Academic Motivation, Resilience and the At-Risk Student

Academic Motivation, Resilience and the At-Risk Student Introduction The topic of investigation was academic resilience and motivation and how it relates to the at-risk student. Motivation and resilience are two key factors students need in order to achieve academic success. Students with motivation and resilience perform well in school and have a developed sense of self-efficacy. Successful students can see the connection between school and future goals, and are more likely to perform tasks even when they become difficult (Berger, 2013). This is characterized as resilience. These students are able to achieve academically and will most likely persist to graduation. Students who are not succeeding academically have a higher potential of failing or dropping out of school (Donnelly, 1987). These students are considered at-risk. Characteristics of the at-risk student include: low academic achievement, low self-esteem, males, minority, and low socioeconomic status (Donnelly, 1987). How does family background affect the at-risk student? According to Donnelly, Students who are both low income and minority status are at a higher risk [of failing]; their parents may have low educational backgrounds and may not have high educational expectations for their children (Donnelly, 1987). Berger states, at-risk students are more likely to experience behavior issues, lower attendance rates, poor grades, lack direction, and fail to use self-regulation strategies (Berger, 2013). If students are engaged in school are they less likely to drop-out? Berger (2013) suggested when students are engaged in school and have positive connections they may be able to overcome many of the barriers that exist in order to achieve success while in school and persist until graduation. How does motivation and resilience effect graduation rates? While much work has been done to improve graduation rates over the past eight years, resilience and motivation are two essential characteristics students need in order to persist in school academically. When students experience positive interactions with teachers and other adults, motivation and engagement will increase (Berger, 2013). Students want to see the connection between the task and how it connects to their future. Students need to feel supported in order to be successful; positive connections with parents and teachers are imperative in order for students to succeed. Statement of the Problem At-Risk students are more likely to fail and drop-out of school because they lack motivation and resilience academically. When students leave school before completing requirements, the consequences are dire. Students who leave school early are often left with little options later in life. They more likely to experience lower wages in life, and are less likely to attend college. Should the at-risk student attend college, they are much less likely to complete school compared to their peers, who are 83% more likely to finish (Berger, 2013). When are students mostly likely to fail? According to Finn and Rock (1997), investigating early behavior and academic patterns one may be able predict academic success in later years. Reaching students early is important when confronting barriers. Forming positive connections with caring adults is also necessary for students to build resilience and motivation. The purpose of this study is to investigate counselor intervention programs and the effect of motivation and resilience in at-risk 9th grade students. At-risk is defined as students who are under-achieving academically, have lower attendance rates and who have experienced behavior issues. Will students who have positive attachments to teachers or counselors perform better than students who do not? Statement of the Hypothesis Prior research has shown that positive school experiences and encouraging relationships at school have had a positive effect on at-risk students engagement and motivation (Scheel et al., 2009). Therefore, it is hypothesized if at-risk students are involved in a counseling intervention program then there will be an increase in academic achievement, students will experience less behavior problems, and students will experience an increase of motivation academically. References Berger C 2013 Bring out teh Brilliance: A Counseling Intervention for Underachieving Students.Berger, C. (2013). Bring out the Brilliance: A Counseling Intervention for Underachieving Students. Professional School Counseling, 17(1), 86-89. 201703241158141438499809 Donnelly M At-Risk Students. ERIC Digest [Supplemental material].20170325140827109581351Donnelly M 1987 At-Risk Students.Donnelly, M. (1987). At-Risk Students. ERIC Digest, 21. Retrieved March 25, 2017, from https://www.ericdigests.org/pre-928/risk.htm 20170325141053517867326 Finn J D Rock D A 1997 Academic Success Among Students At-Risk for School Failure.Finn, J. D., Rock, D. A. (1997). Academic Success among Students At-Risk for School Failure. The American Psychological Association, 82(2), 221-234. 201703241224041284194231 Scheel M Madabhushi S Backhaus A 2009 Academic Motivation of At-Risk Students in a Counseling Prevention Program.Scheel, M., Madabhushi, S., Backhaus, A. (2009). The Academic Motivation of At-Risk Students in a Counseling Prevention Program. The Counseling Psychologist, 37(8), 1147-1178. 20170324122636560129761

