Tuesday, January 28, 2020
The Work Life Management Social Work Essay
The Work Life Management Social Work Essay In today fast-paced society, finding a perfect balance between work and daily living is a very challenging task that every worker must face. Particularly, it is most affected to families lives, as some couples may prefer having more children, yet cannot see how they would afford to working lesser or stop working in order to look after their kids; while some other families satisfy with the number of kids they have, but still prefer working more to support their life styles. This typical problem somehow raises difficulty to the government in a sense that if parents could not achieve their desired work-life balance, it could affect their welfare and so directly impacts on the development of the country as a whole. As a matter of fact, it is said there is no such thing called perfectionism in this world. Even so, Work life balance is still very important for the healthiness of everyone employees and employers, so as for the good sake of the organization; presently it has also received attention from researchers, governments, management teams and employee representatives (Pocock, Van Wanrooy, Strazzari Bridge, 2001; Russel Bowman, 2000). In fact, most of us have all heard the term and simply complain that we do not have enough of it in our lives; so what is work-life balance, exactly? According to Kathleen Gerson, Sociologist, young people are searching for new ways to define Work-life balance that do not force them to choose between spending time with their children and earning an income. Yet, it is generally believed that parents should make more time to support their kids both economically and emotionally, as well as sharing labor equally, at the same time. Indeed, Work-life balance is not simply about working less or starting a family; it is also about learning how to truly liv e and enjoy our lives. In this paper, I would like to address the importance of work-life balance in the workplace; also, the challenges and solutions upon work-life balance. II. Body 2. a. Benefits Work-life balance describes an individuals work and personal life. It tries to prioritize between work (career and ambition) and life styles (health, pleasure, leisure, family and spiritual meditation), so that people can maintain their leisure times with families and friends, and at the same time improving their potential performance at work. On that account, three main benefits are given to both employers and employees when organizations agree to adopt Work-life balance; firstly, embracing Work-Life balance helps attracting and retaining top talent staffs. Otherwise, negatively changing work environment like increasing working hours or lack of support and guidance from new employers are likely to force them to leave the place. Due to the fact that Work-life balance is compulsory toward the growth of company, The Yamaha Group, for example, is known to actively cooperate with labor for many years in its efforts to promote Work-life balance shortening total work hours and providing s upport for both work and family. The company then started introducing employee benefit programs and systems ahead of statutory requirements. Besides, The Yamaha also introduced childcare leave followed by a system of nursing care leave, hopefully eliminating the negative outside forces of their staffs while working for the company ( Initiatives for a Better Work-Life Balance , 2011). Secondly, work-life initiatives helps employees to reducing absenteeism, health costs, and stress even though they may have some distractions by family issues at work; it is known that people who are free of worry about what is going on at home can be more productive at work. According to the Australian data from the 2010 National Work/Life Benchmarking Study (Barbara Holmes, Work/life Balance International) found that thirty-seven percent (37%) stated that their work-life balancing strategy contributed to a reduction in absenteeism, while seventy-nine percent (79%) reported a positive impact on work productivity. Thirdly, work-life balance also allows changes in working flexibility. New research from Families and Work Institute (FWI) has found out that employers and employees benefit, when both partner in finding flexible ways to work. Working flexibly means due to shortages of talent and skills, many knowledge workers have the bargaining power to negotiate their working conditions, including working hours preferences and space available, as long as they can ensure the job will be done. That is to say, working flexibly can not only help employees to manage their work and personal responsibilities, but it can also enhance an employees effectiveness on the job, and thus benefiting employers as much as employees themselves. b. Challenges We live in stressful times, and each of us has to deal with stress everyday. In a society that filled with conflicting commitments and responsibilities, work-life balance is known to be a predominant issue in the workplace; thus, having better understanding the interface between work and family relation, it directly and indirectly affects the daily living and performance in the workplace. Regardless of above benefits, three major challenges of work-life balance are described here. Firstly, global competition describes the outside forces that bring about the work-life balance tensions. These days, due to the various demand of the national and international workplaces, employment experience is changing to get the jobs within todays business environment, workers need to obtain higher skills to compete with overseas workers, it is somewhat weaken the relationship between work and family life. Also, in this new global trend, in order to decrease the companys cost, most employers are sear ching for lower costs workers, resulting in pushing the wages lower and income insecurity higher for the individual workers. According to A Work-Life balance survey in 2009, it was stated that seventy percent (70%) of more than one thousand and five hundred (1500) respondents said they do not have a healthy work-life balance. Ageing population, secondly, impacts the staffs benefits directly. According to Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Older