widespread type of human personal relationship. These are relations between husband and wife, grandparents and children, between older and new generation, between children and their parents. As the considerations of Cindy Bosley in her interesting text What the Honey Meant suggest (Bosley, p.61)
Personal human relations may be characterized by different feelings, emotions and including friendship, love, hatred, anger, envy etc.
This greatly depends on the character of these relations and their ability to influence the level of emotional consciousness. There are different families, different cultural traditions and mindsets, which significantly affect the nature of personal human relations. But it should be noted that without negative barriers, difficulties and external circumstances they generally tend to bear positive nature and are often characterized by mutual respect, emotional empathy and sympathy.
In what follows we will focus on the relations between a teacher and pupils, which will be analyzed in compositional form following the patterns of the essays in the text-book.
A teacher and her pupils
She was working as a teacher of history only for several month – she was young and lacking necessary experience of communication with pupils. However, she was sure that she has all necessary abilities and knowledge and really like her job and what is more important she felt that it was her vocation. Many people who knew her said that she really loves children and is pleased of communicating with interesting people. They also said that she was confident, kind and caring person, which are the necessary features of character for her job.
Of course, all of them constitute a good teacher, however, who knows what it would be in real situation. All these reflections made Ann nervous, while she was walking up the stairs in the school were she worked. She thought: “What difficult thing are human relations, since they are so strange and unpredictable and you can never know how the events would change”. When she walked down the stairs with such thoughts she met several pupils and teachers, who presented her warm welcomes and smiles and that made Ann think that not so bad at all. When she entered the classroom, the time for the break was already over, but still no pupils in the class-room. This made her for the first time angry.
Those teenagers whom she was going to read the lecture did not know her, because it was for the first time she came here and she decided to give disciplinary instructions to avoid future misunderstandings with her pupils. Ann’s specialty in the University was psychology and she knew for sure that it is extremely important for a teacher to take grip of situation from the first lesson. It is important to show children or adolescents that disciplinary violations would be punished and no freedom for loutishness and disobedience would be granted.
When all pupils finally gathered in class, Ann introduced herself, announced her approach to discipline and education, made other comments and began the lesson. She was satisfied that her approach to situation proved to be effective as pupils behaved properly and effectively did all the exercise and attentively listened to the teacher. Ann felt free space for giving pupils that knowledge, skills and information, which she possessed and it was really a great pleasure. From then on positive relations between Ann her pupils were settled.
Ann was no longer nervous and transmitted all of her love and patience to these pupils and they did the same. Ann knew what is the balance between open communication and properly organized learning process and always kept the grip on situation. Ann used both collective and individual approach to education which proved to be quite effective for her pupils. Her class was one of the most successful in educational terms in school. However, unlike other teachers who forced children to do something Ann used another, more pupil-centered technology, built on constructing normal human relations.
Other teachers in school, who often had conservative approach to relations between teacher and pupils, used repressive measures against their pupils. For instance, those of them who did not hand their works in time or were not eager for some reasons do their homework were often criticized, badly assessed and verbally punished. The implications thereof, of course, were opposite to the aspirations of those teachers. These verbal and educational punishments resulted in further deterioration of the educational quality and lowering pupils’ interest in the learning process.
Unlike these conservative teachers, Ann had another approach to educational process. Even when some of her pupils were not ready with the exercises she avoided direct punishments, sanctions and penalties. More attention was rather paid to motivation and building normal professional human relations between the teacher and the pupils.
Those pupils, who made all class and homework with zeal and patience, were not penalized when they forgot to do something, however those who regularly violated educational and disciplinary norms were punished severely. By these means, Ann managed to build normal human relations in the class and pupils really liked her and atmosphere which she managed to create.
Positive relations of children and teacher may be proved by informal survey which was designed to define the most popular teacher in the school. The results of the survey showed that Ann ranked the first place in popularity among all teachers in this school. To sum it up, Ann’s experience shows that human relations are very delicate thing and should be properly built to avoid negative consequences. Normal human relations are premised on mutual understanding and the ability to build excellent communicational patterns.
“Fast Food Nation” By Eric Schlosser
Introduction
In the book “Fast Food Nation” E. Schlosser describes his understanding and perception of fast food culture and its impact on the world. Schlosser singles out the main characteristics of fast food, its history and its advantages. The author argues that the image of fast food culture is replaced by a version of the social culture that is constituted by a process of ongoing struggle to comprehend and live through a world in which everything solid is melting into the air. He speaks about fast food as both “a commodity and metaphor” which helps him to analyze and reveal the nature of this phenomenon. Schlosser shows that “real culture” is used in a highly prescriptive and selective sense within mass cultural arguments. Only certain artifacts and practices are allowed into the cultural canon of fast food. So, for many people, fast food culture in its various manifestations is very often seen as an arena for displays of mundane agency in subverting dominant flows of meaning. Schlosser explains that as a commodity, fast food means chains of restaurants and bars. For instance, in 1970 consumers spent about $6 billion on fast food and in 2000 this sum exceeded $110 billion. Today, fast food restaurants are popular in almost every country in the world being a part of the economy and food sector (Schlosser, 2002, 7).
