Monday, March 16, 2020

Eleemosynary, A Full-Length Play by Lee Blessing

Eleemosynary, A Full-Length Play by Lee Blessing It might be best to begin your approach to this play by learning how to pronounce the title and understanding the meaning of this vocabulary word. In this dramatic work by Lee Blessing, three generations of highly intelligent and freethinking women attempt to reconcile years of family dysfunction. Dorothea was a repressed housewife and mother of three sons and a daughter, Artemis (Artie), whom she favored. She discovered that being an eccentric suited her perfectly and spent a lifetime thrusting her wild ideas and beliefs onto an unappreciative and doubting Artemis. Artemis ran away from Dorothea as soon as she could and kept on the move until she married and had a daughter of her own. She named her Barbara, but Dorothea renamed the child Echo and began to teach her everything from Ancient Greek to calculus. What Echo loves most is words and spelling. The title of the show comes from the winning word that Echo spelled correctly at the National Spelling Bee. The play jumps backward and forward in time. As one character relives a memory, the other two play themselves as they were during that time. In one memory, Echo portrays herself as a three-month-old. At the beginning of the play, Dorothea has suffered a stroke and is bedridden and catatonic for several scenes. Throughout the play, however, she takes part in her memories and then transitions back to the present, trapped in her minimally responsive body. The director and actors in Eleemosynary have the challenge of making these memory scenes feel authentic with smooth transitions and blocking. Production Details The production notes for Eleemosynary are specific regarding set and props. The stage needs to be filled with an abundance of books (signifying the sheer brilliance of these women), a pair of homemade wings, and perhaps a real pair of scissors. The rest of the props may be mimed or suggested. Furniture and sets should be as minimal as possible. The notes suggest only a few chairs, platforms, and stools. Lighting should consist of   â€Å"ever shifting areas of light and darkness.† The minimal set and the stress on lighting serve to assist the characters in moving between memories and the present time, allowing focus to be on their stories. Setting: Various rooms and locales Time: Now and then Cast size: This play can accommodate 3 female actors. Roles Dorothea is a self-acknowledged eccentric. She uses her eccentricity as a means to escape the judgment and pressures of a life she didn’t choose. Her desire was to influence her daughter to embrace her way of life, but when her daughter runs from her, she refocuses her attention on her granddaughter. Artemis has a perfect memory. She can remember anything and everything with total accuracy. She has two desires in life. The first is to research and find out everything she possibly can about this world. The second is to be as far away from her mother (in both body and spirit) as possible. She believes in her heart that she failed Echo and that failure can never be undone, just as she can never forget a single detail of her life. Echo has a mind to equal both her mother’s and grandmother’s. She is fiercely competitive. She loves her grandmother and wants to love her mother. By the end of the play, she is determined to use her competitive nature to mend her relationship with her elusive mother. She will no longer accept Artemis’s excuses for failing to be a mother to her. Content issues: Abortion, abandonment Resources You can watch a director and some actors discuss and rehearse the play.The  Dramatist Play Service holds the production rights for Eleemosynary.

