Thursday, January 30, 2020

Learning a Foreign Language Essay Example for Free

Learning a Foreign Language Essay Whats the best age to learn a new language? researchers say that you shouldnt wait too long before introducing a baby to foreign languages. According to the critical period hypothesis, theres a certain window in which second language acquisition skills are at their peak. Researchers disagree over just how long that window is some say that it ends by age 6 or 7, while others say that it extends all the way through puberty but after that period is over, it becomes much harder for a person to learn a new language. Its not impossible, but children in that critical period have an almost universal success rate at achieving near fluency and perfect accents, while adults results are more hit-and-miss. Because children are so much more skilled at picking up a second language than adults, immersion preschools and elementary schools are a popular choice for parents. Students at these schools have math, story time and social studies the way other students do, but their classes are taught in a foreign language. Not only does this give the students ample time to practice the foreign language, but some research indicates that such a program might have other academic benefits, such as higher math scores and sharper critical thinking skills. And learning a second language at such a young age doesnt hinder any abilities in the childs native language it seems a childs brain is wired so that all linguistic rules, be they native or foreign, are picked up quickly. However, just because a child becomes fluent in Italian, Russian and Portuguese doesnt mean that he or she will be speaking those languages 50 years later. Without extended exposure to a language, the childs abilities diminish, so its important to provide continued opportunities to practice these skills. anguage is too complex for children to understand. All the people know that if one wants to learn a foreign language, one must understand its grammars and vocabularies. These things can not be easily understood by a child who does not have enough experience. Children are simply reciting the rules of grammars and vocabularies. The mountain like amount of rules and vocabularies are difficult for every people, especially children. As children are reciting the rules of grammars and vocabularies, they are forgetting them gradually to none. As a result, there is no good result for both children themselves and parents. Not everyone is a genius, and so almost of the children can not hold as many languages as their parents hopes. So, from my view children should not begin learning a foreign language as soon as they start school.

Tuesday, January 21, 2020

Nature and Nurture in Crime and Punishment Essay -- Crime and Punishmen

Nature and Nurture in Crime and Punishment       In the news today there is an article about a high-school boy who brought guns to school and shot several students. The parents of the victims are suing various computer game companies saying that the violent games present shooting and killing people as pleasurable and fail to portray realistic consequences. A representative of one of the companies released a statement saying that this is another example of individuals seeking to elude responsibility that has become so common in our society. This case is not about software. What is on trial is the age-old debate between nature and nurture, which also lies at the center of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.    In his dream about the gray nag, Raskolnikov as an unshaped child is innately compassionate; he weeps for horses being cruelly beaten, but already society, in the form of his parents, begins to shape him, to train him, to numb his compassionate feelings for those in pain. His mother draws him away from the window when he sees such a horse pass and his father tells him when the men kill the nag "They're drunk, they're playing pranks, it's none of our business, come along" (59). Already Raskolnikov is being taught to rationalize murder, for all those people who watched and did not interfere are partly to blame as they rationalize that "it's none of our business."    Mikolka, the horse's murderer, also rationalizes his role; first, he defines the mare as property, not as life. Repeatedly he says "It's my goods" (57) while those who object refer to the horse not as an neuter object but as "her." Secondly, he attempts to justify the act through cold reasoning: "I might as well kill her, she's not worth her ... .... Even today as we scan the news we can still find the nature versus nurture issue addressed by Dostoevky still prevalent in our court cases and legal system.    Works Cited and Consulted:    Bloom, Harold. Modern Critical Interpretations. New York, New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988.    Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. New York: Random House, 1992.    Gale Research Co. Nineteenth Century Literature Criticism. Detroit, MI 1984, Vol. 7.    Kjetsaa, Geir. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, A Writer's Life. New York, New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1987,    Magill, Frank. Masterplots. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press, 1976.    Terras, Victor. Handbook of Russian Literature. New Haven, CT; Yale University Press, 1985.    Timoney, John. Speech on Crime and Punishment. Mt. Holyoke College, November 10, 1994.   

