...Middle Childhood Growing up, I had to learn to be more mature than what my age depicted. I was adept at taking care of not only myself but my three younger brothers; being assigned this role around the "middle childhood" age was challenging, causing me to acquire the development for new capabilities. My social development was not necessarily flourishing at this point in time, due to cumulative disruption in my home-life. This led up through my adolescence and even has a tendency to continually disrupt my thoughts through adulthood. Psychologically speaking, I wasn't necessarily a stable child; not having what I would define as "natural" sleeping patterns, I was always overly-emotional and testy with everyone that I met. --Throw in a dab of coyness, and that pretty much sums up my middle childhood period! My thought process and my demeanor seem to strive off of this period of my life, good and bad....
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...night Garden and Swallows and Amazons How do ‘the lure of the real’ (Bogan,A.2006) and the ‘power of the fantastic’ (EA300,Block 4) work together in any two of the set texts in Block 4? ‘The lure of the real’ (Bogan,A.2006) and the ‘power of the fantastic’ (EA300,Block 4) are used to create dramatic effect and depth to narratives, in interesting and diverse ways. The two concepts are not mutually exclusive. When the real and the fantastic combine, truly delightful and often informative, stories are created. Novels differ in their proportional use of realism and fantasy. Realism is commonly used to convey a sense of believability, to give gravitas to characters and to enable a child reader to understand through the presentation of the familiar and recognisable. Fantasy can be viewed as a “departure from consensus reality.” (Hume cited in EA300. Block4.p169). This could exist in the form of imaginary play, dreams, unworldly creations or literal impossibility. This essay will concentrate on Swallows and Amazons and Tom’s Midnight Garden. Each text has different approaches to the use of reality and fantasy. However, they convey similar themes and messages through various presentations of ‘the real’ and ‘the fantastic.’ Ransome and Pearce anchor their stories in reality by creating a “powerful sense of place and” a “celebration of freedom underpinned by family security.” (EA300, Block4) Ransome achieves this by distinct geographical representation of the Lake District...
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...really" (line.15) It would seem that the protagonist himself is to blame for the divorce, as he nurtures a desire that things should work again, both in relation to his ex-wife, but perhaps most in relation to his son. The father is very caring and loving to his son, and you quickly sympathize with him as the reader "... when the boy came running into the living room he threw him over his shoulder, careful not to hit his head on the corner of the TV…" (Page 2. line16-17) The protagonist wants to pass some of the good childhood memories that he had with his own father. They also used to take the same trip, and the main character repeats many of the same principles and rituals with his own son. Since the reader does not have access to the boy's thoughts and feelings, just as we have in the father. The author paints a picture of him with descriptions and through his father's thoughts about him. Most of all, we get a picture of a small frail boy. This narrative technique enables the reader to quickly sympathize for the boy and especially his father, who tried to get him safely through their journey in the wilderness: "He looked at the miniature jeans, the sweatshirt bunched beneath the seat belt's strap, the hiking boots dangling off the floor like weights." (Page 2. Line 7-8) The Setting Crossing takes place in a magnificent nature reserve. The setting has importance for the actions in the short story. An example of this is the role of the river throughout the story and especially...
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...Su Fredrich is a filmmaker who created experimental films that are combined with narratives and documentaries. In the first clip that showed, Chapter 3: Gently Down The Stream #3 that she finished in 1981, recalls her dreams. It a silent, black and white film because she was not interested in sounds but rather getting her point across to the audience. Based on the film, she did not used dream sequences that were common in Hollywood movies, which had slow motions. Instead she made the film more of a fast motion that cuts back and forth to different scenes of her dream. She incorporate a number of unusual text in between scenes so that our own voice could be heard as we were reading it. I think her format worked, this was the first time I watched a silent film that was so meaningful and interesting. The symbols and characters used were a bit weird but they add power to the film and made the text even stronger. Although it was a silent film, I think it engage the audience to see the bigger picture the dream....
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...least one short story you have studied. “Rhinoceros Beetle” by Susan Hawthorne is a story about a boy’s childhood obsession which becomes a reality when he grows into a man. The story presents ideas and assumptions which viewers can relate to real life. The writer first presents an image of a boy with a destructive nature which is normal in young males, but then challenges this idea by showing a more menacing side of some men. Women are portrayed as the victims and misunderstood by the males in the story. The writer positions readers to relate events in the story to the real world through the use of narrative conventions of characterisation, point of view and descriptive language. The short story uses the narrative convention of descriptive language which details the events of the boy’s life and position readers to question the worlds outside texts. In the beginning of the story the boy is present as destructive with an obsession for insects. “In the spring he added to his large collection of eggs; raiding nest……. and covering the boxes later with non-reflective glass”. The evidence clearly shows that the boy has an interest in bugs and insects which is normal in young boys. However as the story progresses the readers are exposed to a much more sinister side of the boy who is now a man. “He had treated women as he had always treated every living”, this shows us that his childhood obsession has resulted in his behaviour as a man. The boy’s story is very similar and can be compared...
