Death Essays (1395 words) - English-language Films, Films, Neo-noir

Death Death: Good for the Dead, Bad for the Dying, and Worse for Those It Leaves Behind My whole life, death has been a distant thing to me. It is not even really a thing, but more of an idea. I have heard about death millions of times with the media. Everyday in the news, people are dying left and right with disease in the foreign countries, famine in distant lands, and even murder in the suburbs. I even heard about it a few times from my friends when they told me about their recent loses. With all of these stories of tragedy and awful accidents, I never felt any emotion. The news reporter's sympathy for these victims was not convincing enough to make me think that something tragic had happened, or my elementary school friend did not understand the situation himself in order to feel pain. If something was truly awful about the story, it was too far away for me to consider it a reality. When I was about eight years old, I experienced the first death in my family. My father's sister had died and my he got a call soon after. I was in the room when the phone rang and my dad answered the phone. He first sounded excited to hear the voice on the other end, but that happiness soon turned to devastation. His only sister had passed away and he began to cry. My father is not a crying man, and he soon regained his composure and finished the conversation. He was able to put his sadness aside and tend to business. This was a very small event, but it had a large impact on me and helped shape my ideas about the idea of death. The way that I saw my father handle this so-called tragedy gave me the impression that life was almost like a movie. What goes on in the movie might be sad or scary or whatever, but it is not a big deal. We just need to get over the emotion because the movie is still playing and something different is happening now. The reason that this event was not a traged y to me is that it was extremely distant from me and in reality, it had very little to do with me. My aunt lived very far away from my home, so we rarely visited and I have no memories of her except for a very fuzzy mental picture. We did not attend the funeral because of the distance, but my father flew to pay his last respects to his sister. He was gone for a couple of days and was a little shaky when he returned, but all-in-all things were just like normal. Moral of the story: Death is a small speed bump, which should not be adjusted for, but should not be a big deal. When death occurs in a person's life, they put down what they are doing and tend to the matter, they come back to continue their business, and make like normal. They, with good reason, take off of school or work. They make up for the things that they missed and everything is fine again. They do not want to bring their emotions because they do not want to show their pain to others. They repress their feelings for the benefit of others. When I see this, I see a person who has experienced this thing called death, but they are not sad. This just reinforces the ideas that I have made for myself about death and its place in life. About four years ago, I had my first realization of the power of death. This was a slight taste of what death really meant, but it came at a huge cost for others. It all started one day in the middle of summer. I was downstairs watching the television while my older sister and her friend were hanging out upstairs. We all heard a few pops that sounded a lot like small firecrackers that came from outside. I disregarded this noise as neighborhood children messing around, but my sister and her friend went outside to investigate. The sight that they found would change their lives. On

Phonics Definition and Examples in English

Phonics Definition and Examples in English A method of teaching reading based on the sounds of letters, groups of letters, and syllables  is known as phonics. This method of teaching reading is commonly contrasted with whole language approaches, which emphasize learning whole words in meaningful contexts. During the 19th century, phonics was commonly used as a synonym for phonetics. In the 20th century, phonics acquired its present meaning as a method of teaching reading. In practice,  phonics  refers to several different but generally overlapping methods of instruction. Four of those methods are summarized below. Analytic(al) Phonics During the 1960s, numerous basal reading series included a manual outlining how to teach each story. The manual included a program for ​analytical phonics instruction that recommended that the teacher use known words and ask children to analyze the phonetic elements in these words. . . .Analytic phonics relies on readers knowing a large number of words at sight. Drawing from known sight words, teachers directed students to make inferences about the phonic relationships within words containing the same letter combinations. In other words, the student matched the sounds in a known word with the sounds in the new word (Walker, 2008). . . .However, in the 1960s, some reading programs differed from the mainstream basal readers that used analytic phonics. A few basal readers included instruction using linguistic units that had recurring patterns. The linguistic-phonics system used the idea that the English language had recurring written patterns that were systematic to develop their program.(Barbara J. Walker, History of Phonics Instruction. An Essential History of Current Reading Practices, ed. by Mary Jo Fresch. International Reading Association, 2008) Linguistic Phonics In linguistic phonics, beginning instruction usually focuses on the word patterns found in words like cat, rat, mat, and bat. These selected words are presented to the students. Children need to make generalizations about the short a sound by learning these words in print. Consequently, linguistic phonics lessons are based on decodable books that present repetitions of a single pattern (Mat saw a cat and a rat). . . . Linguistic phonics . . . is like analytic phonics in that it emphasizes word patterns rather than individual letter sounds. However, linguistic phonics is not typically espoused by top-down advocates, because it does not emphasize naturally occurring text.(Ann Maria Pazos Rago, The Alphabetic Principle, Phonics, and Spelling: Teaching Students the Code. Reading Assessment and Instruction for All Learners, ed. by Jeanne Shay Schumm. Guilford Press, 2006) Synthetic Phonics The sounding-out-and-blending approach to decoding is known as synthetic phonics. In a synthetic phonics program, students are taught to decode new words by retrieving from memory the sound that each letter, or combination of letters, in a word represents and blending the sounds into a recognizable word (National Reading Panel, 2000). It is a parts-to-whole approach (Strickland, 1998).(Irene W. Gaskins, Interventions to Develop Decoding Proficiencies. Handbook of Reading Disability Research, ed. by Richa Allington and Anne McGill-Franzen. Routledge, 2011) Embedded Phonics Embedded approaches to teaching  phonics involve students in learning phonics skills by reading authentic texts. This approach may be compared to whole language; however, embedded phonics involves planned skills taught within the context of authentic literature. Embedded phonics formed in response to the intense criticism experienced by the whole language movement, and highlights the role of phonics instructions within the context of authentic literature. (Mark-Kate Sableski, Phonics. Encyclopedia of Educational Reform and Dissent, ed. by Thomas C. Hunt, James Carper, Thomas J. Lasley, and C. Daniel Raisch. Sage, 2010) Summary In summary, deep and thorough knowledge of letters, spelling patterns, and words, and of the phonological translations of all three, are of inescapable importance to both skillful reading and its acquisition. By extension, instruction designed to develop childrens sensitivity to spellings and their reactions to pronunciations should be of paramount importance in the development of reading skills. This is, of course, precisely what is intended of good phonic instruction.(Marilyn Jager Adams, Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning About Print. MIT Press, 1994)