Saturday, February 29, 2020

Create-A-Greeting-Card College Scholarship Contest

With college costs on the rise, more and more families are looking for ways to bridge the gap between what they can afford to pay and the price of tuition and fees. Fortunately, a number of independent scholarships exist to help students attend their dream colleges. While securing these scholarships isn’t as simple as filling out the FAFSA form, students who are willing to put in the time and effort can often secure significant amounts of money toward financing their college education. Different scholarship opportunities exist to recognize students with various talents, skills, and interests. For high school students who are artistically minded, it might be worth considering the Gallery Collection’s Create-A-Greeting-Card College Scholarship Contest. The winner of this award receives a $10,000 college scholarship, with an additional $1,000 award going to the student’s high school. The Create-A-Greeting-Card contest invites applicants to use their innate talent and creativity to design a holiday, get well, or birthday greeting card. To apply, simply submit a work of art, computer graphic, or photo intended for the front side of a greeting card. Each image must be submitted in JPEG format and be two megabytes or fewer in size. Entries will be judged based on the following factors: Candidates can view current designs online at www.gallerycollection.com . To apply for this scholarship, you must be a high school, college, or university student who is currently enrolled in school. All applicants must be U.S. citizens. If you have additional questions or concerns about the requirements, feel free to contact the Gallery Collection online at scholarshipadmin@gallerycollection.com . Estimating your chance of getting into a college is not easy in today’s competitive environment. Thankfully, with our state-of-the-art software and data, we can analyze your academic and extracurricular profile and estimate your chances. Our profile analysis tool can also help you identify the improvement you need to make to enter your dream school. It’s not enough simply to hope you get a scholarship for college. Savvy students seek out a variety of contests and programs offering scholarships to reduce the cost of their degrees. Fortunately, you don’t have to look far to find lucrative opportunities. Not only do a number of high schools boast scholarship programs targeted toward college-bound students, but many community organizations offer contests as well. You can discover scholarship programs through your town or city, church, Lions club, or even businesses in your community. When deciding which scholarships to target, students often ignore contests with smaller awards. While you might be hesitant to invest time and energy into applying for a $500 scholarship, the truth is that these awards can add up quickly. After all, winning five $500 scholarships is the same as securing one worth $2500. Moreover, the number of applicants might be lower because of the smaller potential payout. So your odds of winning might be higher with these contests. Similarly, scholarship contests that require a lot of work tend to draw a smaller applicant pool. After all, busy high school seniors are often hesitant to invest their time in writing lengthy essays or shooting video submissions. According to one Money.com article , scholarships requiring 1000-word essays tend to receive fewer than 500 submissions. So don’t be afraid to put in a little extra effort to score some additional funding. Unlike student loans, scholarships represent financial awards that don’t have to be paid back. So it’s only logical to apply to a wide range of contests and opportunities. At , we created our Applications Program to help students gain admission to their dream schools and find the financing they need to make their dreams a reality. From creating a custom roadmap for the applications process to filling out FAFSA and scholarship forms, we help students best the competition. To learn more about our services, call today or contact our team online.

Thursday, February 13, 2020

Sears changes again and again Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Sears changes again and again - Essay Example And since the top management of the organization are the decision makers, they have the power and capability to initiate strategic change. Strategic change affects the â€Å"... goals, systems, structures, work processes, values, mission and culture† of businesses (Jacobs, 2010). This means that such changes are far-reaching and they affect the entire organization over a period of time. There is always a reason for change. This is because top level management makes changes to attain certain ends. In this paper, the case refers to Sears, now known as Sears-Roebuck and Co, a U.S.-based chain of stores that provides consumer goods for the public. The paper will examine the strategic changes that occurred in the company over the past two decades. In attaining this end, the following objectives will be addressed: Normally, organizations have institutionalized cultures and systems. Institutionalism is defined by Poole and Van De Ven (2004) as the culture and structures that guide activities in an organization. As such, every organization nurtures a type of system that enables it to operate and maintain its unique identity. Sears had its own system and structures. The initial system was to produce household appliances and run departmental stores in the early 1990s. The institutional structures and systems of the company had survived through the 1980s to the 90s. This shows that they believed in traditions and systems. However, the company seemed to have priorities: maintaining Sears as a going concern. When this was threatened, they had to find ways of adjusting the institutional structures to keep the companys performance high. So they resorted to bringing in Martinez, who was from a completely different background. Gottschalk (2007, p.14) states that â€Å"outside successors are often selected when in periods of poor firm performance and when directors cannot locate a competent successor in-house.† In order for new CEOs to succeed, they will need to

