Facing the Hard Facts of Life Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Facing the Hard Facts of Life - Essay Example Born in a well-to-do urban business class family, life had always been a cakewalk for me. A cakewalk, till the day the â€Å"hard facts† of life were thrust on me! I remember having a carefree childhood, cushioned in the warm, caring love of my parents and elder sister. Being the younger child, and a chubby one with dimples to go with my naturally good looks, I was the apple of everyone’s eye. Parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, seniors, friends, and later girlfriends, everyone simply loved me. Life was just beautiful. In school, I was good in studies, sports and extra curricular activities. Dad’s business was thriving and we were used to the best in life. We lived in a palatial house, went to the best school in town, dined in fine restaurants on weekends with dad’s friends and had a chauffeur driven limousine to drop my sister and me to school every day. Once in a couple of years, we would have a foreign holiday. What more could one ask for in life? At least, that is what I thought when I entered my teens.

Frontline :: essays research papers

â€Å"Frontline† exposure of current affairs programs makes a mockery of journalistic integrity. Through humorous portrayals of important issues, and clever imitation â€Å"Frontline† makes veiwers aware of ridicule towards journalistic integrity. While current affairs programs are based on real life stories, which are enhanced to ‘make good news’, Frontline is based on the making of these stories. Frontlines purpose is to inform the audience of the life behind a current affair program but more importantly its main focus is on entertaining the audience. This is achieved in many ways, primarily by bending real life situations out of contempt to journalists uprightness. Current affair programs do not take stories as they are and simply present them with the facts, they are sensationalised and enhanced to bring more entertainment value to them, however this is not widely known throughout the general public. Furthermore it’s exactly what Frontline did with â€Å"The Siege† and â€Å"Dessert Angel† when it complemented certain factors of the story to make them sound more entertaining than the boring facts. By ‘enhancing’ the facts and manipulating the truth it made the stories more presentable to the audience as a form of entertainment and mockery in regards to journalists. This was spoken about in the â€Å"Dessert Angel† episode when Marty shows Stu how anyone can be turned into ‘good media fodder’ Frontline is aimed at being a comedy program and therefore has a main purpose of comedy and entertainment rather than informing. Most nightly current affair programs struggle to get articles for each night. Most with three or four articles a night have a very tight and limited time schedule to prepare each night. Therefore with such a limited time they are unable to really concentrate on the serious analysis of some current affairs programs. ‘Frontline’ exaggerates and exposes this concept in the episode ‘Desert Angel’, where ‘Frontlines’ integrity is taunted as it secures an exclusive with Australian aid worker Jessica Steckle, whom a week before was given a funeral by the team at Frontline with Mike providing the eulogy. The issue is made humorous with the bidding war scene directly following Mike’s adamant speech that the team at ‘Frontline’ do have ethics and integrity. Whilst the episode maintains its criticism of current affairs programs and journalists by indicating that ‘bidding wars’ and ‘chequebook journalism’ are ri fe though-out such programs. In ‘The Siege’, ‘Frontline’ again tackles an exceptionally topical issue, and interspersing ironic humour to signify their criticisms.