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...life. Myop have explored the woods many times before, but one day she turns her back to the rusty sharecropper to explore the forest on her way. She finds ferns, leaves and strange blue flowers and a sweet suds bush. She gets farther and farther away from home and she thinks it's a little creepy and uncomfortable in the cove she ended up in. She describes it as "the air was damp, the silence close and deep." Suddenly she steps on something. A corpse of a man. Beside him a pink rose lay on the ground. The rose has something around the roots it turns out to be rotten remains of a tattered plowline. A last Myop lie down the blossoms and the story ends with the words "and the summer was over.” It is an omniscient narrator in third person narrative. Because the narrator knows what the girl thinks and feels without direct expression in the text. We follow the girl and her achievements seen from outside when the viewpoint is an external perspective. It makes the story neutral and you keep getting the exterior of knowledge, but not the interior. Therefore it forces us to even think what Myop thinks. And why she thinks so. The story takes place in a forest. Myop and her family live in a sharecropper cabin med rusty boards and it may symbolize poverty. They live in the country probably because they have chickens and a pigpen. Around the spring it’s also described how they fetch water from the river. I believe that history could take place in a country in South America or Africa, as...
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...Each memory, experience and event that occurs in a person’s life is essential to help discover the person they have grown to become. Our childhood, in particular, is important to reflect on because that is when we experienced things for the first time and where we learned from our mistakes (Cottingham 2008). It is through narration that we are able to understand how our childhood and our past has affected us and created who we are as a human being. We must recognize the importance of old memories and how well we are able to explain them. It will be examined how the actual occurrence of an event differs from the way it has been told. With every action we take, there is always a good reason for doing it. According to philosopher Charles Taylor, this is called “an orientation to the good.” He believes that to make sense of our lives and have any identity at all, we must have an orientation to the good (Cottingham 2008). The direction of our lives depends on this good as well as how motivated we are to get to the place relating to this good. What Taylor is trying to say is that without having motivation behind each decision we make, our reason for existence is meaningless. This is an excellent point because it is what makes us all individuals. Although many people may experience the same thing, the way it is interpreted is what makes each person’s identity unique. We are able to create incentives that push us do better in everything we do and make us work hard to achieve...
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...The mental state of a person is a complex thing. It is also a fragile thing that can be bended, damaged, and maybe even broken. Many people do become broken, but that is not the story of Antwone FIsher. He overcame his demons. The movie detailing Fisher’s life primarily tells the story of a man in the navy who struggles with authority while “breaks” in the present narrative tells of the man’s childhood. Each segment of his life leaves a lasting effect on Fisher, for better or worse. The first and most prominent problem Fisher has is his anger. Due to it, he attacked an officer and was sent to a therapist as punishment. This behavior can most likely be attributed to his feelings of helplessness as a child. He was powerless against his foster...
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...THEME AND NARRATIVE ELEMENTS IN A SHORT STORY XAVION LAY INTRODUCTION TO LITERATURE JACLYN MALLAN-KING THEME AND NARRATIVE ELEMENTS IN A SHORT STORY The short story that was chosen to write this paper was the Welcome Table by Alice Walker that was written in 1970. This story being racial in theme and treatment was one of the best stories and that was heartfelt in this book. While without describing the story in detail I will point out its theme and narrative elements that make this story what it is today. Just as in the Oxford Companion to African American Literature states: “Though we are aware of the dismissal of so much black American writing for so many years because it did not conform to prevailing aesthetic or critical canons, our understanding of literature is not restricted to these traditional genres.” (Oxford Companion, 1997) This book was definitely written by one the greatest writers ever know. She placed her heart mind and soul into the writings of which she made which brings me to the writing of the Welcome Table. The Welcome Table was a short story that had a racial theme. Due to the story taking place in the time that black who were referred to as colored at the time could not congregate in the same place as whites. The point of view that was in play was omniscient. This is a story is written from another point of view. Not that of the person that is in the story but from someone on the outside that understands the way the character in the story feels...
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...Reading many of the stories from the oral history project, there seemed to be many similarities and differences. One of the similarities that some had in common was the way that these narrators where raised in their childhood, yet different environments they grew up in. The upbringing of all these narrators has had a profound impact in the way they create art that has helped them create a path to their own success and work. To further expand other themes in common that come across the selected narrators include; opportunities in Chicago, theatre, artistic and academic freedom/expression. This paper will focus on two of the four questions, “How has your sense of self influenced your cultural work/production” and “What brought you to Chicago and what keeps you here?” When asked the first question “How has your sense of self influenced your cultural work /production” many of the narrators started by talking about their childhood and how those experiences were key to the development of their cultural work along with theatre. This is also a reason I selected these narrators as I saw that it was unique compared to the rest of the narrators. These four individual began to talk about...