Saturday, February 1, 2020

What Is The CAPM (Capital Asset Pricing Model) And Of What Practical Essay - 1

What Is The CAPM (Capital Asset Pricing Model) And Of What Practical Use Is It - Essay Example When the expected return of a security is determined using the model then it can be compared to the estimated return of security over a given time period. Such comparison will help the investor to analyse whether it is worthwhile investing into the security. CAPM was first conceptualised and pioneered by William Sharpe, Jack Treynor, Jan Mossin and John Lintner through their independent works (Focardi and Fabozzi, 2004, pp.86-87). The Capital Asset Pricing Model The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) is popularly used to price individual portfolio securities. The CAPM helps to determine the expected rate of return for an asset relative to market risk. Using the CAPM model an investor can eliminate the unsystematic risk through proper diversification by estimating the required rate of return for a given level of non-diversifiable or market risk. The practical application of the model is that the individual investor will be able to modify their investment portfolio according to their r isk taking behaviour. The model also helps the individuals to analyse the risk-return profile in the portfolio (Gallagher and Andrew, 2007, pp.173-175). Assumptions of CAPM Investors are risk averse and rational No single investor can influence security prices No transaction cost or taxes Investors have access to all information at same time Expectation of the investors is homogeneous Mathematical Formula For individual assets, the relation between systematic risk and expected return can be estimated using the Security Market Line (SML). The significance of SML is that it can help the investor to calculate the risk-to-reward ratio for a given security relative to market. (Source: Financial Planning Body of Knowledge, 2010) The market risk-reward ratio is also known as the market risk premium. The systematic risk can be estimated using the Beta factor (?). Beta measures the sensitivity of excess expected return of security to the excess market return. Mathematically, ? = Covariance ( Ri, Rm) / Variance (Rm) Excess market return or Risk Premium = E (Rm) – Rf CAPM = Rf + ? x [E (Rm) – Rf] Where, Rf = Risk-free return Ri = Security Return Rm = Market Return Market Portfolio and Efficient Frontier The concept of CAPM encourages an investor to invest a portion of his or her wealth in risky asset and the remaining portion into risk-free asset. The proportion of asset allocation between risky and risk-free asset depends on the behaviour of the investor. According to this model, a rational investor will prefer maximum return for given risk or minimum risk for given return. The optimum portfolio is a combination of securities which yields maximum returns for lowest risk or volatility. The total portfolio risk can be measured and compared to market risk using beta. The optimum portfolio is derived from the efficient frontier curve that gives the relation between portfolio risk and return. The combination of securities that is formed at the tangency of indivi dual assets and the capital Allocation line (CAL) is called the optimal portfolio (Khan and Jain, 2007, p.16). (Source: krotscheck.net, 2008) The Significance of Beta Factor Beta indicates the stock volatility relative to a benchmark or market. The benchmark can be international index like S&P

Thursday, January 23, 2020

Organizational Change Essay -- Business Management

Organizational Change Organizations today are going through constant change brought about by competition, economics, business innovation and a realization that remaining stagnant may mean organizational death. As the business environment increases in complexity and changes rapidly, organization and management consequently experiences significant transformation to cope with these changes. On a micro level (company level), these changes would include the transformation of the internal corporate culture as well as enhancements in the management of human resources in response to increasing workplace diversity and the evolving needs of the workforce. Therefore, the ability to change is an important part of the organization's business environment while the ability to help it adapt to change is equally a critical business challenge for the leadership. Change is imperative Organizations can't escape change. So what is change? - It is adjustments, transformations, transitions, and revolutions which is a never-ending cycle of birth, growth and death (Topping, 2002). Change disrupts everyone's life; the only question is for how long. Leader - the change agent When an organisation is at the crossroad of change, it is in the crisis stage. DuBrin (1989) defined crisis as a turning point for better or worse, or a situation that has reached a critical phase. When a company is in a crisis, it requires decisive and bold leadership to identify, isolate and manage the crisis (Topping, 2002). Leadership now requires very different behaviour from the leadership tradition that we were used to. It requires leaders who are able to speak to... ...kills: A leadership wake-up call, Available: http://www.selfgrowth.com.html, (Accessed: 2004, April 8). Robbins, S.P. (2002), Essential of organizational behavior, 6th ed, Prentice Hall. New Jersey. Sarantos, S.T. (1994), Managing change by creating a synergistic environment, World Wide Web ed, Vol. 7, no. 11, Available: http://www.league.org/publication.htm, (Accessed: 2004, April 8). Schein, E.H. (1995), The leader of future, Working Paper 3832, MIT Sloan School of Management, Available: http://dspace.mit.edu, (Accessed: 2004, April 13). Stoner, J.A.F. and Freeman, R.E. (1989), Management, 4th ed, Prentice Hall, New Delhi. Tichy, N.M. and Cohen, E. (2002), The leadership engine, 2nd ed, HarperCollins Publishers Inc., New York. Topping, P.A. (2002), Managerial leadership, McGraw Hill, New York.

