text:
Bram Stoker report
narrative Essay
Bram Stoker report Bram Stoker was born in Dublin, Ireland on November 8th, 1847. His father was a civil servant in Dublin Castle, and his mother, Charlotte, was a women's lib advocate. They had seven children in nine years; the third of which was Bram. The first seven years of his life he was bedridden with an undiagnosed disease which may have been anything from rheumatic fever, asthma or a form of nonparalytic polio. During these first years of his life as he laid in his bed he listened to stories his mother told him of the cholera epidemic of 1832; people buried alive, and entire families dying in a matter of days. At the age of 12 Bram left his home to attend school at Dublin's Rutland Square under Reverend William Wood. During these years he made up for his childhood sickness by becoming involved in athletics and became an endurance walker. Following his older brothers lead in 1863, at the age of 17, he entered Trinity College in Dublin. Only ten years after he took his first steps he was now six foot two and 175 pounds. He joined several clubs and groups; he became president of the Philosophical Society, auditor of the Historical Society, he played soccer, was unbeatable in his walking marathons, and after two years he became the athletics champion of Trinity. In 1866 Bram took a one year leave of absence from Trinity to work as a clerk in the Registrar of Petty Sessions at Dublin Castle. Later in the year he saw the play The Rivals playing the lead, Captain Absolute, was the British actor Henry Irving, a person who would play a major role in Bram's life. He was so impressed by Irving's performance he wrote: "What I saw, to my amazement and delight , was a patrician figure as real as the person of one's dreams, and endowed with the same poetic grace. A young soldier, handsome, distinguished, self-dependent; compact of grace and slumberous energy. A man of quality who stood out from his surroundings on the stage as a being of another social world. A figure full of dash and fine irony, and whose ridicule seemed to bite; buoyant with the joy of life; self-conscious; an offensive egoist envy in his love-making; of supreme and unsurpassable insolence, veiled and shrouded in his fine quality of manner." He returned to Trinity after his absence and graduated in 1871 with a degree in science, he then stayed on... ... middle of paper ... ...ns. In the last year of his life Stoker suffered from a number of illnesses from: Bright's Disease (a painful kidney disease), gout, syphilis, and exhaustion. On April 15th, 1912 Florence Stoker rushed to her husbands bedroom to tell him that the luxury liner Titanic had sunk the night before. Five days later April 20th, the day the investigation into the Titanic disaster began, Bram Stoker died at the age of 64. His death certificate listed three causes of death: Locomotor Ataxy (tertiary syphilis), Granular Contracted Kidney (Bright's Disease), and exhaustion. The story of Dracula has been played out many times over in Hollywood with the most famous being; Nosferatu (1928), Dracula (1931) starring Bela Lugosi, Count Dracula (1971) starring Christopher Lee, and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) starring Gary Oldman. It was first a Broadway stage play in the late 1920's. It's leading actor, Bela Lugosi, would go on to play the original Dracula and play the part in over 80 other horror movies. Dracula still remains the one work Bram Stoker is remembered for and today, over 100 years after it was published, it remains one of the most popular books of all time.
Narrates how the polio patient listened to stories during his first years of life.
Narrates how bram left his home at the age of 12 to attend school at dublin's rutland.
Narrates how he took his first steps at trinity college in dublin and was now ten years later.
Narrates how he earned his masters degree in pure mathematics.
Narrates how stoker's address was a trinity college address, and the second was an address.
Opines that they were a hit and ran for 100 nights, at the end of the first season.
Narrates how they spent the day working with irving and took the ferry back to the lyceum.
Narrates how the man kept his head above water until a boat came. he died later.
Narrates how an orphan girl tries to warn the people of her town of an imminent danger.
Narrates how the lyceum began touring every year until 1887.
Explains that trinity led the way and each year they still did a sold out tour of america.
Narrates how august stoker, looking for a quiet place to write, walked around the city.
Explains that he had been five years earlier to do research for the play macbeth.
Explains that stoker scrapped his original language, which means son of the devil, or dragon.
Explains that stoker suffered from a number of illnesses in the last year of his life.
Explains that the luxury liner titanic had sunk the night before. five days later, on april 20th, the ship was refueled.
Opines that today, over 100 years after it was published, it remains one of the most popular novels of all time.
Narrates how their mother, charlotte, was a women's lib advocate and had seven children in nine years. the third was bram.