Volcanic Emissions and Global Cooling Essay -- Global Warming Climate

Volcanic Emissions As volcanoes erupt, they blast huge clouds into the atmosphere. These clouds are made up of particles and gases that were previously trapped in the geosphere, including sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide, chlorine, argon, carbon monoxide, and water vapor. Millions of tons of harmful sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide gas can reach the stratosphere from a major volcano. While all these gases play a small part in volcanic-induced climate change, carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide are by far the largest contributors to global cooling. Carbon Dioxide Carbon dioxide emissions from volcanoes total around 110 million tons per year, but this number is extremely small if compared to the 10 billion tons put into the atmosphere by human activities. Despite being a greenhouse gas that is known for its global warming potential, carbon dioxide, combined with volcanic ash, actually act as short-term coolants in the atmosphere by acting as a â€Å"blanket† that absorbs the sun’s radiation in the stratosphere before it can reach the earth’s surface. There are those who argue that volcanic carbon dioxide emissions result in long-term global warming, but the amounts released by volcanoes have not proven to be substantial enough to significantly affect the global temperature in the long run. Sulfur Dioxide Sulfur dioxide has the most adverse effect on the atmosphere of any of the volcanic gases. Sulfur dioxide is converted to sulfuric acid within months of the eruption. Winds then spread these newly formed aerosols over the ... ...here is a definite short-term global cooling process brought about by volcanic eruptions, there have been no noticeable long-term effects, other than the depletion of ozone due to the release of aerosols. The relatively small amount of harm done to the atmosphere by volcanoes cannot even compare to the extensive damage done by man. Sources Cited 1. "Atmospheric Aersols: What are they, and why are they so important?" http://oea.larc.nasa.gov/PAIS/Aerosols.html 2. "Volcanoes and Climate." http://itg1.meteor.wisc.edu/wxwise/museum/a5/a5volcan.html 3. "Recent volcanic eruption data." http://skye.gsfc.nasa.gov 4. "The Science of Climate Change: The Aerosol Effect." http://www.panda.org/resources/publications 5. "The Effects of Volcanic Eruptions on Earth's Climate." http://www.geo.mtu.edu 6. "Volcanoes and global cooling." http://www.nasa.gov