Monday, January 13, 2020

American Indian History

The meaning of the word â€Å"nation† can be interpreted in different ways, but it always signifies the people, native language, traditions and a territory. Every nation has its own usages and they are inherited by its population across the generations. The people love their culture and love their land. Long time ago people learnt to cultivate the soil and to grow the crops. However, the land is not just people’s wet-nurse. It is something more for natives, because it unites them into one whole, into one nation. But when somebody deprives people of their land, the power of population as a nation weakens.â€Å"The world turned upside down† – wrote Colin G. Calloway trying to bring to the readers a sorry plight of Indians after blood-thirsty invasion of Englishman into their land. Peace and idyll of Native American’s life remained in the past and new era of a disaster came. One group after another endured successive waves of epidemic disease, inter-tr ibal and European warfare, rapid environmental change, colonial pressure for cultural change, displacement, and sometimes enslavement and servitude. Some groups disintegrated under the pressure, but others found ways to survive and some new groups came into being.It was not easy for them to adapt to the new laws white men had brought with them. The Indians felt that something was dying for ever and their home had changed. But the main human instinct of a survival played its key role. The Indians learnt to live with colonists. In this paper we’ll discuss the various ways Indian peoples adapted to their new settlers. To open the subject perfectly we’ll look to the life of the Native Americans through the history. For thousands of years land that is now the United States belonged to the Indians. They spoke many different languages.They lived in many different ways. Some were farmers. Some were hunters. Some lived deep in the forests in villages of strongly built houses. O thers roamed over the grassy plains, carrying all they owned with them. Each Indian belonged to a tribe, which was made up of a number of bands. Just two or three families constituted some bands. Each Indian thought of himself first not as one man but as part of a band and of a tribe. All the members of a band took care of each other. They hunted or farmed together and shared whatever they caught or grew. Some tribes were warlike. Others lived in peace.Indian religions were many. Some believed in one god, others in many, but all believed that man and nature were very close. Hunters or farmers all knew that the wind, the rain, the sun, the grass, the trees, and all the animals that lived on the earth were important to them. For thousands of years Indians wandered through the forests, over the grassy plains and great deserts. The earth was their mother, supplying all their wants. Then men arrived from Europe, men who wanted to take this land and have it for their own. These men believ ed that land could be cut up and bought and sold.In 1513 the Spaniard Ponce de Leon arrived in Florida. He did not stay, but he was fallowed by others Europeans who came to settle the land that was to become the United States. Spaniards came and Frenchmen came. Settlers came from England to Virginia and Massachusetts. These settlers wanted the Indians’ land. They wanted it for farms and cities. Englishmen cut down the forests and plowed the earth. Sometimes they made treaties with the Indians in which it was agreed that part of the land belonged to the newcomers and part to the Indians. As more men came from Europe, then were more men who wanted Indians land.The natives could not sell or give away all their land, but the settlers wanted it all. Eventually conflicts arose and outgrew into the Indian Wars. Because of nomadic life, small numbers, lack of weapons Indians turned out not worthy adversary for their enemy. But the Indians fought for their land. They went on fighting for almost four hundred years. Indian armed opposition was suppressed only at the end of nineteenth and their remains were driven to reservations. The Europeans carried with them not only longing to subdue the new land for all its material richness, but also brought unknown and deadly diseases.According to Northern Plains Indian winter counts (chronologies) epidemic diseases occurred on average every 5. 7 years for the area and every 9. 7-15. 