Narrates how bram took a one-year leave of absence from trinity to work in the registrar of petty sessions at dublin castle. he later saw the play the rivals playing the lead, captain absolute, played by irving.
Explains that bram wrote short stories on the side, the london society published his short story the crystal cup, and the chain of destiny was his first horror story. he quit the evening mail to take a job as drama critic at the dublin mail.
Explains that irving read this the next morning and asked the manager of the theater to introduce him to bram. they met that night for dinner at the shelbourne hotel.
Explains that in 1878, he was promoted to inspector of petty sessions, received a pay raise, but this also required him to travel for weeks, and resigned his job as drama critic of the dublin mail.
Narrates how dracula was inspired by slains castle, which he used as his inspiration for the castle in his book. the ending of the book was changed, perhaps to leave it open for a sequel.
Analyzes how the castle and the rock and even the hill on which it stood seemed to rise into the air and scatter in fragments.
Opines that even though the volcano burst had satisfied the need of nature, the castle and the structure of the hill had sunk again into the void.
Explains that mary shelley wrote a ghost story at the villa diodati in 1816.
Narrates how stoker stumbled to the floor of the midland hotel, lost consciousness, and died. one year later, he published his novel personal.
Narrates how he began work on his last novel, the lair of the white worm, on march 3rd, 1911.
Jonathan Swift As A Modest Proposal
the help of his relatives, later attending Trinity College in Dublin where he earned his bachelor's
Describes jonathan swift as one of the most memorable satirists in english.
Analyzes how swift criticizes the immortality of equating life with wealth in the eyes of the upper class in his modest proposal.
Explains that swift suffered from meniere's disease in 1742 and was at the state where he was.
Analyzes how swift used satire to get the rulers of ireland, england, to realize what they were causing.
Analyzes how swift uses the idea of selling children to get his point across that the people in ireland needed a way out of poverty and over population.
Explains how swift disagrees with human life. people who rely on speculative reason to solve problems may end up thinking the unthinkable rather than following what should be more natural.
Analyzes how the writer agrees with swift on how something should be changed to fix the problem of poverty.
Explains that jonathan swift's satirical work, a modest proposal, was well-known for his mocking of governments, politics, etc., which caused a different way of thinking.
both the ninth and the twelfth grades and entered Morehouse College where he studied medicine
Narrates how he earned his bachelor of divinity degree and was elected student.
Narrates how the king family had been living in montgomery for less than a year.
Narrates how he was named man of the year by time magazine.
Opines that the most significant moment in this speech occurs in the closure.
Analyzes king's response that he just breaks unjust laws. king responds by saying "isn't."
Explains that martin luther king, jr. was born on january 15, 1929. his mother taught him how to read and his father was a preacher.
Narrates how martin entered morehouse college, where he studied medicine and law, but never graduated from high school. he was a popular and precocious student.
Describes how king changed his mind with the help of his mentor morehouse president, dr. benjamin mays.
Narrates how martin luther king jr. met coretta scott, an aspiring singer and musician, at the new england conservatory school in boston, and settled in montgomery, alabama.
Recounts how a 15-year-old girl refused to give up her seat to white man on montgomery city bus in violation of local law. the naacp investigated the problem and felt they had an excellent test case to challenge.
Narrates how rosa parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger and was arrested for violating the montgomery city code. on december 1, 1955, e.d. nixon, head of the local naacp chapter, met with martin luther king jr.
Narrates how king's house was bombed by angry whites in the same year that the bus boycott ended.
Narrates king's famous "i have a dream" speech, emphasizing his belief that someday all mean could be brothers.
Explains that the march one victory in congress by 1964 when congress proceeded to pass the civil rights bill that kennedy had created, before his death.
Describes how dr. martin luther king jr. was hit by a sniper's bullet at 6:01 p.m. on april 4, 1968 at the lorraine motel in memphis, tennessee.
Explains that the martin luther king, jr. holiday celebrates the life and legacy of a man who brought hope and healing to america.
Opines that king had taught us so many values, such as courage, truth, and justice.
Analyzes how dr. king knew that it was not enough just to talk the talk, that he had to walk the walk for his words to be credible. he paid the highest price to make democracy a reality for all.
Analyzes how martin luther king jr's "i have a dream" is powerful because it comes during the climax of the civil rights movement.
Analyzes how king structures his speech to appeal to different types of audience, supporting it with ethos, pathos and logos. he tells the audience to demonstrate their freedom and stand up for what's right.
