Academic Euphoria free essay sample

In the world of emotions, euphoria has been the more recurring one felt through my past 17 years. Euphoria is defined as the state of extreme excitement or happiness. As a child I could only relate in those few and rare hours my parents spent with my sister and me after having endure 12 hours of labor. Hours spent having dinner at the table, enjoying the mere presence of them with us, right before my sister had to get me ready for bed while my parents showered, power napped and got ready for their overnight custodian shifts. Growing up, I felt it through the rigor of my class selections. Feeling that â€Å"extreme happiness† in being the only 5th grader with straight As, winning the Spelling Bee throughout middle school and taking exclusive â€Å"honors† or â€Å"high school credit† courses. Being one of the elite, the more driven or being offered the more demanding curriculum, along with the new standards and insight given by the IB Program gave me a taste of satisfaction in learning. We will write a custom essay sample on Academic Euphoria or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page I received the opportunity to be challenged, to question and interact with others who offered the same intellectual stimulation and interests continued piquing my interest and incited a sort of euphoric sensation through academics. With every level of depth or new concept in Economics, Latin American History or even literary analysis in English, I was engulfed in new perceptions, increased awareness and inundation of questions. Eventually I tasted the other facet of learning. Teaching. Through my membership and presidency in the French National Honor Society (FNHS), I tutored other fellow students in the French language, which was just as foreign to me. As demanding as learning a foreign language was, I fell in love with the language and devoted my time to helping others appreciate it as much as I had learned to do. In any given tutoring session, there’d be students asking for help in reading, writing in french or simply maturing their vocabulary and word choice. My teacher always encouraged discussion as a way of ameliorating confidence and control of a language, which is what Thursday afternoons were allotted to. There appeared to be such remarkable success, among tutees and their consequent performance, I established, along with my other club officers, an outreach program for local middle schools who offered high school credit for French courses, to ensure and aid future FNHS members and French a ddicts. The experience of sharing my knowledge and encouraging the same drive for learning, in the study of French, allowed me to practice and perfect my skill, allowing the saying â€Å"By learning you will teach, by teaching you will learn† to ring true. As I made mistakes in grammar and got corrected, as tutees asked for definitions of words I didn’t know and had to look up, as I struggled with articulating my thoughts and opinions and had to research for apt translations, I learned. I found myself applying French sayings and proverbs to my daily routines and issues, taking notes in french short-hand, and discussing school events in French with native-speakers, thrilled by ability and the effort I had to put into formulating simple sentences. The difficulty and demand that came with understanding and being able to explain the syntax of a strange language was what drove me to excel, perfect and dedicate myself to the club, my tutees, and French studies. Through tutoring middle and high schoolers, I developed a taste for leading and witnessing the growth of my students. I chased that enthusiasm and signed up to be a camp counselor for a History camp over the summer, before my senior year. I could go on to gush about my kids, the nonsensical things they would say and the insight they gave me and my fellow counselors but those memories would take up more storage than any modern computer allows. However, as we talked about the Civil War, Columbus’ discovery of the New World, and Osceola County’s participation in United States’ history and development, I witnessed the power my position held. They showed up week after week, asking questions about â€Å"Why the white man hated the dark men?† or â€Å"What happened to the Indians?† and swallowing our replies as fact while they processed and questioned their validity. The facial expressions on an 8 year olds face as you try to explain the social and cultur al implications of the Holocaust forces self reflection. Their confusion on â€Å"why† things happened or â€Å"how† we judge the value of a president and its lack of rationale or common sense subjected me to my personal speculation on history. I had gotten conditioned to accept history as is, as questioning was deemed futile, but they broke that pattern. With a simple question, a group of 4th graders revived my focus and acknowledgement of the purpose in studying. Among FSU’s caring and intellectual community, I aim to continue embracing my schooling. I will continue to ask the â€Å"why†, memorize the â€Å"how† and understand the â€Å"what† so as to be able to remain an active leader in answering the future why’s, what’s and how’s, compelled by my pull to happiness, to euphoria.