Wednesday, January 15, 2020

Education-Strategy Essay

It is a common knowledge in human development that individuals have stark differences especially in their cognitive capacities and behavioral attributes. Education was then established to somehow reconcile this individual diversity hence it is a must for teachers to allot substantial amount of their time to prepare and assess instructional approach and materials that they will employ in classes of heterogeneous populace of students. To effectively facilitate the learning outcomes of students, teachers at every level should map out their objectives for the specified topic of each instructional period. Teachers usually have different strategies in preparing a lesson; some create detailed and meticulously encoded charts while other teachers plainly scrawl down the notes for a particular topic at a discarded piece of pad. Strategies in planning for an instructional approach are immaterial because the most important endeavor is for the teacher to execute wise decisions about the feasibility of their instructional technique to the successful attainment of learner goals. Furthermore, it is an educational requirement that teachers should be well-equipped of the knowledge that they are teaching because specialization of a particular subject matter effectually bolsters the realization of an educator’s designed objective for the improvement of students’ cognitive competence. First and foremost, before a teacher could outline relevant topics for a subject matter and its corresponding intent the teacher must conduct a pre-assessment of the students’ capacity and skills in a class that is needed to be handled; it can be in a form of a diagnostic test or conversational question-and-answer approach. The teacher ideally should not carry out an impersonal treatment to the students since they are not basically identical in aptitude and manners. After carefully assessing the individual needs of the students a teacher then must enterprise in designing a lesson plan that is precisely appropriate for the learners’ demand. In delivering carefully prepared instructional scheme, a teacher must keep in mind the unavoidable nuisance that may hinder the proper execution of the lessons’ objectives. In addressing this kind of problem in the classroom, teachers should make use of rewards and punishments to further reinforce the need to conquer irresponsible learning behaviors and the encouragement of receptiveness to knowledge enhancement. At the end of a specified topic’s timeframe, the teacher then is expected to administer a check-up test. In doing so, a teacher must be aware of the following criteria in designing a test questionnaire; the test must coincide with the intended learning objectives; the test questions should accurately recount the information taught; the test items must quantify relevant ideas and not those that are insignificant; the test items must be able to assess the composite behaviors, the practical abilities or principles-application of the students and not just simply reckoning memory skills; and lastly, the test questionnaire must be clear and simple to avoid confusion. The test should not be purely objective because it cannot measure the reasoning abilities of students. Provide spaces in the test papers that will measure the subjectivity level and argumentative skills of the students. Commonplace negative feedbacks occur every after a test exam is successfully completed. Normal setbacks such as large percentages of failing students occur that extremely pressures teachers because of strict adherence to the set timeframe of lesson plans. In cases of unforeseen problems like this, a teacher must devote time to communicate with the students to inquire the difficulties they have encountered in the entire instructional program. Subsequently, after the appraisal of the factors contributing to the failure of a large portion of students in the examination, the teacher may form study groups that will be evenly comprised of both astute and slow-learners. The teacher then must monitor that the study groups discuss or brainstorm about the previous topics while a new one is being elicited. Afterwards, the teacher may administer another test to evaluate the success of the remedial approach. Works Cited Center for Teaching and Learning. Brigham Young University http://ctl. byu. edu/? page_id=343 Ten â€Å"Must-Know† Facts About Educational Testing. PTA: Every Child, One Voice, 2000-2008 http://www. pta. org/archive_article_details_1117837372328. html

Tuesday, January 7, 2020

Ethics As A Textbook Definition Of Ethics Essay - 1129 Words

Jones Sontag, Becker and Fogelin (1969) define ethics as â€Å"the attempt to state and evaluate principles by which ethical problems may be solved.† (Cooper, p.1). While Cooper (p.1) refers to this as a textbook definition of ethics, it is nonetheless accurate and concise. Preston (1996) describes ethics as being concerned with â€Å"what is right, fair, just or good; about what we ought to do† (Cooper, p. 1-2). Preston’s definition is succinct and to the point. Ethics really is about allowing what is right or just to shape our beliefs and guide our actions. Gibson Winter (1996) asserts that ethics â€Å"seeks to clarify the logic and adequacy of the values that shape the world; it assesses the moral possibilities which are projected and betrayed in the social give-and-take† (Cooper, p. 2), and is a â€Å"science of human intentionality† (Cooper, p. 2). This definition is less acceptable than the previous examples. Rather than an attempt to clarify societal values, ethics is better described as a representation of values and an exploration of the origins, characteristics, and implications of our individual morals and societal values. Cooper (2012) defines ethics as â€Å"the study of moral conduct and moral status† (p.2). Morality is based on acceptable behavior as established by society, religion, culture, class, organization, family, or the community, and established though formal and informal means. 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