A Woman’s Place

â€Å"A woman's place is in the home. † This is a very old saying, and has today I think come to mean something very specific. When people use this expression today, it is usually in ridicule of someone else, and suggesting that they have very old-fashioned and reprehensible beliefs. The notion is that people who actually believe that the saying is true, believe that all women should be forced to stay in their homes, and not go out to work, or have careers, and that they should busy and content themselves with tidying up and decorating the home, to make it a pleasant place to be for their husbands who will appreciate this.On top of this, they must do the cooking and washing. If this is what the saying means, then I disagree with it. The saying refers to a very large and complicated topic: that of people's roles in society, and if I were forced to state that I either agreed or disagreed with the statement, then whichever answer I gave would be a simplification so great that it would be untrue. However, I may surprise you by stating that I am more in agreement with the statement than against it. The standard modern belief seems to be that the saying is wrong. Modern people also seem to believe that those who agree with the saying have old-fashioned views.Actually, I think that there is a confusion between modernity and older ways on this issue. The notion that a woman must stay at home and have no occupation, and instead make a nice nest is a modern one, not an old one. Before the industrial revolution, and right back to the start of farming, the home was not as it is now. There were no factories. Clothing for everyone was made in homes. There were no machines for spinning yarn, no automatic looms, no huge workplaces employing hundreds of people dyeing and sewing cloth. Instead, there was what we now call â€Å"cottage industry†.A region's cheeses were made in the homes of the locals. A woman who was good at making cheese or sewing could earn money this way, and she would work at home. There was no divide between the home and work. There were no office blocks, people did not commute, and no one was stopping women from working by confining them to their homes. Similarly, the modern home, in which a couple might live, is a modern thing. Homes until very recently were places where many people lived. Rich people had servants, and poor people had extended families, lodgers, and took on the task of looking after each others' children.Homes were not lonely prisons as they can be for the modern housewife. The idea that the home is a nice place to stay in and be proud of, and spend money on, is also quite modern, and of great convenience to the various DIY chains around today. Some great houses of the very wealthy were show-pieces, and used for entertaining, but for the common man, the house was a place where the roof kept his bed and belongings dry, and the floor was made of earth, and one room was a pig pen, and another was for weavi ng. My feeling is that people should act in whatever way is most likely to make them happy.Coercion tends to prevent happiness, and freedom tends to promote it. I do not think that a woman's place should be forced on her, I think that women should be free. I also think that if they were truly free to pick the path that would for them lead to the greatest contentment, that many more of them would end up not going out to work. The housing situation in modern Britain strikes me as inconvenient for the fostering of happiness. Whereas once a man could with a simple job support himself and his wife and family in a home, today most couples find that both of them have to work full time to afford a decent house.How can this be a good thing? Do women go out to work at the check-out counter of a supermarket because they love it? No, I suggest that they do this because they think that they need the money. Would it not be better that they did not have to do this? If they were free, would they no t prefer something else? House prices rise and fall dramatically. In recent times in Britain, they have risen very sharply. They have been subject to a inflationary force peculiar to themselves.In a given area, there are only so many houses. If everyone buys a house there for ?10,000, and each home is paid for by one person's wages, then perhaps this  situation could remain stable, or just follow the general pattern for inflation. But if later a couple, both of whom are working, buys one house for ?12,000, then the next person in the area selling his house will know that it is possible to get ?12,000 for it, and so will instruct his estate agent to get this amount for him. Soon, all the houses become â€Å"worth† ?12,000, and the cycle repeats, with the prices going ever upward until after a while the only way to afford a house there is to pay for it with the wages of two jobs, and all the women have to work. Are the people of that area now richer? Are they happier?Some of them might be, but for most the situation is that they do not have much or any more spending money, but instead money tied up in the same homes as before that today cost more, and now the women are all working, which makes everything difficult. Very few of the women will work at home, so the house will be empty most of the time. The thing itself that all this is for – the house – gets enjoyed less not more. Childcare becomes a huge problem.Many women will find themselves chasing their tails, trying to earn more so that they can afford to pay for child carers that they need because they are at work trying to get enough  money to pay for childcare. People who argue against a woman's place being in the home are often well-educated people who take great interest in their careers. It should be remembered though that most women are not highly career-oriented, educated and intelligent. Working the till at a supermarket is not a career, it is a job. Whereas an educated woman might get great fulfilment from working as a doctor in a hospital, I do doubt that this is why many women choose to scan in tins of baked beans for a living. Half of births are male. This is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.There are areas in Britain where the traditional male jobs have disappeared. Mines and steel works have closed, the army is now very small, and machines have taken over the jobs of many men in what few shipyards and car factories are left. Nevertheless, men still seek these sorts of job. Most new jobs are taken up by women. In many places, this leads to a great amount of male unemployment, and a discontented underclass of unemployed males is not good for a stable and peaceful society. Would it not be better to have those men doing something useful that gave them self-respect and purpose?Men have evolved instincts that make them do things for women. They may not always realise that what they do is for women. Quite often, they may feel that the reverse is true. Men drive recklessly. This is not good for society. Evolution has favoured men who take risks and show off, however, because in the past these men passed on the most genes. Today, selfish men drive too fast and endanger us all, but the drive in them that makes them do this comes from the fact that women of the distant past were impressed by skill and daring. Today, men get a kick out of being able to support women.They also get a hefty kick in the confidence and self respect if they cannot do this. It is commonly remarked that men do not like to marry women who earn more than they do. Society at large does not respect the kept-man. Given that this stems from deeprooted instinct, it is incredibly unlikely that this will change in the near future. We could try and educate people to respect kept-men, and kept-men to be happy being kept, but this would be going against the grain of human nature. Surely it is much better to go with the grain of human nature.This way, rather tha n having a population that can tolerate the situation, you will have a population that will be happy. This may strike you as a ridiculous opinion, and an entirely subjective conclusion, but I must point out that there is a fundamental difference between the two states of being. In one, you have people who know that they ought to believe a certain thing because they have been told to, and who perhaps (though probably imperfectly) go along with this. With the other, you have a population that gets an endorphin rush from what it does.In our ancestral past, people did not have to fill in forms. They did have to copulate in order to pass on genes. Consequently, we did not evolve to get a natural mental high from form-filling, but we did evolve to get something of a pleasant sensation from copulation. Today, we have to fill in forms, but no amount of education can make formfilling fun, because our brains simply do not have a mechanism for releasing pleasure chemicals for form-filling. Our brains do, however, have very strongly hard-wired mechanism for rewarding sex.By the same logic you cannot educate men to be happy about being kept or women to be happy working in an office while a stranger looks after her kids. You can, of course, find exceptions. Somewhere, there is a happy kept-man, and a woman for whom photocopying forms is a continuous source of joy. I am writing about the great mass of people. One thing about the saying â€Å"a woman's place is in the home† is that people find it belittling. To them it suggests that women are lesser things, not clever enough to do anything more than dust and cook. There is nothing in the statement that says this.If another saying were â€Å"a man's place is in the army†, or â€Å"a man's place is in the factory†, would people similarly think this an insult to the intelligence of men? I think not. There is nothing innate to the saying â€Å"a woman's place is in the home† that means that women are s tupid. That association comes from the history of ideas – from old arguments that have been used to suggest that women are inferior. Let us forget them. An awful lot of work has been done on human intelligence, and one consistent result is that the average man and average woman are of equal overall intelligence.Success these days is rated in male terms, it seems. To become high rank in an organisation is high status and good, and to be applauded. To earn lots of money is impressive too. To be high-profile, assertive, and otherwise masculine receives praise and to be domestic and content is seen to be contrary to this. It is a great shame that women seem to see success in the same terms. To be self-respecting, they now are made to feel that they have to succeed as men. That they usually find that they are not as good as men at being male they often put down to prejudice and unfairness in society.If the only way they can succeed is at being male, and they are competing against men, then they will always lose. Similarly, men competing in a female world will always lose. Indeed, society is biased that way too, as any man who has tried to get custody of his children after a divorce will tell you. If women will always lose, then they are likely to end up discontent. Surely it would be better to go with the grain of human nature, and offer them a feminine form of success. We live in a money-driven economy. To eat, most people have to buy food from shops. Mothers need money to raise children.For the typical woman, there are two ways of getting it: from a man, or by earning it herself. Clearly the better of the two is from a man. You may be shocked to read this, but I really do mean it. If a woman can delegate the task of getting money to someone else, and by this method end up with the money she needs, then this is surely easier and better for her than having to manage the simultaneous tasks of bringing up children and working. People may admire working mothers , and say, â€Å"how ever do you manage it? † but I do not believe that these women chose their way of life for its ease and convenience.So, it is better for the mother and her children to get the money from a man. Men might prefer to spend all their money on themselves, but this does not mean that it is better that they do. Men do get a reward in self-esteem from supporting their own children, and surely it is good for a society that they do. It seems that it is better for women, for children, for men, and for society that women get financial support from men. This is all very well, but unfortunately, life is enormously more complicated than this may suggest. Marriages break down very often.One major reason that divorce is on the increase, is that women are more financially independent, and can afford to divorce. In a modern rich world, their children will not starve. After divorce, the typical woman is considerably poorer, and the typical man richer, but still women divorce their husbands. A society that forces women to stay in marriages they hate would be sub-optimal, but so too surely is a society in which marriage is close to meaningless. It could be that we have fallen into a post-industrial trap. The invention of farming was a bit like a trap.Before farming, people did not own land, and wandered around hunting and gathering. The population was low and scattered and free. Once farming started, people had to stay put to farm their land, and to guard it from pests and thieves. They had to regard the land they farmed as their own. Farming increases the number of people who can live in a given area of land, and after not many generations, it was impossible to go back to hunting and gathering, because the population was then too large to support that way, and the rest of the land was beingfarmed by people who didn't take kindly to poachers. The result was that people who were once free were now trapped in the backbreaking world of farming. Perhaps our economy will make it impossible for houses to be affordable for typical single wage earners. If enough people stay together for long enough to pay enough joint mortgages, then house prices can stay inflated. Governments could not simply intervene and lower the price of housing. Attempts to force people to sell things for less than they could get for them always fail one way or another.Something is only ever worth what someone else is prepared to pay for it. It could be that men have ended up in a world where male virtues are criticised in all but the successful few, and in which their male instincts cause them to pursue lives that will bring them little pleasure. Meanwhile women cannot feel respected without independence, but cannot get enough money without dependence on a man who might be gone tomorrow, and so still they have to go out and get jobs.