workers are those men and women who continue their employment after reaching age 50, or who during their fifties or sixties are seeking to re-enter the labor market. Therefore, to stabilize their job in old age, an individual has to work longer hours, thus forgoing personal leisure time as well as neglecting their health, to meet the excessive demands of work and life. In the United States, for example, healthcare does not provide to all citizens. Statistically, Berg disclosed that 15.7 percent out of a population of 46 million is said to have no access to healthcare, because it is mainly covered by their employers and for the expenditures on this healthcare have just rose by 40 percent. Likewise, since their society takes it as a private matter, there is no federal assistance for this child rearing and sickness, causing it to be very expensive for most workers to afford. Additionally, Berg also added that starting from 1997 until today, dual-earner couples has been increasing in US causing them to work by 10 hours per week and thus personal time has been dramatically reduced to an hour or less for men and women respectively. Thirdly, technology is said to have facilitated employees from pressuring and keeping themselves at work more than home; however, the increased technology allows individuals to work anywhere and at anytime. Berg again raises that men nowadays have less time off but working more, which pushing them to face higher levels of intensity at workplace. An increasing in ill health, both mental and physical, and stress then have become troublesome problem in the modern workplace as much for office staff, managers, and even shop floor workers, due to over-work. c. Solutions Since work life balance is rising to the top of many employers and employees consciousness, in today high-tech society, human resource personnel seek alternatives to positively impact the bottom line of their companies improve employee morale, retain employees with valuable company knowledge, and at the same time to keep pace with workplace trends. Â There is no particular strategy of one size fits all; yet three possible solutions are given to deal with above challenges. To begin with, On-the-Job Training should be provided. Being able to take part in lots of seminars and training might allow employees to challenge themselves in a global market. Besides, it is also enabling them to learn how to better manage their workloads, eliminate unproductive work habits, get enough exercise and bargain for more flexible work conditions, which meet their needs. On top of that, it is important for line manager to be aware of overwork, because only managers are able to manage the error rates, absenteeism and stress-related burnout of their employees, by simply offering employee-assistance programs. Moreover, a manager should also guide them on how to prioritize their works in case lower level workers do not have related-knowledge; otherwise workload and stress are likely to exist amongst them. Next, both men and women in ageing society mainly like in US, are found to be very crucial for the development of organization in terms of the knowledge they have, the role they can play in mentoring or coaching younger colleagues, and for the experiences they offer; so organization should consider creating strains on retirement pension budgets and education on retirement healthcare, prompting governments to encourage older employees to remain in the workplace with flexible time contracts. Otherwise, those young talented staffs will urge to retire more and enjoy early retirement stage, while other older and experiential senior workers insisting on retirement due to the need of spending more time with family and friends. Plus, government also plays important role in eliminating age discrimination in the workplace either upon promotion or recruitment. According to Margaret Collins from Bloomberg.com/news, once they lost their jobs, older workers in the age of 55 years old tend to stay out of work longer about 41 weeks on average in 2010, compared to 35 weeks of those age 25 54 years old. Last but not least, with unlimited access to information and technological advances, it seems to serve both of our personal and business matter at the same time, faster than expected. However, when technology could be accessed everywhere people seem to be busier than they used to; it is suggested that if one is really addicted to web surfing, so to better balance this typical work-life, an individual should limit their working time (checking email, and work on it) and start focusing on family life, while getting some other times for leisure, as well. Besides, it is suggested that all workaholic should adopt the single idea of work will never be finished . It is true that there are some certain people, who try to please everyone (boss, customers, family) by holding multi-tasking at the same time, but they may forget that it could make them less productive and inefficient if they still continue with their workloads. People are not computer, there are times to be productive and times t o be not, so entertainment is a must in this sense, to help them relax or re-focus on their job after a short while. III. Conclusion To sum up, in todays sophisticated life, although money is not everything, people have to work harder to support their infinite demands. Meanwhile, they have to distinguish between working and family time while earning money. So it is the responsibility of all the managerial levels of organizations to ensure that they provide positive working environment for their employees by taking Work-Life Balance into consideration. Employees tend to feel more motivated when they feel appreciated and respected, thus boosting up their morale and productivity levels. In my opinion, efforts should be made to balance personal life and professional life, for the reason that if employees tend to pay more attention on personal life, then professional life will be more disturbed which resulting in losing the job and income. Nonetheless, if employees would give more importance to professional life, it is more likely to affect their nerve causing higher stress levels and thus negatively affecting their wo rk performance.