8 years for individual groups. Disease outbreaks tended to follow episodes of famine or disease and tended to be followed by episodes of abundance of game when human mortality had been high. Epidemics preceded sustained contact with non-natives. The groups keeping winter counts recognized that epidemic diseases were spread through intergroup contact.Recorded reactions to epidemics include population dispersal, attempts to identify effective medicines, avoidance of outsiders, and changes in religious practices. Chronological listing of reference s to epidemics in winter counts shows that the northern plains groups endured about thirty-six major epidemics between 1714 and 1919 (table 1). Great smallpox broke out in 1837-38 that decimated the Mandas. Unlike the Yanktonai Blue Thunder winter counts, the Oglala John Colhoff and Flying Hawk winter counts describe the 1844-45 epidemic as severe. Blue Thunder notes that this epidemic was very widespread.The Hunkpapa Cranbrook winter count states that only children were affected by the 1844 measles or smallpox epidemic. . Iron Crow reported a food shortage in 1817 followed by measles or smallpox in 1818. The Yanktonai John Bear recounted a severe famine in 1814, followed by a severe epidemic in 1815. It is unlikely that birthrates could increase enough to compensate for this frequent loss of life. Many aspects of native life in the Great Plains were affected by epi-demics. Military might depended as much on a group's health as on the training and technology available to its warrior s.Patterns of social aggregation and dispersal, religious revivals, migrations, and survival of particular groups were affected by epidemic disease. The diseases and wares drained Indians having made them vulnerable before Englishmen. As colonists were fully aware from their negotiations for Indian land, the best way to press Indians into service was to allow them to run up debts with English merchants, then demand the balance and bring them to court when they could not pay. In such way â€Å"violation of the rights of Indians†3 continued for a long time.There is more then one example of illegal capture of Indians in their sorrowful history. For instance on August 12, 1865 a Hopi woman wobbled into the office of Lieutenant Colonel Julius C. Show, commanding officer of Fort Wingate, New Mexico Territory. She looked appallingly: her clotted hair with blood from a hand wound hung down her face. The woman declared to Show that while she and her nine-year-old daughter were walking the wagon road between Cubero and Fort Wingate, two men from the village overtook them, thumped her with their rifle butts and left her beside the trail.When she regained consciousness some hours later, her daughter was missing. Retracing her steps to Cubero, she discovered that the men had kidnapped her daughter and refused her to see the child. Then she went to Fort Wingate to plead for Shaw’s mediation in the kidnapping. Two accordant developments provide larger historical and cultural context for the Hopi woman’s dilemma. For although discrete in certain details, the sufferings of this anonymous woman prove symptomatic of the experience of women and children caught in larger processes of violence, exchange, and state regulation in the region.Chato Sanchez – the man who captured the girl answered Shaw’s question about the mother and her daughter clearly that â€Å"he had assumed a debt which this woman contracted and had taken both the mother and her daughter as security against that debt. †4 The man probably spoke the truth as he saw it. Since the early eighteenth century, Spanish New Mexicans had engaged in the practice of â€Å"rescate†, or rescue and redemption of captives held in the power of â€Å"los indions barbarous†. In New Mexico â€Å"rescate† served as the artifice by which legal and moral sanctions against Indian slavery could be subverted.Much about Indian society and culture in southern New En ¬gland had changed during Howwoswee's lifetime. From the late seventeenth century through the early nineteenth century, English merchants exploited the Indians' dependence on store credit to coerce men, women, and children alike into bonded service. County court judges complemented this effort by indenturing native debtors who could not pay off their accounts and Indian convicts who could not meet their court fines and costs of jailing. Meanwhile, colonial officials made little but token effort s to stem such practices despite full awareness that they were occurring.By 1700, neither Christian Indians nor colonists found it acceptable for natives to put on reed-woven clothes, skins, or just shirts with