Civil Rights and Affirmative Action Laws †African American Studies Essay

Civil Rights and Affirmative Action Laws – African American Studies Essay Free Online Research Papers Affirmative action is a collection of procedures that were designed to achieve fair employment practices in the workplace. In general, to accomplish this objective, agencies responsible for the enforcement of the laws related to the affirmative action urge employers to hire particular groups of people who were discriminated against in the past. In general there are two strategies available for employers to follow in order to remain within the realm of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 clearly prohibits employers to base their hiring decisions on race, sex or age, employers should disregard these characteristics when hiring. However, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 also urges employers to hire certain group of people who were discriminated against in the past. This means that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, paradoxically, forces employers to made their hiring decisions based on race, sex or age. The inherent conflict between these two strategies has been causing problems in the society while employers try to abide with the requirements of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The moral justification for the first strategy is self-evident whereas for the second strategy one needs explanation. According to the first strategy, no one should be denied a job that he or she can perform successfully regardless of his or her race, sex or age (Walker and Epstein, 2004). The justifying argument for the second strategy is the following. If being a woman or a African American had been prevented one to have the life standards of a white male in the past, for the purpose of the just society hiring (or awarding) a white female or an African-American person (with a contract) by taking the gender or ethnicity as well as other factors into consideration becomes a morally correct decision. Even though, this correcting past mistakes in the present time seems morally appealing, it has sparked the presen t â€Å"reverse discrimination† debate. In sum, affirmative action (also known as reverse or positive discrimination) has spawned many legal battles in America. Cases include the quota-driven promotion of minorities and the firing of white employees so as to comply with the Act. In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court ruled in June 2003 that race could be a criterion in university admissions (and by extension in companies and the armed forces), as long as it is not â€Å"a decisive factor†. This means that decision can be applied to workplace. The recent proposals in the U.S. Congress advocating banning affirmative action across the nation have triggered a variety of mixed responses, proving that the debates over racial preferences and opportunity is far from over. Therefore, the employers as the main group of the stakeholders in the affirmative action domain should have comprehensive procedures at hand to sail through smoothly. Such procedures require a management strategy consisting of four fundamental actions (Fisher, Schoenfeldt, and Shaw, 1999): The management should frequently conduct an internal auditing to examine the status of minority, female and disabled workers. Moreover, organizations should develop formal and written policies concerning equal employment opportunity. Organizations should base their decisions about hiring, firing, promoting or providing benefits to their employees on objective and job-related criteria. For example, experts trained in performance-rating techniques should assess job performance in organizations. Organizations should develop grievance procedures to minimize the involvements of the agencies responsible for the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into their employment practices. In case of the evidence for discrimination exists, the organizations should develop policies to correct the situation. Being a foreigner who is not considered as a minority and whose forefathers had not been discriminated against, the equal opportunity employment consequence of Civil Rights Act of 1964 will affect my employment situation positively through its first strategy. However, because of the second strategy of Civil Rights Act of 1964, I might end up disqualified for a job because of these very characteristics due to the possibility that an African-American female applying for the same job. However, this second possibility that would affect my future employment situation negatively does not prevent me from arguing that the equal opportunity laws should stay as it is because the discriminative potentials in the society have not been eliminated fully. Reference(s) Epstein, L. and Thomas G. Walker. Rights, Liberties and Justice. CQ Press Fisher Cynthia, Lyle F. Schoenfeldt, and James B. Shaw (1999). Human Resource Management. Houghton Mifflin Company. Civil Rights Act 1964, Retrieved December 2, 2004 from http://usinfo.state.gov/usa/infousa/laws/majorlaw/civilr19.htm Research Papers on Civil Rights and Affirmative Action Laws - African American Studies Essay19 Century Society: A Deeply Divided EraCapital PunishmentPETSTEL analysis of IndiaRelationship between Media Coverage and Social andTwilight of the UAWWhere Wild and West MeetQuebec and CanadaDefinition of Export QuotasHip-Hop is ArtOpen Architechture a white paper