An Ordinary Outlook Essays - Lake Forest, Illinois,

An Ordinary Outlook The movie Ordinary People directed by Robert Redford is a very real life movie set in the suburbs of Illinois in the late 1970's. The movie begins early December and ends what seems to me like the following spring. I think the significance of the seasons is that December, representing a dreary lifeless mood, at least for the northwest region, symbolizes death. During this time, Conrad experiences many confrontations with this matter. He has recently witnessed the death of his brother and is struggling to make his appearance seem ?normal?. When the weather begins to get warmer, setting a more renewed atmosphere, Conrad begins to understand his emotions and, therefore, deals with the circumstances of his brother's death better. Conrad Jarrett, the protagonist, is a seventeen-year-old student attending a public high school. Conrad represents more of a heroic figure in this story because he has begun to overcome the overwhelming obstacles of life. This complex individual realizes that love gives one the strength to endure life. However, Con must struggle to cope with the drastic changes occurring in his life. His struggle against these obstacles is the antagonist in the story. Other important characters include Con's mother, Beth; Con's father, Calvin; Con's psychiatrist, Dr.Berger; his friend Karen, and his somewhat girlfriend Jeannine. Beth, a determined perfectionist, is constantly concerned with the way people view her and her family. She wishes for everyone to view her family as ?normal?. She buried all her love with Buck and, therefore, neglects Conrad because she no longer understands how to love. Beth feels that Con had intended to hurt her as much as himself when he had tried to commit suicide. She can only see things in terms of how they affect her, a very selfish mindset. Beth thinks that everyone feels this way and that perhaps she is simply more honest about it. At one point of the movie, Beth states that she does not hate Con for what he has done, but she cannot forgive him for it. In a way, it seems she can not forgive him for surviving. On the flip side of the movie, Calvin or Cal, struggles to understand how he should react to his son's fe elings and actions. Cal feels as if Beth and Con are drifting away in opposite directions, and he doses not know which direction to follow. Con's self confident psychiatrist, Dr.Berger, helps con to express his feelings and encourages him to do what he wants instead of what people expect him to do. Berger is unorganized and spontaneous which works to the benefit of Conrad. Con finds comfort in Berger's friendship and his willingness to listen. Karen is also a valued friend of Conrad. She was in the hospital at the same time he was, and they helped each other get through the hard times. When Con left the hospital, they lost contact until he called her one-day and they met in a restaurant. When talking with Conrad, Karen displays a false sense of enthusiasm for the coming years. Later on in the movie Conrad is shocked when he finds out Karen has committed suicide. This event causes Con to release all his suppressed anguish and let down his shield to his emotions. Jeannine is Conrad's somewhat girlfriend who is there for him and allows him to feel needed, a feeling Con cant seem to find even in his friends at school. She is the only person who really asks Con about what he had felt when he tried to commit suicide. The major conflict in the movie is an internal one between Con and himself. Conrad struggles to cope with the drastic changes occurring in his life. He wants to please everyone. Con will not allow himself to feel or express emotion for fear of becoming vulnerable. There are many other minor conflicts that occur within the story. One example is an external conflict between Conrad and Beth. Con and his mother find it hard to communicate for the fact that both are too unwilling and stubborn to forgive each other. Also, Beth and Calvin experience an external conflict because of the circumstances have caused them to grow apart, and question their love for