Analyzes how he uses powerful diction to create his final emotional appeal. he asks for america to follow up on its promises to become true to its words.
Analyzes how king identifies with the audience because he is living out the same reality they are, thus creating credibility. king wanted everybody to be equal.
Analyzes king's use of ethos to gain credibility by saying he follows just laws, but breaks unjust laws with early christians.
then to Oxford. He was a brilliant man, and became a succesful writer of short stories in
Explains that 'brave new world' was based on travel books and a record of his experiments with drugs.
Explains that individual is determined before birth. it's a society in which the human being only serves.
Explains that the story is set in our world, in the future (some 600 years from now).
Explains the key word that ensures everybody of material welfare (developed by the great ford).
Explains that the slogan of the new world is decantating babies.
Narrates the birth to a son, john, who grew up among the indians and taught himself to read.
Opines that shakespeare's lack of culture and humanity, all of which shakespeare had taught, was shattered.
Opines that stability is the pillar, and all threats (as arts, beauty and religion) have to be abolished.
Explains that aldous huxley was born in 1894, and died in 1963. he was a successful writer of short stories and essays.
Explains that before becoming the writer as we know him, he worked as a journalist and critic of drama.
Analyzes how huxley tries to make a statement with this book. he uses characters, but they're insignificant to what his real intentions are, he merely uses them to express his ideas.
Explains huxley's theme of 'brave new world' is the advancement of science as it affects human individuals.
Explains that sex is the most normal thing on earth, and even drugs are taken with the routine and amount of normal meals. only a small group of the real man exists.
Opines that the human being is only on this earth to serve a sociological and scientifical purpose. there's no space for free speech, emotion or even literature that reminds of the free spirit.
Analyzes how huxley tells the story as he was telling their history. the genre of the book is that of alternative realism, but as it spreads certain ideas, it's called a 'novel of ideas'
Analyzes how bernard uses john to get attention and respect from his boss, who was about to fire him.
Narrates how the director of the central london hatchery and conditioning centre explains to a group of students the different stages of growth.
Narrates the gruesome story of the once, long ago, so called family, with the father and mother, and that sex was
Analyzes how bernard is similar to the pre-ford man. he adores lenina crowne, a female worker on the same plant, in an old fashioned way, and wants her for himself.
Speculates that john was the unlawful son of his boss, the director of the hatcheries, who once had been to new mexico, a long time ago, and returned without his female
Narrates how bernard faces disgrace, back in the civilized world with him. john is eager to see the wonderful world of which he had been told by his mother.
Analyzes how bernard introduces linda and john as a counteract. the director has to resign and disappear, this was an embarrassment too great
Analyzes how john's mother, linda, is glad to be back and enjoys the renewed comforts and luxury to the maxx.
Narrates how the crowd cools down when it becomes clear that they won't get any if they stop. he is arrested and led before the great mustapha.
Analyzes how john leaves london, to pick up his old way of life again, but people come to visit him and talk about him as a weird man.
Narrates how he whips himself with a strong twig to forget about his beloved lenina, but when she comes to visit him too,
George W. Norris
for Tennessee Valley Authority. He was a U.S. senator for Nebraska. He was the author
Narrates how mary norris gave birth to a boy on july 11, 1861 in york township ohio.
Narrates how he passed the bar exam to earn a law degree. he later tought some school.
States that he was a u.s. senator for nebraska and of tennessee valley authority.
Narrates how george moved to beaver city where he met pluma lashely his first wife. his father died onne year after the wedding and his wife gave birth to three daughters.
The Reign of Joseph Stalin
scholarship to the Tiflis Theological Seminary. When he was an occupant at Tiflis he joined
Narrates how he was an occupant at tiflis theological seminary and joined the seminary.
Explains that iosif came in contact with karl's ideas in the soviet union.
Explains that iosif was expelled from tiflis in may 1899 for several reasons.
Explains that after his death, he was expelled for trying to convert his other classmates to marxism.
Describes underground politics, such as labor strikes and demonstrations, in the early year of 1900.
Opines that stalin was in a difficult position after betraying socialism.
Accuses him of being dictatorial and calls for more democracy in the party.
Explains that after zinoviev was officially out of the way, stalin rose to his full and final position of power
Opines that stalin made an effort to eliminate the remaining classes, which led to more terror in the ussr.
Describes the "harmful elements" of the soviet union that could possibly hurt the economy.
