Elephant the movie Essay -- essays research papers

Gus Van Sant’s Elephant was at once critically praised and denounced by both film reviewers and filmgoers alike. The cinematography takes you on a waltz throughout a seemingly typical day at an unnamed high school, stopping through the journey to focus on the stereotypes of school. The jock, the quirky artist, the cliqued girls, the skateboarder, they are all represented and representative of his film. Van Sant created a film, seemingly without a staunch opinion on the horrors of the Columbine shootings. The movie seems distanced from the actors and their actions: an unaware participant from the tranquil introduction to the gruesome climax. His seeming lack of a purpose, lack of a reason for the creation of this film, is exactly the impetus that drives its core meaning. The high school was as stereotyped and typical as possible, a campus where everyone swears they’ve visited once in their life. The visceral climax is at once both slowly built up to inevitability by the characterizations of the assailants, yet it also strikes the school suddenly and without warning. Van Sant’s film is a series of seeming contradictions and paradoxes that create the illusion that he has no stance on the Columbine shootings. His stance, however, is given away in the purposelessness of the film; the idyllic simplicity of the school, and its subsequent destruction, has no purpose. The Columbine massacre had no purpose. Gus Van Sant’s aestheticized school builds up a world that seems tangible to most students. He carries every right to create his own world and tear it back down. It is this beauty that he creates that makes the film so much more shocking when it ends. Aesthetic realism is the concept of accepting reality as unchangeable; therefore, one must find the beauty that is inherent in everyday life instead of attempting to create beauty. The idea is that aesthetic realism â€Å"sees all reality including the reality that is oneself, as the aesthetic oneness of opposites,† (Siegel). In other words, life is at once changing and the same. For example, someone is the same person when they wake up in the morning and the same person when they go to sleep at night. They haven’t changed. However, there have still changed as a person throughout the day, at least minutely. Change and stability both occur simultaneously. At the same time, Siegel states that it â€Å"sees the largest purpose o... ...e what can be easily related to; they wouldn’t be considered stereotypes otherwise. The beauty that is created during the first hour, which is denounced by Foundas as unrealistic, is subsequently destroyed in the climax. To create and destroy mediocrity would not be as stirring a rendition as Van Sant’s recreation of perfection coupled with his systematic disposal of it. Gus Van Sant has created a world of high school that has every stereotype. He manifests a sense of beauty in every shot he creates, with the slow arcing camera shots combined with the loving caricatures of the students. He finds the aesthetic realism in high school, the elegance inherent in aspects of campus life, and constructs a film around it. It is his own right to create his own view of high school, and while critics can disagree, they should not debase. The initial purposelessness should only be taken at face value; it is the lack of purpose in the beginning of the film that makes the lack of purpose in the massacre more obvious. There was no reasoning behind the Columbine shootings, they were a tragic occurrence that had little logic behind it. However, Van Sant’s film had purpose underneath its exterior.