Importance of Education
The task to educate people should be assigned to mass media and the government, local communities and every citizen who knows about the negative impact of fast food on every American. Schlosser sets the task of clarifying the dynamics of culture through a discussion of what he regards as fundamental presumptions at its core. First, there is the presumption, by which fast food commonly and easily comes to substitute for the American lifestyle. This discursive shift has resulted in a cultural politics that is patronizing to the population and fast food. Schlosser’s second presumption is what he associates with fast food proliferation and expansion, whereby Americaness has come to be associated with fast food bars. “Every few miles clusters of fast food joints seem to repeat themselves. You can drive for twenty minutes, pass another fast food cluster and feel like you’ve gotten nowhere” (Schlosser cited Lunsford and Ruszkiewicz 43). In this description, acute irony and desperation are portraying a region as fast food paradise. Schlosser unveils the true nature and business goals of McDonald’s corporation as a test area for “other types of restaurant technology” (Schlosser cited Lunsford and Ruszkiewicz 43). The problem is that fast food companies occupy the space in many cities leaving no choice for a population and competitors. The need for unskilled work, especially in late afternoon and evening shopping times, opens the way to after-school and weekend jobs for millions of Americans. No particular prior training or experience is necessary for these jobs. These mature concerns are offset by the amount of fast food and snack foods consumers bought–burgers, fries, corn chips, ice cream, cookies, soft drinks.
Hopes and Future Opportunities
Schlosser puts his hopes, not in regional or national futures, but on new urbanism, with cosmopolitan and multicultural possibilities. Schlosser argues that the logic of economic and cultural changes deprives people of a chance to choose their lifestyle and even thinking. Using such symbols as Academy Boulevard, Schlosser invites readers to reflect on the significance of culture and fast food values. Some now seek to mobilize the ideal of fast food, invoking ‘a core of ideas around which appeals to the “natural” heart of life can be based. Fast food, the symbol of cultural modernization becomes devolution, which contradicts the old logic of national identity and uniqueness of the American nation. In sum, in this excerpt Schlosser gives an account of the significance of fast food in the construction of the national culture. The issue of fast food remains a central one in America: for some, it remains crucial to the maintenance of an enduring’ national home: and for others, it represents a fundamental obstacle to the creation of a more accommodating and cosmopolitan cultural order (Fields 32).
Social Involvement
Social involvement and education about the negative impact of fast food must extend beyond the community. All individuals affected should be educated and have a chance to express their opinions before important action is taken. In the end, the liability and power for final decision-making are in the hands of the government and the individuals who permit fast food restaurants, acting on the recommendations of the state authorities, but true and lasting success in dealing with the difficulty will depend on openness and conversation with every individual affected. All buyers in America need to have the courage and strength of mind to look at why and how they do things, to question fats food practices, and to plan for the future. Schlosser underlines that the fast food problem in society, culture, and identity is presenting all Americans with profound dilemmas- that are badly in need of clarification and resolution of real-life values and ideals Schlosser wonders whether it is politico-cultural choice for citizens or expansion of the fast food empire. The task of community leaders is to recognize that although fast food consumption is indeed different from business, industry, and government, so lawful questions can be raised about the health effects of fast food, the quality of food and services rendered, the concern for customer service, and approval. At the same time, the state needs to be concerned about the most successful and well-organized use of the resources available to buyers (Sherman 12).
Fast food culture is shared by members of a society and the behavioral traits of which it is comprised are manifested in a society’s institutions and artifacts. It is something that shapes behavior or structures perception of the world. For most Americans, fast food culture becomes a shared system of meanings, it is learned, it is about groups, and it is relative; it is no right or wrong, inherited, or about individual behavior. To understand a fast food culture people must understand its origins, history, structure, and functioning; and the effects of the geographical environment on the culture, acculturation, and assimilation. “However, the kinds of fast food one eats depend on age and gender. Taste, rather than fast food versus non-fast food, determines where one will go to eat. Older people rarely eat at McDonald’s or another similar restaurant” (Traphagan and Brown 32).
Food and Culture
Fast food culture changes over time, with change typically being slow to occur. The control task is to develop formidable and devastating: to work together as colleagues on multifaceted problems to meet the challenges. If buyers and the state are to build up institutions now and for the future, restaurants must offer the highest quality of food, research, and public service to, community. With understanding, purpose, bravery, cooperation, and preparation, individuals can reduce fast-food proliferation and enter into a new and brighter era for higher education (Fields 32).