Narrates how stalin declared that many of the "rebels" had been exiled and on july 3, 1937.
Explains that executions were permitted throughout the nation in labor camps.
Explains that iosifs was the fourth child to his parents after the first three died of bad health issues. his mother was an in home washer, taking in other people's clothing, and his father was a boot maker.
Describes how iosif survived small pox, which left scars all over his face, causing other children to call him "pock." his mother obtained a place in the local church school for her son in 1888.
Explains that iosif stayed in the soviet union in 1901 when he began serving on the first central committee of the bolshevik party. he helped organize the industrial resistance in tsarism.
Describes how iosif was deported to siberia to meet bolshevik party leaders and create a higher status for himself among these men.
Narrates how vladimir lenin invited stalin to meet him after stalin escaped from siberia and returned to the ussr.
Describes how they kept a close eye on stalin to see what his decisions were and if he could be trusted enough.
Explains that stalin, like many other deported bolshevik party members, saw this as a sign that the people of the soviet union were
Explains that vladimir lenin fell as the soviet union's new leader after the fall of nicholas ii.
Analyzes the contents of a letter written by lenin to leon trotsky, stalin's main rival, for the leadership of the party and the country.
Explains that stalin kept the same laws and rules that vladimir lenin created with few changes that did not cause drastic changes in the ussr. four years later, stalin started attacking kulaks.
Explains how stalin used his "secret police" to arrest kamenev and zinoviev under the charges of assisting in the assassination of sergey kirov, a rival of stalin.
Describes joseph stalin's five-year plan to convert the soviet union into an economic powerhouse, which included the collectivization of privately owned farms.
Describes how 1.8 million people were deported to gulags, exiled or killed, and confiscated by the state or raiding parties.
Explains how joseph stalin's "law on the five ears of corn" caused thousands of people to die or 10 years in prison for the crimes of being rebels and stealing grain.
Explains that 500,000 soviets and germans were banished from the soviet union, just like many of the kulaks had been.
Explains that the soviet union allowed for the killing of the "most active elements" and the arrest and deportation to gulags for 8 to 10 years for those who were "least active"
Explains the execution of children under the age of 12 if they were young enough to be sent to orphanages and acted and behaved the way of stalin.
Explains that by 1939, 155,000 children were sent to work colonies. by 1940, 1.3 million people were imprisoned in labor.
Explains how stalin and hitler signed a nonaggression pact and germany invaded the ussr in 1941. stalin led the soviets into atomic age and exploded an atom bomb.
Explains that joseph stalin was one of the most ruthless and greatest dictators known to history. he saw what he wanted, made up his mind, and took what
Biography of Charles Darwin
He was then sent to be a pastor in the Church of England. He studied at Christ
Narrates how his first discovery led to his second that is a key piece in the story.
Opines that small animals and as more died and then clumped it made a large mass.
Explains that he unleashed yet for it was far too complicated to be explained by tongue.
Explains that some rock layers were higher than others in some areas, but in other areas they were lower.
Describes how he was sent to be a pastor in the church of england. he studied at christ.
Narrates how he met many connections who were his allies in a 'quot;war' against the nazis.
The Literary Career of Bram Stoker
The Literary Career of Bram Stoker Abraham (Bram) Stoker was born November 8, 1847 at 15 The Crescent, Clontarf, North of Dublin, the third of seven children. For the first 7 years of his life Stoker was bedridden with a myriad of childhood diseases which afforded him much time to reading. By the time he went to college, Stoker had somehow overcome his childhood maladies and while at Trinity College, Dublin, the honor student was involved in soccer and was a marathon running champion. He was also involved in various literary and dramatic activities, a precursor to his later interests in the theater and his involvement with the rising action Henry Irving, whose performance he had critiqued as a student at Trinity. After graduation from college, and in his father's footsteps, he became a civil servant, holding the position of junior clerk in the Dublin Castle.
Explains that his literary career began as early as 1871 and in that year he took up a writing career.
Explains that by 1894, he was already making notes for a vampire-themed novel.
Explains that "the jewel of the 7 stars" was published in 1903, and it was a novel.
Narrates how he lived to this point until his death in 1912 at the age of 64.
Rebelling Against the Status Quo in Arthur Miller's The Crucible
the University of Michigan and when he was initially denied admission he went to work to
Opines that in a world where compromise is part of our daily experience, there is something to be grateful for.