Memories of the mentor Essay

Often in our lives comes a person who leaves us completely changed and different, even to ourselves. In my life such a role has been played by a number of individuals combined but one of them whose influence was maximum was late Mr. Salim, my English teacher during O Levels. May Allah bless him a place in Paradise. I have never met such a person in my life, so gentle, so broad-minded. Even now when I remember him smiling, a smile appears on my face as well and I pray for him. He was a unique man; unique in, perhaps, every sense of the word. I had known him before I came to O Levels. He had been my Oral English teacher during the 8th class but he took only one period every week and hence we knew very little about him. When I entered O Levels he was our Class Teacher as well as our English teacher. He was aware of the fact that we were not very good in English and that we needed a lot of hard work. He gave us a nice little lecture about the new challenges we were going to face and how we were going to deal with them. He told us that everyday for the first five to ten minutes one boy was to come in front of class and make a speech, on any topic he wanted to talk, in English. The students were to come roll-number wise. This was perhaps the most interesting items during my first year at O Levels. Everyday in the morning a boy would come, often reluctantly, and tell Mr. Salim what the topic was. Many times it happened that the student said that he had not prepared anything. Then he would say, with a matchless wave of his hand which I remember clearly, â€Å"Well, then do it offhand. Go on, speak on anything you want, anything you choose.† The thing which impressed me most was his vast knowledge. Before the student started his speech, he would give a little introduction on that topic, and no matter what the topic was he always knew something about it, even if it was like ‘Eating insects for food in the Far-East’! I was a shy student at that moment and I knew that the speech-process would help me in over-coming it. When my first speech was drawing nearer and nearer, I searched for a unique topic. I had taken it as a challenge to find a topic about which Mr.Salim would know nothing. After a lot of search I found one: Antimatter. This was, I think, the real beginning of my relationship with Mr.Salim. When I came to make my speech, he asked me about the topic and I told him. For the first time in my life I saw an expression of unawareness on his old face. â€Å"Ah, well,† he said, â€Å"its something about modern Physics.† And then he beckoned me to make the speech. Now I had become a person he recognized. In fact, I think, he was impressed. A few days after that he praised me for an essay I had written. I used to do assignments given by Mr.Salim with great zeal, perhaps just to hear a word of praise because when I did hear one by him, I felt myself elevated. I wouldn’t say I was very bad at English but I was not very good either. I was just an average yet somehow, slowly and gradually, like the dawn on a wet day, I was converted into a person who could write a good piece of English. I owe a lot of it to him, a lot. He understood the way we worked. He knew that we were short of time and we had a lot to do, but he knew that if he applied too much stress we would break, and so he went slowly. At that time we thought that it was folly on his part that he took us gradually, while the other sections were covering their syllabus rapidly, but now after it is over, I realize it wasn’t folly but wisdom on his part. And I’m thankful to him for the fact that he made English for us a lovely subject. While telling us the meaning of adolescence he pointed towards me, as I had at that moment faint traces of a mustache. Although I have shaved off that mustache long ago, I can never erase that memory. During his last days he taught us the past papers and he would share with me my book of past papers, which I did with great pleasure. If it had been just the love of English, I would never have written this article. He gave us a lot more than that. The outstanding among them is the broadening the horizon of my way of thinking. He was old, but he was not orthodox or conservative. He was a liberal and modern person. He understood the requirements of the modern age and he spoke fluently about it. Often, his views on Islam created disturbance among the ‘orthodox Muslims’ of our class. Topics like ‘Music, Nationality, Hadood Laws and Taliban’ were a cause of heated discussion. He had a weak and gentle heart. He couldn’t bear unjustice to anyone, even to his enemies. He was highly against the ‘Maulvies’ and called them ,’Semi-illiterate, half-educated mullahs, they want to keep us in the past, centuries back.’ He was aware of the fact that the people are apt to use their emotions rather than mind, especially in matters of religion, and this is, perhaps, his greatest contribution. He taught me to use my brain, not my emotions, for emotions are blind. He developed in me a hatred for rage and emotional acts. Yet, he was believer of freedom of speech, and whenever any student of the class objected on his views, he would allow them to say whatever they wanted to say. He would say to them, â€Å"I respect your views but I do not agree with them.† He never forced anyone to change his views. Once the topic of ‘Basant’ was under discussion and a few students of our class were speaking against it for in their view it was ‘against Islam’. He said, â€Å"Why don’t you people understand, its just a regional festival, why involve religion in this? You don’t want to celebrate it, fine, but why do you force others to do what you want? Live and Let live!† All his life he wanted to gain more and more knowledge. Perhaps, the only field in which he was weak was modern Physics. A few days before he came to know about his disease, I was sitting in the class reading the book ‘A brief history of time’ by ‘Stephen Hawkings’ and he saw me reading it. He asked me if he could see it and I gave it to him. He then discussed with me a little about Stephen Hawkings. He said that there was another book by the same author in the market and I told him that I had read that one too. Then he asked me that if I had read it could I give it to him for reading, and I told him that he could take it for reading at that very moment for I was reading it for the second time. He thanked me and took it. But he never returned it to me because we learned only a few days later that he had stomach-cancer and was now on long leave from the school. A few months after that, he died. I don’t feel anything bad about that book, in fact I feel happy that he had with him something I had given, when he died. I remember exactly the last day he spent with us. He was checking our assignments day and while he was checking mine, he asked me what the word ‘mentor’ meant for I had used it in my assignments and he wanted to know whether I knew its meaning or not, and I told him that it meant a ‘wise teacher’. He gave me an ‘A’ on that composition and I feel, I just feel, that the moment he wrote an ‘A’ on my notebook it was written in my fate that I would get an ‘A’ in English. When my result came and I had scored straight As, the person I remembered the most was Mr.Salim. He was a patient person and bore everything with courage and determination. His son had died in an accident but he had kept himself steady and carried on with his life. He adopted a son and he once told us about him. He was very nice with his students and gave us a lot of time to complete our assignments but when a student wouldn’t do any work for months he would say, â€Å"Show me your knuckles, show me your knuckles,† and then he would give a blow on them with a wooden duster. I think I won’t forget him my whole life. I remember him quite often; his words, his expressions, his speeches, his advises, his laughes and his smiles. He was a little hard of hearing and whenever he a person said something he couldn’t understand, he would bring his hand to his ear and say with an unparallel expression, â€Å"Pardon?† I remember it clearly, every moment of it. He never gave me any special treatment, he treated me like any teacher would treat a normal good student but the way he has influenced me is astonishing. I love that person. His death was a big loss, a big loss. I sometimes feel that I never got the time to tell him how much thankful I was to him, and that how much I owed to him, and that how much I loved him but he went away, unaware that he had changed the whole life and way of thinking of a person. At times when I remember him, I feel that he can see what I am doing and that he is happy. I feel that somehow he knows that how much I loved him and how much I am grateful to him. I know that some of his ideas were wrong and in some points he misunderstood Islam but I also believe that it was all due to his gentle and nice nature and he had no bad intentions, and I also hope and pray that Allah would forgive him for his mistakes because he did them in good faith. I believe that Allah is gentle with gentle people, and Mr.Salim was certainly a gentle person. Through this article I just want to thank him because I feel that he is reading this article. I just pray that Allah blesses him with a place in Paradise.

Differences Between Home Daycares And Daycare Centers

Differences Between Home Daycares and Daycare Centers: Assessing the Quality of Care Found in Both Settings Jennifer Lea Grossman Amberton University TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION †¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦.3 Genesis Purpose and Methods Significance Operational Definitions Research Questions 2. LITERATURE REVIEW..........................................................................7 3. METHODOLOGY....................................................................................12 Participants Materials Procedure 4. CONCLUSION.........................................................................................15 Discussion of Results Suggestions for Future Study CHAPTER 1- INTRODUCTION Genesis Since graduating with my Bachelor of Science degree in child development in 2012, I have worked for four daycare centers. 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