Monday, January 20, 2020
The Power of the Witches in Shakespeares Macbeth Essay -- Macbeth e
The Power of the Witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth  The tragedy of Macbeth comes about because of a single event in his life. If that one moment, the meeting with the witches on the heath, had not happened then Macbeth would no doubt have gone on to be a loyal and respected subject of King Duncan and, later, King Malcolm. However, the meeting did happen and the powerful force of ambition was unleashed within Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. It is the combination of these two factors, the meeting with the witches and Macbeth's own inner demons, that lead to tragedy, and make the play 'terrifying' in the Aristotelian sense. The three witches are certainly responsible for initiating the events that lead to Macbeth's tragedy. Their greeting to him All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee thane of Glamis! All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, thane of Cawdor! All hail Macbeth! That shalt be king hereafter! feed straight into his desire for advancement. At this point in the play he is the newly appointed thane of Glamis but assumes that the thane of Cawdor still lives. When news arrives that he is to be the new thane of Cawdor, Macbeth sees the second greeting as a prediction and cannot help but wonder whether the third greeting will also prove accurate. Banquo says that the forces of darkness use the truth to win us to harm but Macbeth is unsure.  This supernatural soliciting cannot be good, Cannot be ill.  For the audience there is even more to think about. They know from the conversation about the sailor whose wife had offended one of them that the witches' power is circumscribed.  They can torment him but not change his fate. Though his bark cannot be lost Yet it shall ... ...with witches, partly to flatter the witch-hating James I and partly to introduce an exciting flavour of the supernatural into the play. But, exciting as the scenes with the witches and Hecate are, they are not at the heart of the tragedy. The witches' powers are limited, Lady Macbeth is only a helper: it is Macbeth's own weaknesses that bring him down.  Works Cited and Consulted: Greenblatt, Stephen. "Introduction to Macbeth." The Norton Shakespeare. New York: Norton, 1997. 2555-63. Hawkins, Michael. "The Witches and Macbeth." Focus on Macbeth. Ed. John Russell Brown. London: Routledge, 1982. 155-88. Kermode, Frank. "Introduction to Macbeth." The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton, 1974. 1307-11. Shakespeare, William. Tragedy of Macbeth . Ed. Barbara Mowat and Paul  Warstine. New York: Washington Press, 1992.       Â
Saturday, January 11, 2020
Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock Essay
Perhaps the two greatest rebels in the history of modern art were Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock. To a great extent, they knocked what was considered traditional art for a veritable loop with their new and unique approach to what was considered â€Å"good arts.†Granted, neither artist was the first to rock the traditional method of presenting â€Å"Gods and Kings†as the centerpiece of the artist’s canvas. Dadaism, Impressionism and a host of other styles of art had been slowly, but surely chipping away at the traditional mores of art for many decades. But, it was Pollock with abstract expressionism and, to a greater degree, Warhol with pop art that truly blew away many of the common conventional themes of the art world and attracting widespread public attention as mega star artists.            Now, some of the more trite critics will look at Pollock’s abstractions and Warhol’s elevation of the mundane as something â€Å"Anyone can do†or, worse, â€Å"I can do that†, but as previously stated such criticism is ridiculously trite and based on a surface value (or non-existent) understanding of the work and legacy of these masters. For Pollock and Jackson, art was far more than simply putting paint to canvas. Yes, their work was visually appealing (again, Warhol’s work was more appealing, however, on a national level), but this appeal was not limited to merely how good the painting looked. No, there was a unique psychology that captured the pulse of public sentiment that drove the popularity of these paintings. In other words, the paintings touched a raw nerve in their audience because the artist’s had a unique ability to firmly place their finger on the cultural pulse of a society and it was this that made them so popular.            Of course, in order to understand how they were able to place their finger on the pulse of a nation it is also critical to understand what was motivating them, how they achieved their psychological response in their audience, why the audience was so open to receiving such a psychological response, and what was the dominant cultural themes in society at the time that made their work so wildly popular. Much of this will be examined in this essay and from this a clearer understanding of the work and influence of Pollock and Warhol will b derived.            Regarding the ways the careers of Pollock and Warhol went against the standard perceptions of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, it would be safe to say that neither Pollock nor Warhol was looking to impress an audience of art critics or maintain their popularity in certain social circles as much as they were looking to take their work directly to an audience and knock the art world for a loop. In other words, they did not seek to be members of an established club of conventional wisdom or taste as much as they were looking to completely re-establish the means and methods of how art was perceived and what goals art functioned. In Pollock’s case, abstract expressionism was designed more as an understanding of the chaotic nature of the human psyche. For Warhol, pop art was an understanding of the consumer and entertainment driven culture and both rejected the elitism that was so very common in art critic and fan circles.            