Link Between Academic Success and a Students Perceived Self-worth Essay

Link Between Academic Success and a Students Perceived Self-worth - Essay Example There is a vast body of research on the intricate link between academic success and a student’s perceived self-worth. There is also a large amount of research detailing how the dynamics of student-teacher interactions play a key role in the formation of self-worth by these same students. However, Fay and Funk (1995) point out that educators only have access to the formation of such perceptions when providing feedback to behavior. Schroeder (n.d.) points out that feedback also involves the methods by which the educator communicates correctness of student responses to academic questions. Jim Fay’s (1995) discussion of three major teaching styles reminders readers that feedback sends not only the overt message of the words used but the covert messages of tone, actions and general body language. Of the three teaching styles - helicopter, drill sergeants, and consultants – it is the consultant teacher who embodies the overt and covert â€Å"messages of personal worth , dignity, and strength† (Fay & Funk, 1995, p. 197). When looking to the strategies employed by consultant teachers, it becomes obvious that these can be used with all teaching styles to provide corrective feedback in a whole instruction setting. First, educators should make sure the questions being asked are of appropriate difficulty and cognitive levels while being stated as clearly as possible. Schroeder (n.d.) suggests that questions dealing with new material should be such that 80% of the responses given are correct and 90+% for review materials. Educators may find that low-level questions that ask what, where, and who are best for this. Such pedagogical procedures will promote self-esteem as well as momentum needed to progress with instructional activities. Students will then be more willing to work for answers to higher order questions dealing with the why and how. Secondly, teachers should react to responses in such a way as to encourage student answers. Quick, certain responses that are correct need only affirmation that they are indeed correct. Correct but hesitantly given responses need the affirmation of correctness as well as praise and perhaps a short review of why the response is correct. Incorrect responses that are due to a careless error need only a quick reference to the error and time for the student to be allowed to provide the correct answer. Incorrect answers based on a lack of knowledge should be met with prompts and hints that may engage the needed information. Clarifying, rephrasing, or even changing the difficulty level may also assist these students (Schroeder, n.d.). Educators should provide students with every opportunity to get a correct answer but should not prolong the experience once it becomes obvious that the student lacks the knowledge needed. Third, instead of issuing orders teachers should present expectations as a challenge of something the student can and will do - positive expectancy. There are many procedures that will engender such an atmosphere. However, students sometimes resist the challenge even though a sense of positive expectancy has been created. Effective teachers will continue to work with the student and try to help him identify how to meet the expectation.Such teachers are engaging in tenacity (Saphier & Gower, 1987). Tenacious teachers engage in a "no excuses" policy. In this procedure the teacher will ask why the student is unable to meet the expectation. She will then refuse to accept such excuses. Work may be sent back to be done over; supplies may be procured and provided to the student; help and individual instruction may be offered more often; and eventually the consequences of the performance - superior, adequate, or poor - will be given without anger (Saphier & Gower, 1987).

Poem by William Wordsworth The World is too much us; late and soon Essay

Poem by William Wordsworth The World is too much us; late and soon - Essay Example Wordsworth uses contradictory words together, to describe his anger and helplessness at a world which is being destroyed, and yet progress cannot be stopped. His choice of words to conjure up images and sounds is truly extraordinary, and he uses the rhythm of the iambic pentameter of the sonnet to great effect. William Wordsworth is also known as one of the Lake poets along with his friend and mentor Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Together they are credited with ushering in the era of Romanticism in English poetry. William Wordsworth was born in the beautiful Lake District of Cumberland, and grew up surrounded by the beauty of nature. These beautiful surroundings nurtured in him a deep and lasting love for nature in all her wondrous moods. He referred to poetry as â€Å"the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,† originating from â€Å"emotion recollected in tranquility†, yet there was a natural rhythm and poetic form to his poems. (Wordsworth, preface to Lyrical Ballads) His poem The World is Too Much With Us is a classic example of the many sonnets he wrote. Composed in 1802, the poem was first published in his work Poems in Two Volumes in 1807. In the early years of the nineteenth century, Wordsworth was deeply disturbed by what he saw as decadence in the form of material gr eed, to the exclusion of everything else. At this time he wrote many poems deriding the materialism of a world that was losing its spirituality, and he urged mankind in most of these poems to find that lost spirituality in nature. The World is Too Much With Us is a sonnet in the Petrarchan style modeled on the work of the Italian poet Petrarch of the early Renaissance period. It is also known as the Italian sonnet, which is a poem of 14 lines. This kind of sonnet is divided into two parts. The first eight lines are known as the octave and the next six lines, the sestet. Each of these parts has a special function in a Petrarchan sonnet. The octave is employed to state a problem or a