leggings, as they did in the seventeenth century. As a result Indians either had to purchase spinning wheels and get wool to their own cloth, which a minority did, or else buy finished material or clothing from local stores. â€Å"Cloth, clothing, and sewing items constituted 16 percent of the value of native purchases at Vineyarder John Allen's store between 1732 and 1752, 63 percent at John Sumner's between 1749 and 1752, and 86 percent at Peter Norton's between 1759 and 1765 (see table 2).Even for merchants who did not specialize in fabric, like Beriah Norton, cloth and clothing sales made up no less than 13 percent of the value of Indian transactions. †5 Food charges for corn, meat, and sweeteners were also significant, running as high as 26 percent at one store (s ee tables 1). English land purchases had so effectively restricted Indian movement that the natives' mixed subsistence base of corn-bean-squash agriculture, shellfish gathering, fishing, and hunting had been soundly compromised.Dams prevented fish from migrating along rivers. In connecting with deer herds declined, Indians were compelled to kill their livestock or buy meat. Traditional economic ac ¬tivities were further undermined when Indians went to work for colonists during planting and harvest seasons in order to pay off store accounts. The laborers turned to purchased, rather than self-raised, corn to carry them through the lean winter months until April's fish runs and the midsummer harvest of squash and beans replenished stores.In such way cycle began: first, a native family was pressed to rely on pur-chased food for a season or two; then creditors forced adults to work for Englishmen; the next cold season, they were back at the store to buy things they had been unable to p rovide for themselves during the previous year; and thus debts mounted again and the pattern repeated itself. Bonded service affected the Indians of southern New En ¬gland not only individually but culturally as well. Inevitably, having so many Indians, particularly children, living among the English promoted native acculturation to colonial ways.Some acculturative change proved empowering for native communi ¬ties. Other shifts were decidedly less welcome. In either case, groups such as the Wampanoags of Aquinnah and Mashpee, the Narragansetts, and the Pequots were forced to struggle with how to define themselves as they became more like their English neighbors. Indian children had not only to withstand separation from their parents and relatives but to adapt to the colonists' strange ways. Left with little choice, they could do nothing but adjust. By making colonial agricultural and domestic tasks an accepted part of Indian life, indentures played a key role in natives' accultu ration.In 1767, when Eleazar Wheelock put a Narragansett Indian boy to work in the fields, the boy's father having expressed a protest proclaimed: â€Å"I can as well learn him that myself †¦ being myself brought up with the best of Farmers. â€Å"7 As usual women rarely recorded such statements, but changes in their work prove that they also were adopting English ways. Indians Betty Ephraim, Patience Amos, and Experience Mamuck received credit from Richard Macy for spinning yarn and sewing — possibly on equipment that they owned themselves, given the presence of spinning wheels and looms in a few native estate inventories.Indentures were not the only factor encouraging Indians to adopt new tasks and technology. Missionaries contin ¬ued to promote the benefits of colonial work ways, no doubt persuading some listeners. Other natives distressed that their lack of accumulated capital made them chronically vulnerable to merchants and judges, carefully decided â€Å"to l ive more like my Christian English neighbors. â€Å"8 The enormity of servitude's impact on Indian culture is obvious. At least one-third of native children were living with the English at any given time, most under indentures that kept them in service until their late teens or early twenties.When these servants returned home as adults, they passed on what they had learned to their children, some of whom were in turn bound out to colonists. By the second half of the eighteenth century, probably nearly all native households included at least one person who had spent an essential portion of his or her childhood as a servant. As a result of poverty and widespread in ¬dentured servitude, were the changes Indians experienced in their dress. Between the advent of English settlement and King Philip's War, Praying