The supermarket shelves provide the same tins and cans found elsewhere, and the menus in McDonald’s and Pizza Hut are identical to others throughout the country. From this perspective, food opportunities would seem to be increasingly homogenized. The quirks of seasonal and regional gastronomic differences would seem to have been replaced by a monotonous culinary uniformity. These connotations are, we might imagine, derived from the texture and flavor of the mango itself, rather than from the complex social relations of its trajectory from Jamaica to the supermarket shelves. This conclusion is aided and abetted by how food commodities are marketed, a process which in many cases tends to limit consumers’ knowledge about the conditions of their production. Schlosser states that social dimensions are manifested in the ability of mass media to control the circulation of ideas about body image and fashion. The local administrators are telling society that they have to be innovative and willing to take risks, develop strategies, and set up priorities. Despite all this activity, it seems to be the general guide for communities to make reductions, thus deteriorating all support units and programs. Despite such mixed terms of support, there is a lack of identification of fast food and health-related problems, needs, and tactics in most statements of goals and aims. If Americans had been elitists, they would have been different places because eating habits and culture of consumption determine their way of living and even thinking. The distancing of self from those others who eat curry or spaghetti specifically, or in general from consumers of ‘foreign muck’, has contributed significantly to the definition of American life. his emphasis on nation forms part of a broader interest in identity, belonging and difference that has been central to the formation of cultural studies (Traphagan and Brown 32).
Globalization
Globalization threatens a sense of tradition by undermining the importance of time and place in terms of the food we eat. At a more general level, it can be seen as an exemplar of a certain form of cultural manifestations, particularly outside the United States where “Americanization” is so often a synonym for fast food. Also, Schlosser underlines the importance of fast food culture for the American nation connected it with entrepreneur innovations and self-men. After all, at various points in his argument Schlosser claims that McDonaldization is akin to the rationalization process. In that sense, he claims that he is not hostile to McDonald’s itself as a cultural form but rather to the iron cage it exemplifies, to the inexorable spread of bureaucratic systems that the metaphor so neatly captures. In addition, on many occasions, he uses the rhetorical strategy in order to put forward a point of view or quotation without actually endorsing it himself. “Like Cheyenne Mountain, today’s fast food conceals remarkable technological advances behind an ordinary-looking façade” (Schlosser, 2002, 5). As the most important he underlines the role of fast food in the formation of national identity. A key dimension in such formations is the concept of the ‘imagined community. Schlosser argues that the nation is essentially ‘imagined’ in so far as it focuses on a sense of belonging. Many commentators have sought to identify the factors and agencies instrumental in the processes of constructing national identity (Traphagan and Brown 32).
Schlosser identified key territorial, legal, economic and political factors and continues. As a metaphor, he connects fast food with the emergence of car culture and its influence on national habits. “The nation’s car culture reached its height in southern California. A new form of eating place emerged. People with cars are so lazy, they do not want to get out of them to eat” (Schlosser 2002, 11). In other words, fast food culture provides the key to an understanding of the formation of the American nation. Schlosser views McDonald’s as a prime example of suburbanization, Americanisation, and degradation and assumes that those who eat there are, by and large, dupes and victims. On the other hand, for Schlosser McDonald’s, and any other similar phenomenon is a pleasure. Schlosser uses many ways to analyze fast food as a metaphor and commodity seeing it as a part of culture, eating habits and way of living. To inform the public about fast food and its impact on every individual, the state and interest groups should involve all possible sources of education such as schools, universities, the local community groups and the mass media (Traphagan and Brown 32).
Conclusion
In sum, one of the best strategies for helping buyers and the community, in general, is supporting them through the complex process of education and aid. Education and promotion of a healthy lifestyle should be targeted at parents and children, youth and older people. Local and state agencies should have joint programs with other institutions. Others may share supporting and promotion materials. It should be clear that the utmost advantage which can be achieved from such programs occurs when agencies are willing to give up something in return for the principles to be received from the collaboration. To gain maximum results from collaboration of all institutions, the individuals and agencies involved have to spend resources they might not support independently. Agencies should have vital programs so they benefit from the institution.
Works Cited
Fields, S. Another Fast-Food Fear. Environmental Health Perspectives, 111 (2003), 32.
Lunsford, A. A., Ruszkiewicz, J. The Presence of Others. Bedford Books, 1999.
Schlosser, E. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Harper Perennial; Reprint edition, 2002.
Sherman, N.W. Children, Schools and Fast Food. JOPERD–The Journal of Physical Education, Recreation & Dance, 78 (2007), 12.
Traphagan, J.W. Brown, K. Fast Food and Intergenerational Commensality in Japan: New Styles and Old Patterns. Ethnology, 41 (2002), 32.