Regarding consumer culture, the work of Warhol is much easier to decipher on the surface than Pollock’s work. As the legend goes, when Warhol was asked to paint the things that mattered most to him he painted Campbell Soup cans because he ate Campbell’s soup every day. Later, this would expand into the painting of a variety of celebrities and pop cultural icons that were at the heart of commercial entertainment consumerism. To a great degree, Warhol was savagely mocking the former notion that the subject of the artist’s brush need to be gods and kings from antiquity. Instead, Warhol pointed out that modern gods and kings come from the world of entertainment and that they are rooted in commercialism.            For Pollock, the connection is more subtle although his bizarre painting style would assume to be anything but. On Pollock’s canvas, there is present the images of chaos and a decided lack of clarity. (Hence, the painting were abstract) As such, there is not so much a direct attack or presentation of consumerism in a positive or negative light as much as it is an â€Å"attack†on the psyche of the individual who has become a walking ball of confusion thanks to media inspired messages of consumerism. In other words, you can not separate the parts from the whole and in the case of Pollock you can not separate the confused mind from the random images that perpetually bombard it.            Regarding the relationship between disaster and mass culture, it would seem that Warhol did not really have such an alarmist view of pop culture. In fact, he was more celebratory and embracing of it. Yes, there can be a cynical notion put forth that Warhol may have felt that people were belittling themselves and not living up to their full potential by being overly reliant on a love of consumerism and popular entertainment and this, of course, can lead to a weakening of the mid; but, overall, Warhol did not seem to paint his images as a cautionary tale although it is understandable that some may feel it this way. After all, if a person felt that popular culture and entertainment were the central focus of a declining culture then Warhol’s painting would be representative of alarm bells going off.            Regarding how contemporary politics affected the careers of both artists this is somewhat of a difficult question to answer because neither Warhol nor Pollock were known for being expository in terms of the means and methods in which they developed their art. Of course, Warhol had produced paintings of John F. Kennedy, but such painting was far more focused on lauding the celebrity nature of Kennedy’s depiction as opposed to an endorsement of his politics. Pollock was seemingly a humanist in his psychological approach to invoking emotion and did not seem to endorse any politic motivations. Whether or not this made them popular with the public is a somewhat moot point because the public was more interested in the â€Å"hipness†of their work as opposed to any sincere attempt to decipher meaning.            In terms of criticizing pop culture the answer would be Pollock by default as Warhol celebrated consumerism. Pollock’s material was far more cerebral and this would seemingly go hand in hand with a rejection of trite consumerism although such an ideology was probably not Pollock’s governing motivation. Again, it is hard to prescribe motives to visionaries mainly because it is difficult to understand where there are coming from since they are the origination point of and ideology and not a tool of it. As such, understanding them takes on a unique level of difficulty.
Friday, January 3, 2020
2nd Grade Math Course of Study
The following list provides you with the basic concepts that should be attained by the end of the school year. Mastery of the concepts at the previous grade is assumed. Numbers Read print numbers to 20 and locate, compare, order, represent, estimate, identify numbers to 1000 and mentally add and subtract numbers to 20Understand place value to be able to trade 10 ones for a ten, etc.Count by 1s, 2s, 5s, 10s beyond 100.Locate numbers when requested to 1000Understand the reverse properties of whole numbers 57 is the same as 75Add and subtract two-digit numbers (no carrying/regrouping)Introduction to division using sharing as examplesCount by skipping numbers when requestedAdd and subtract coins up to $1.00Compute word problems with addition and subtraction, (We have 20 children in swimming class, 8 are boys, how many are girls?) Measurement Use and understand more than, less than, the same as, heavier than, lighter than, taller than etc.Measure with a variety of cups, rulers and measuring spoonsTime - hours, minutes and secondsUse the terms inches, feet, yards, centimeters, meters etc.Know the months of the year and tell time to the quarter hourUse a thermometer and count money to a dollar including being able to create different sets that equal a dollarCompare a variety of measurement tools Geometry Describe, identify, create and sort and build with shapes (squares, triangles, circles, rectangles etc.)Identify a variety of geometric shapes in everyday structuresCompare and sort 2- and 3-dimensional shapes (3-D terms include sphere, prism cones etc.)Extend and make patterns with shapesDetermine lines of symmetry, flips, slides, turns, and transformations of shapesDescribe locations on a grid - up four and over two etc. Algebra/Patterning Identify, describe, reorganize and extend patterns with more than one attributeGive specific rules about patterns for numbers, shapes, pictures, and objectsIdentify and describe patterns in the world around us (wallpaper, paint etc) Probability Use graphs to record number of pets, hair color temperature with 1 and 2 attributesDesign or construct bar graphs and include pertinent informationInterpret a variety of picture and bar graphs and give explanationsInvestigate what happens when coins are flipped and die are rolled All Grades Pre-K Kdg. Gr. 1 Gr. 2 Gr. 3 Gr. 4 Gr. 5 Gr. 6 Gr. 7 Gr. 8 Gr. 9 Gr. 10 Gr.11 Gr. 12
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)