Legalizing Physician Assisted Suicide

As I stand in front of you, my thoughts go to thousands of patients in the world today that are undergoing intense suffering and tormenting experience for they have been denied to exercise that one great decision regarding their life. My thoughts also go towards hundreds of medical practitioners charged with the responsibility of caring for such patients. To what length should I go to save this patients life? For how long can this patient hold on to life and is the pain worthy it? It is more than certain that almost each and every medical practitioner has ever mulled over these two questions alongside many others. In the same breath he or she has also thought of the ethical dilemma involved should a rash decision be made on the issue. The debate on whether physician assisted suicide should be legalized has raged on for sometime now and has taken an emotion twist (Cook, Earleen H., 1982). It is my opinion that this debate should be put to rest. A look at the positive side of legalizing physician assisted suicide leaves no doubt that it is the only way to go. It is the only way to relieve a patient who is undergoing a moment of immeasurable suffering and whose end is certainly nigh (Beauchamp, T.L., 1989). There are a number of reasons why physician assisted suicide should be legalized. The most basic reason is mercy .As human beings, we are endowed with loads of emotions and a conscience that cannot allow us to sit back and watch as our beloved ones wallow in a miasma of suffering, especially when we have the ability to end such suffering. It hence would be inhumane to watch as patients undergo a slow and painful death. Secondly, we talk abut individual rights and freedom, what more freedom would there be than allowing a patient to make that crucial decision in determining his/her hour of death and quell the bouts of pains tormenting him her. Finally, the huge cost of maintaining life in the face of sure death cannot be rationalized. Why should we spend millions in taking care of people in a vegetative state while million others are dying due to lack of basic drugs? (Kenneth Cauthen, 1998) The opponents of legalizing suicide are only afraid of change. Their arguments do not hold any water. They talk of difficulties in regulation, sanctity of life and further state that sometimes miracles do happen. These arguments are just but empty words and cannot be compared to the suffering our beloved ones go through as they try to grapple with the last painful moments of their lives. It is the high time that bold steps are taken. It the time to bend the Hippocratic oath, at least for a just cause. It is the time to â€Å"change the rules† as Jack Kevorkian, an American pathologist and the pioneer of the latest debate of legalizing physician-assisted suicide, puts it. (Ed Newman, 1996) References Ed Newman, 1996. Making the final choice: Should physician-assisted suicide be legalized? Truth seeker. Retrieved on 03/11/07 from http://www.banned-books.com/truth-seeker/1994archieve/121-5/ts215m.html Beauchamp, T.L., 1989, â€Å"Suicide in the Age of Reason,† in Suicide and Euthanasia: Historical and Contemporary Themes, ed. B.A. Brody (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Cook, Earleen H., 1982.  Euthanasia and the right to die:   the medical and legal viewpoint.   Monticello, IL:   Vance Bibliographies.

Essay on Family Literacy Respecting Family Ways - 1970 Words

Family Literacy: Respecting Family Ways Throughout history, the family has been the primary source for learning. Before the advent of schools, children were taught at home by their parents, older siblings, grandparents, and/or other relatives. With the introduction of formal schooling, the teaching of values, cultural practices, and skills such as cooking, sewing, farming, and trapping continued to originate in the home. Today, in spite of the vast public and private educational systems, some parents are choosing to teach their children at home, confident in their belief that teaching in the context of family is the best way to ensure the learning the desire. Public agencies, such as the National Center for Family Literacy, and†¦show more content†¦Auerbachs socio-contextual model is congruent with the contextual teaching and learning approach to knowledge development. This approach is based on the proposition that students learn best when the learning is meaningful to them and situated in the context of their social environments. This model acknowledges that there are family-relevant, as well as school-relevant, ways of bringing literacy into the home. It acknowledges the positive contributions of family members and takes into account the influence that cultural values and practices have on literacy development. The Value of Different Literacies Because school-based family literacy efforts are typically directed to people from poor, minority, and/or immigrant families who lack English proficiency, some of these programs assume that these individuals have little to offer and that the school must determine the forms of literacy that are acceptable for the family. Referring to this model as deficit driven, Taylor (Book Notes 1998) challenges educators to redefine the relationship of literacy to poverty and socioeconomic status and to acknowledge the wealth of knowledge members of these families offer, e.g., their languages, multiple approaches to literacy, and ability to deal with life events. Although all literacies are notShow MoreRelatedImplementing The Reggio Emilia Approach For Low Income Pre Kindergarten Students1283 Words   |  6 PagesThe academic achievement gap between students from families with low socioeconomic status and students from families with high socioeconomic status is of major concern in the world of education today. It is the job of current and future educators to come up with solutions to this issue. 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