Using the French Expression Avoir la Frite

Expression: Avoir la fritePronunciation: [a vwar la freet]Meaning: to feel great, be full of energyLiteral translation: to have the French fryRegister: familiarNotes: The French expressions avoir la frite and avoir la patate mean exactly the same thing: to feel great. Patate is an informal synonym for the head and by extension so is frite, thus saying that you have the potato or the French fry means that you have the (proper) head - in other words, your head is in a good place and you feel great. Examples Je ne sais pas pourquoi, mais depuis mardi, jai la frite  !I dont know why, but Ive felt great since Tuesday!Elle avait la frite jusquau coup de tà ©là ©phone de sa banque.She was feeling great until the bank called.Tu nas pas lair davoir la frite.You dont look well, You dont look like you feel very well.Pauvre Thomas, il na pas la frite aujourdhui.Poor Thomas, hes not feeling too great, hes a bit down today.Avoir indicates a current status; you can substitute other verbs to indicate a change or continuation.Quest-ce quon peut faire pour lui donner la frite  ?What can we do to cheer/perk him up?Jespà ¨re quil va garder la frite quand il entendra les nouvelles.I hope hell still feel good when he hears the news. Synonymous Expressions à ªtre dattaque - literally, to be on attackà ªtre en forme - to be on formà ªtre en pleine forme - to be on full formà ªtre plein dà ©nergie - to be full of energyavoir la pà ªche (informal) - to have the peachavoir la pà ªche denfer (informal) - to have the peach from hellavoir mangà © du cheval (informal) - to have eaten some horseavoir mangà © du lion (informal) - to have eaten some lionà ªtre dans son assiette (informal, usually used in the negative) - to be in ones platepà ©ter le feu (familiar) - to be bursting with firepà ©ter les flammes (familiar) - to be bursting with flames Warning: The Collins-Robert Dictionary gives the alternate British translation to be full of beans for avoir la frite and some of the synonyms. However, in American English, that means to talk nonsense, which in French is dire nimporte quoi or dire des bà ªtises. Related Expressions à ªtre une frite - to be sickly, puny (literally, to be a French fry)faire une frite à   quelquun (informal) - to slap someone on the bottom (literally, to do a French fry on someone)