Indians in order to mark themselves as Christians cut their hair and donned shirts, pants, shoes, hats, and cloaks.However, many Christian Indians refused to abide by the Engli sh dictate that people dress according to their station in the colonists' social hierarchy. Indian women, in particular, had a special liking for jewelry and clothes that colonists considered gaudy and ungodly. Servitude also influenced the Indians' food ways. Throughout the early seventeenth century, the usual Indian dish was a corn mush that consisted of some mix of vegetables, shellfish, fish, and/or game. Water was the natives' sole drink. But soon merchants stocked alternative foods and extended Indian credit lines, as traditional sources of protein became less accessible.As a result natives became accustomed to the food provided by colonial masters; the Indian diet began to change. Although In ¬dians continued to consume traditional foods, by the early eighteenth century they also ate mutton, beef, cheese, and potatoes, massive quantities of molasses and sugar, and smaller amounts of peas, biscuits, and apples (see table 2). Thus, by the end of the eighteenth century the Ind ian life rather changed. The characteristics that previously had distinguished natives from their colonial neighbors were no longer a part of Indian existence.In ¬dians became more like their white neighbors in their gendered division of labor, in their food and dress, and perhaps even in their propensity to beat children. As colonists forced Indian children as well as adults into bonded labor, natives lost control not only over their workaday lives but over the very upbringing of their young people. Large numbers of children and young adults spent most of their developmental years working in colonists' homes and on their farms and ships, where they heard and spoke English, performed English work, wore English clothing, and ate English food.Over time, they could not help but become more like their masters. Food, labor, dress, child-rearing: these are major elements of any people's cultural life. But indentured servitude's impact on Indian culture was even greater, its reach even l onger. It struck much nearer to the foundations of Indian identity when it began to interfere with the people's ability to pass on native languages through word of mouth and print. Gradually, Indians became English-only speakers and this change more than any other threatened Indian claims to distinctiveness.During the first two-thirds of the eighteenth century, as more and more natives served indentures, Indian literacy rates stagnated or declined. This lack of progress is remarkable, considering that in the seventeenth century, colonial officials and native parents alike expected masters to instruct bound Indian children to read and write English. Some natives sent their offspring to live with colonists or attend boarding schools precisely so that they would be formally educated.Not until the late eighteenth century, when native household servants began to receive instruction in writing from white women — who were themselves in the process of gaining full literacy — d id Indian signature rates start to climb, particularly among females. About three centuries wars of annihilation against Indians continued. Because of primitive weapon and nomadic life, Indians’ forces were broken. But not their spirit. Love to their land, nature and culture always lived and lives in their hearts.Despite all the disasters which fell down their heads Indians adapted to the new life. New settlers left indelible imprint on Indians’ life, traditions and language. Many groups of Native Americans did not stand cruel invasion in their life but some of them learnt to find ways to survive. And nowadays the Spirit of the chieftain lives in the heart of every Indian. They are proud of their tribal roots and their culture. Notes 1. Colin G. Calloway, The World Turned Upside Down: Indian voices from Early America (Dartmouth College). 2.Linea Sundstrom, Smallpox Used Them Up: References to Epidemic Disease in Northern Plains Winter Counts, 1714-1920, 309 3. Richard White and John M. Findlay, Power and Place in the North American West (Seattle and London: University Of Washington Press), 44. 4. White, Power and Place, 45. 5. David J. Silverman, The impact of Indentured Servitude on the Society and Culture of Southern New England Indians, 1680 – 1810,626. 6. Silverman, The impact of Indentured Servitude, 627. 7. Silverman, The impact of Indentured Servitude, 652. 8. Ibid.