Motivation in Education Essays

Motivation in Education Essays Motivation in Education Essay Motivation in Education Essay I was doing these classes mainly during the evening when I was coming back home or most of the time on the weekends when I had most of my spare time. I think in the classes that I completed, there was a sense of easy topics compared to the other ones. As such, they were necessary skills compared to the other ones. I could see myself growing fast in it because I could go from 0 to 100 in few hours of learning. In this case, the coursers that I completed were not so extraordinarily time-consuming. As such, I was spending no more than 3 or 4 hours per week. The homework and the projects that I was doing were easy and fascinating. For instance, in the python one, every week you had to create some programs, video games like space invaders, which are also kind of fun. Indeed, it was cool to see the output of the results. The above quotation was taken from the interview made to Francesco, and it is an interesting example since it explained his personal experience when he completed a courser. Additionally, it makes it possible to understand how the main categories represented in the conceptual model affected his motivation while he was enrolled. One of the main advantages in the context of Coursera is that users can choose when to study. This enables them have a higher flexibility with regard to how they structure their work. This characteristic was also found in the research of Liu et al. (2015) where users indicated that one of the advantages of the platform was its flexibility. Users feel gratified when they realize how they can progress during their experience. Specifically, users are more motivated to continue the path of learning when they can understand the content of the course and master the skills learned through their experience. As discussed at the beginning of this section, users have different reasons and motivations for enrolling in a course. In this regard, they are not only triggered by their curiosity to learn something new and related to their academic or work background but also by their hobbies and interests. These results evidence that users access the content mostly for their personal interests as opposed to some extrinsic factors. Specifically, users get the content to have a wider understanding in the areas that are more relevant to them. Thus, they are more intrinsically motivated to enrol in a course and probably complete it. In my perspective, these results make sense because, first, most of the MOOC learners already have a degree- either bachelor or master, and some of them already have a job; therefore, they access Coursera to either add or explore new skills. As such, the primary interest and motivation for Coursera learners are to master new skills and add them to their toolbox that they use at work or in their personal lives. From this assumption, we can find a correlation between what users do in Coursera and what the CEO stated regarding the difference between learning in Coursera and traditional universities. He said that if anyone intended to master any content, Coursera was a great tool. Additionally, if they wanted to explore the forming relationships that will be very critical for them, for their entire lives and learn the soft skills and interpersonal competencies and skills of leadership and teamwork that they required in life, there was nothing like these great universities (Bill Snyder, 2014). These results also find consistency in other study findings like Kop and Fourier (2011) where they sta ted that users who are intrinsically motivated are more likely to engage in the course and be participants that are more active. In a study conducted by Yale University, however, Wang et al. (2015) found that there are no substantial differences in mastery goal orientations between completer and non-completer users. From this assumption, it is reasonable to believe that while a user is enrolled in a course, his/her initial motivations and goals may be affected by any changes during his/her learning path. Indeed, one of the reasons why users drop out is because they fulfil their needs before completing the course. Notably, Users may enrol to a course and focus only on one part of the compendium, which they believe, is more valuable to their needs. Specifically, a user may be motivated to master further skills, but he/she might be interested only to follow one lesson of the entire course without any reason to complete the assignments. As such, it is rational to assume that both completers and non-completer learners are motivated to master new skills albeit having different priorities in what they need to learn. The priorities of each user may be based on how they perceive the knowledge that they acquire while they are enrolled in a course. In specific, it is important that some coursers are more relevant for users to learn in a particular range of time. Additionally, the skills that a user wants to learn have a different priority about the tasks that he/she is doing that moment. For example, while Agne was explaining the reasons why she completed the course in English grammar, she stated that it was easy and because at that moment, she found it useful to complement those skills that matched with her voluntary job. She stated Effective writer one was easier to complete. The assignments were very clear; you did not need to do a lot of background work, and it was most of about the writing itself. At that moment, I was doing a lot of writing also from my volunteering, as such; it was complementing my actual work. The skills that she wanted to learn were complementary to her task that she was i nvolved in at that moment. This aspect also makes the course more relevant to the user and, therefore, more critical. The relevance of the course and the value of the skills that a user wants to acquire are based on the outcome. It is critical to take into consideration time perceived from learning because most of the users accesses Coursera to fulfil short-term goals and complement their skills that they think are more relevant to a particular range of time. If users perceive that the time taken to acquire the knowledge is too long, or the effort requested to complete the course is not contingent on the outcome, then they will be less motivated. It is also reasonable to make a consideration about the value of the certificates that Coursera offers and how users perceive the value of them. From the results obtained in the previous chapter users, they view the certificate as useless. Since most of the users already possess a degree, either bachelors or masters, and some of them have even more advanced degrees, they have stated that they do not aim to add further levels to their background, but they are more focused to acquire new skills and knowledge. Moreover, it is possible to follow coursers free, and this means that most of Coursera learners do not have any incentive to buy a certificate. Indeed, while discussing with the participants about the reasons why they do not purchase a certificate, they were referring their grounds in job interviews and the perspectives of the employers. Specifically, those taking part explained that in their interview experiences, firstly, companies do not know what Coursera is and secondly, busi nesses are interested in hiring people that have the right skills to do a task; they do not care if a possible candidate possesses a certificate. Moreover, users stated that the skills learned through a courser were added to their CV, and, therefore, they did not have any reason to buy a certificate.