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...theme in the short story is depression caused of a death. The following essay focuses on the structure and symbols in the short story. “Divorced, Beheaded, Survived” is about a 40-year-old mother - Sarah, from whose the point of view is told – therefore a first person narrator. The woman looks back upon an essential episode in her childhood when her older brother became sick and died. The setting is also important in these realizations. The story takes place in Manhattan in the present, but the setting of Sarah’s childhood home is described positively with a sense of calming familiarity. “Day after day, dusk really, in the time between school and dinner, in the small, untended yard behind my childhood home…” When we see at the setting the exiting aspect is to see at the lack of details in the description. The result of this is that the focus of the story becomes the emotional way Sarah experiences and creates a deeper understanding of death and all it’s terrible consequences. The emotional aspect of the history is boosted through the structure of the short story. The short story is structured chronological with flashbacks of Sarah’s childhood like two stories from the Sarah’s life. The first story is her memories about the episode with her older brother’s death, and the other part of the short story is about an everyday situation where her son loses a friend. The...
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...new. Informational text can be intimidating to adults let alone small children so it is understandable that some teachers may be intimidated introducing non-fiction to their early learners. There is an assumption that children will understand and make sense of a story that is fiction before they will be able to comprehend text that is a nont-fiction text (Bortnem). Some teachers may feel the text is too complicated, the vocabulary is too topic specific, there is not enough age appropriate material and many may such as storybooks, fairytales, etc. The author like many teachers was convinced that kindergartners preferred fiction, even though much of the research cited children's preferences for the content of informational books over narrative text. The author decides to investigate the children's book preferences through a study to determine if her perception that they preferred fiction was accurate. The core of the article centers on her study that was done among a class of kindergarteners. The study was done to determine whether kindergarten students would choose fiction or informational texts more often. The study was done over a period of 19 weeks. The study concluded that the kindergarteners would pick informational texts just as often, or even more often, than fiction books. The teacher found that students liked to learn about things they found interesting. The children chose nonfiction or...
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...Tomorrow Is Too Far VATE Inside Stories 2014 This is the other story in the collection, which is told in the second person and it is considered the more powerful one by many reviewers. This story looks back eighteen years to an incident in the narrator’s childhood, one which has had a major impact on her whole life. The narrator reflects on the last summer before everything changed – her parents divorced, she never returned to Nigeria or saw her father’s family again. The memory begins eighteen years earlier in Nigeria at grandmamma’s place where the American-Nigerian narrator, her older brother Nonso and her cousin Dozie were all staying. Grandmamma favoured Nonso as the eldest grandson and the only one to carry the ‘Nnabuisi name’ (p.188) and largely ignored the other two. This was the summer that Nonso died, leaving grandmamma and her American daughter-in-law grief stricken. The narrator felt alienated from them both. The action moves from the memory to the present where the narrator has arrived back in Nigeria, having been called by Dozie for the first time in eighteen years and told about the death of her grandmother. Dozie tells her that he is surprised to see her because he knows how much she hated grandmamma. She recalls Nonso’s funeral and the months later where she told her mother that he died because grandmamma sent him up the avocado tree ‘to show how much of a man he was’ (p.194) and then frightened him by telling him there was a snake there. She also said...
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...Tomorrow Is Too Far VATE Inside Stories 2014 This is the other story in the collection, which is told in the second person and it is considered the more powerful one by many reviewers. This story looks back eighteen years to an incident in the narrator’s childhood, one which has had a major impact on her whole life. The narrator reflects on the last summer before everything changed – her parents divorced, she never returned to Nigeria or saw her father’s family again. The memory begins eighteen years earlier in Nigeria at grandmamma’s place where the American-Nigerian narrator, her older brother Nonso and her cousin Dozie were all staying. Grandmamma favoured Nonso as the eldest grandson and the only one to carry the ‘Nnabuisi name’ (p.188) and largely ignored the other two. This was the summer that Nonso died, leaving grandmamma and her American daughter-in-law grief stricken. The narrator felt alienated from them both. The action moves from the memory to the present where the narrator has arrived back in Nigeria, having been called by Dozie for the first time in eighteen years and told about the death of her grandmother. Dozie tells her that he is surprised to see her because he knows how much she hated grandmamma. She recalls Nonso’s funeral and the months later where she told her mother that he died because grandmamma sent him up the avocado tree ‘to show how much of a man he was’ (p.194) and then frightened him by telling him there was a snake there. She also said...
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...on the LO in the context of learning and OL and in particular the theoretical tensions and dilemmas existing between these concepts. Management theorists have under-utilised the insights and practices from other disciplines such as sociology, philosophy and anthropology. As Burrell (1994) argues: Sooner or later organisation studies must enter an area where philosophy and social science meet. Organisation studies must also enter intellectual theory where the well-established French and German traditions of social theory meet. The author Deb Stewart is a Lecturer in the School of Management, Victoria University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Keywords Learning organization, Organizational learning, Organizational change, Metaphor, Narratives Abstract Examines the theoretical and practical development of the concept of the learning organisation (LO). Some theorists...
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