Sunday, January 5, 2020

Article Review about Social Studies

Social studies are the incorporated study of humanities and sciences enhanced to endorse effectual community development. This paper therefore identifies and discusses three journal articles from different sources discussing about social studies. An annotation of the three journal articles dealing with social studies is presented below. Lawlor, D. Mariscal, Q. (2006). ‘Longman Social Studies.’ Journal of Social Studies Research, 10(3), 34-41. In this journal article by Lawlor and Mariscal, a set of three books have been discussed in the journal article. These are a student’s book, a workbook and a Teacher’s guide. This are enhanced in order to link through the advanced preparation of English language learners and stressed readers to finger complex educational skills and comfortable acquaintance in later conventional social studies classes. Therefore, the set of the three manual books emphasizes mostly on educational language, social study skills and content reading strategies. The student’s workbook is intended to assist students to strengthen and enlarge significant academic language, social studies skills, reading strategies and finally the writing skills achieved from the student’s book. The work book forms importance basis since it can also serve as a measure where students grasp information before continuing with the relevant skills. In addition to that, the same is used by teachers to measure grasp of concepts of learners. On the other hand, teacher’s guide book serves to provide detailed information and instructional measures for presenting and teaching social studies skills for academic contents. Generally, from the article, it is clear indication that the study of social studies encompasses a wide base of information consisting of the diverse branches of social science. This calls for the idea and reason for everybody to get well acquainted with the skills of social studies so as to be in better position to compete with the global emerging issue in all relevant fields which are related with social studies skills. ‘Social studies.’ Source: 11 United States History and Government. The New York Education Department. Albany, NY. Adapted for Journal of Social Studies Research. The article emphasizes on the importance of the skills acquired from the social studies teachings. In this case, the skills are introduced and applied within the relevance framework of social studies programs and thus remediating the skills is considered a developmental process to a student. The article points out that: students will get the best understanding of such skills once they use apply them in examining, interpreting and analyzing concepts of social science. Further, students are foreseen to aim for mastery objective skills. This is because empirical research proves that students lacking appropriate social studies skills will face numerous difficulties when it comes to applying information to new fields and analyzing emerging issues and past problems. Regarding this journal, social studies teachings should be conducted in all classroom activities. This is to ensure that students connect to methodical and developmental progress to learning how information is processed and how to apply the same in the relevant emerging fields. Social studies skills are categorized into two:Â   thinking skills and thinking strategies. Thinking skills involves the talent to collect, understand, classify and manufacture information, where else thinking strategies includes processing information while students engage in solving the problem so as to come up with relevant solution. The recommendations of learning and teaching social studies revolve around some basic dimensions which are necessary in ensuring meaningful programs. The dimensions cover widely on the essential parts of all social study program and teaching. They include; multi disciplinary approaches, skills of intellectual, breadth and depth, student-teaching, knowledge, and evaluation and patterns for organizing data among other dimensions. Higgs, P. L. (1996). ‘Using Inquiry to Teach Social Studies.’ The Charter Schools Resource Journal, 1(1), 20-32. This journal article by Higgs revolves around the ‘studying and teaching’ of social studies through the use of inquiry. Through this mode of teaching, the structure encourages teachers to teach without the use of exclusive textbooks. This is done with the aim of assisting the students to make relations with the world; in other words beyond the classroom setting. The article calls for more participation and thinking of the student to come up with solutions towards emerging problems when applying the same skills in the new information fields. Further, this method includes special and advanced techniques of dealing with social studies, this includes; public dialogue, decision making and resident participation principles that anticipate learners to examine their humanity as social It also encourages and explains the need for scientists to conduct empirical studies through the use of scientific skills to recognize emerging issues and to be in better position of solving such problems that lead to feasible solutions. The basic standard of ‘inquiry’ expects the instructors to connect the learners in an advanced manner and categorize the thinking activities. This comes with the benefits of expanding learner’s knowledge concerning social studies education. Mostly, this is achieved through comprising students in substantive conversations and further creating lots of activities that help students relate with the world beyond the classroom. The journal article reiterates further on the importance of teachers planning and assessing lessons. Â  This enhances better and advanced experience which in turn results to production of meaningful learning. Basically, influential social studies in this article are seen to be of help in guiding students to create meaningful learning by serving students to associate truth and concepts which they later apply and explain to the entire globe. References Higgs, P. L. (1996). ‘Using Inquiry to Teach Social Studies.’ The Charter Schools Resource Journal, 1(1), 20-32. Lawlor, D. Mariscal, Q. (2006). ‘Longman Social Studies.’ Journal of Social Studies Research, 10(3), 34-41. ‘Social studies.’ Source: 11 United States History and Government. The New York Education Department. Albany, NY. Adapted for Journal of Social Studies Research.