A Blue Print for Academic Success free essay sample

Many students can recall standing in front of their kindergarten class and reciting the alphabet. We all have faint memories of repeating the order and pronunciation of each letter after our teacher. We learned to emulate our instructors with perfection, knowing that it-imitation- was probably the best way to succeed in the modern American educational system. If a person said the alphabet in the wrong order or didnt recognize the difference between an â€Å"A† or a â€Å"P†, they probably would be deemed â€Å"below average† or â€Å"dumb† or worst of all, â€Å"mentally challenged†. As good as another year of â€Å"nap time† may have sounded to me at the age of five; I refused to bare the stigma of being â€Å"special† or different, which had a very negative connotation at my catholic elementary school. I suppressed my intellectual curiosity and made sure I conformed to the kindergarten norms, but one day I stepped outside of my boun daries and asked my teacher a question that literally changed my perspective of the educational system. We will write a custom essay sample on A Blue Print for Academic Success or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Before class could start its daily chanting of the alphabet, I threw my hand in the air and waved it frantically until the teacher noticed me. She called my name and I sat up in my chair and asked in a nervous fashion why did â€Å"a† come before â€Å"b†. The entire class responded with laughter and the teacher gave me a puzzled look. She put her head down as if she had to think, then rose up and told me to stop asking â€Å"silly questions†. I swallowed hard and felt tears build in my eyes as the class began to roar with laughter once more. Embarrassment overwhelmed me and my teacher began to give a spiel on how asking dumb questions interrupted the learning process. I unthinkingly hollered out that I only wanted to know why. She squeaked furiously â€Å"That’s just the way it is!† and demanded that I be content with her answer, but it was too late. I had an instant paradigm shift and refused to accept her erratic answer. I suddenly became driven to understand why things happened, how things happened, and when things happened. I began seeking knowledge and understanding instead of memorizing, emulating, and regurgitating what someone else told me. I entered a new realm in which I valued my intellectual curiosity even when others may have found my ideas radical. I also realized that everyone was unique in their own way and that my individuality defined my purpose in society. However, my school, like others, still tended to shun individuality and praise uniformity. Since I chose to venture from the average thought process of child, my teacher scolded me for my critical thinking instead of valuing my ambition to learn more than required of me. For some reason, some schools are operated like factories that are attempting to mass produce the â€Å"ideal student†. When a student steps out of the mold or doesnt fit the pre-designed â€Å"blueprint for academic success†, they immediately become a threat to the school s â€Å"educational conveyor-belt† and are dropped into the â€Å"faulty product bin†, which is usually detention or special education classes. However, this attempt to create a utopian educational system would deter the progress of innovation and bring creativity to an abrupt halt. Intellectual curiosity is the foundation for creativity and creativity is basis for innovation, which is usually linked to progress. If no one ever thought outside the box then progress in all disciplines would cease. For instance, imagine an art instructor telling Leonardo Da Vinci that his painting didnt adhere to a certain guideline or J.K. Rowlings high school English teacher telling her that her storyline wasnt organized correctly. These are perfect examples of how discouraging creativity can lead to destroying innovation. How can anything â€Å"new† come into existence if someone doesnt think â€Å"beyond† what concretely exist now? Therefore, many schools must cease wit h the idea that human beings can be educated through a prepackaged curriculum that is universal and always works for every single student.

Essay on Transsexualism

Essay on Transsexualism Essay on Transsexualism This is a free sample essay on Transsexualism: In 1952, few Americans were familiar with the concept of transsexualism. It was difficult to understand or acknowledge that gender was not synonymous with sex; that is, most people believed that the anatomy with which a child was born would indisputably influence his or her behavior, disposition, career choices, tastes and sexual preferences in one of two ways: male, or female. It was in that year that Christine Jorgensen was born. Christine Jorgensen was in fact a pseudonym for a 26 year old ex-GI from the Bronx named George. Since childhood Jorgensen had been haunted by his place in the sexual binary system, pulled like a magnet to a female identity despite his male genitals. He had finally decided to seek sex-reassignment surgery, an operation that was not available in America but was crudely performed by some doctors in Denmark (Brown et. al). Eventually details of Jorgensens surgery were leaked to reporters and the Daily News screamed EX-GI BECOMES BLONDE BOMBSHELL one quiet morning in December, propelling America into a frenzy of shock, outrage, and curiosity. Some people even saw the fact and publicity of such an event as an important landmark in the destruction of all moral and societal good. What most Americans and other Western citizens didnt know was that a rich history of transsexualism, transgenderism and/or gender variation had been alive and celebrated in many Non-Western societies for innumerabl e years. The Two-Spirited people of the various American Indian tribes and pre-contact south- and central-Americans are arguably the most interesting example of unique transgenderal customs, beliefs, and societal significance. Two-Spirited people, first written about in Western literature in the late sixteenth-century, were called bardaja or berdaches by European missionaries (Trexler). These words indicated a receptive role in sodomy and derived from the Persian bardah prisoner or kept boy. Despite evidence that some berdaches did provide homo-sexual services for warriors in central American tribes and the apparent frequency with which they took same-sex lovers, these individuals played a primarily gender-based, rather than sexual, role. In some cases this gender role was functional, such as in the incidences of female-born children being raised as boys to facilitate a fathers hunting in the Inuit subsistence based economies. Similarly, in families whose children had all been born male, a child in present-day Colombia may have been given a female gender to fill the role of fathers servant or caretaker of a sick mother. Generally these individuals would retain their given-gender for the rest of their live s (Trexler). It is important to realize, however, that in most indigenous cultures, the child raised Two-Spirit was not simply raised in the opposite gender role, but as a combination of the two, as notes Roscoe in The Zuni Man-Woman: [A] male lhamana would take on roles that not only included male occupational status such as farmer, weaver, shaman and story-teller, but potter and housekeeper as well, which were female roles (126). On the other hand, the majority of research on Two-Spirited people has revealed a gender role that is more spiritual than functional. In stark contrast to Europeans, indigenous Americans did not generally view the existence of a third gender as an abnormal phenomenon, but instead as a unique blend of male and female that comes with a heightened spirituality. In quite a number of tribes, such as the Navajo, parents would recognize a child that was to become a man-woman or woman-man by the way he or she acted while very young (Goulet). In the cultures of the Plains and the Prairies, as well as in parts of California and the Northeast, the choice to become a Two-Spirit was preceded by a vision or a dream, which both explained and legitimized their choice to become a gender other than woman or man (Lang, 95). In still other cultures, for example the Canadian Dene-Tha, children are gendered according to a complex system of cross-sex reincarnation beliefs (Lang, 95). Often these reasons fo r gender variance are not exclusive, i.e., a male may express a predisposition for traditionally female chores while young and later experience a spiritual instruction to become a woman, or vice-versa. Regardless of the reason for gender variance among Two-Spirited people, their dual-genders are a natural part of the Native American cultural world view that emphasize[s] and appreciate[s] transformation and change (Lang, 93). Native Americans are expected to go through many changes in a lifetime. The Navajo Ndleehà ©Ãƒ ©, in fact, means someone who is in a constant process of change (Lang, 97). ______________ is a professional essay writing service which can provide high school, college and university students with 100% original custom written essays, research papers, term papers, dissertations, courseworks, homeworks, book reviews, book reports, lab reports, projects, presentations and other assignments of top quality. More than 700 professional Ph.D. and Master’s academic writers. Feel free to order a custom written essay on Transsexualism from our professional essay writing service.