Opines that the playwright of the past half century has secured a well earned place in the history of literature.
Narrates how the writer wrote a letter to the president of the university and asked for the chance to prove his merit.
Opines that his personal crucible began in a critical arena.
Describes the people who had attended a meeting to which he had been invited as guest.
Analyzes how miller became the eventual target of the committee.
Analyzes how the religious minister paints him as a human being with fears.
Analyzes how the revelation of abigail's dismissal from the proctor home causes her to lose credibility.
Analyzes how the characters present in the room are secondary to their individual pursuits.
Analyzes how the play is set in a puritan village during the 1600s where the bible and summary were written.
Describes the hysteria that has gripped the majority of the population.
Analyzes how john proctor's child, elizabeth, begins growing in elizabeth's womb.
Analyzes how proctor triumphs as one of miller's many, despite his shortcomings.
Explains that joe keller wrote an adaptation of henrik ibsen's an enemy of the people.
Opines that the actions and agendas of such rebels vary, as do the means and modes of self expression.
Opines that the idea of rebelling against the status quos is an element of excitement and dread attached to it regardless of a given agenda.
Explains that arthur miller's modesty as a child growing up in the shadow of new york city did little to anticipate his eventual rise as literary giant.
Explains that miller had a desire to attend the university of michigan and when initially denied admission he went to work.
Analyzes how arthur miller proved his moral courage in the midst of a politically charged environment as well as in his conviction of contempt of congress.
Analyzes how betty parris is unable to wake from a coma-like condition and the chief reason suspected.
Analyzes how parris draws the audience to his character, but such attachment is abruptly stripped when he discloses his true concern is not for his daughter but his reputation.
Analyzes how the reverend's paranoia plays out as he laments that a faction is sworn to drive him from his pulpit.
Analyzes how the reverend's portrayal as selfishly concerned with his social status in light of his daughter's apparent illness is the first bit of evidence that is open to taking on the risk of suicide.
Analyzes how miller introduces a string of characters that each contribute to an atmosphere of paranoia.
Analyzes how the interaction between the young women in this scene sets in motion what is to follow.
Analyzes how the story introduces flawed characters and information that is both revealing and critical to the plot. the next scandalous revelation is revealed.
Analyzes how is communicating the reality that every person is flawed and rejects the notion that there is such thing as an upright or untarnished individual.
Opines that miller is the only person who has made the radical proposal to blame ourselves instead of pointing fingers.
Analyzes how miller shows each judge to be more concerned with their personal reputation and the mere appearance of justice.
Analyzes how proctor sacrifices his last glimmer of self-respect and confesses to lechery in an effort to save his wife.
Explains that arthur miller believed that the stage was the place for ideas, for philosophies, and for the most intense discussion of man's fate.
Analyzes how he asked hard questions, gave unpopular answers, and articulated revolt against the world's standards and their resolve, if not to live then to die on their own terms.
Bram Stoker: A Brief Introduction To The Victorian Era
I. Brief introduction to the Victorian Era The Victorian Era started when Queen Victorian inherited the throne in 1837 and lasted till 1901. Over those years, England underwent "technological, commercial, and social developments that fundamentally changed English life, replacing the world into which Victoria was born with one that looks much more familiar to the twenty-first-century eye." (Nelson 1). According to Houghton "never before had men thought of their own time as an era of change from the past to the future.
Explains that the victorian era began when queen victoria inherited the throne in 1837 and lasted till 1901.
Analyzes how bram stoker used the gothic novel as a medium to present the dark cultural changes in the victorian society.
Who Is Bram Stoker's Dracul Fact, Fiction, And Folklore?
Vampires; Fact, Fiction, and Folklore Vampires. Our favorite Halloween costume. The scariest folk tale. But behind all this scary fun, there is some history. And this history, for some people, is exciting.
Analyzes the origins of vampires, including bram stoker's dracula and shish kevlad.
Explains that vampires are revenants, human corpses that are said to return from the grave to harm the living. other versions of the vampire were supernatural, possibly demonic, entities that did not take human form.
Explains that vampires are successful literary characters because writers can play with the so-called rules to fit them into the story that they are thinking of. however, finding a vampire is not always easy, as in books and movies.
Explains that interest and belief in revenants surged in the middle ages in europe. the folklorist paul barber noted that potential vampires were identified at birth, by some defect or abnormality.
Explains that the belief in vampires stems from superstition and mistaken assumptions about postmortem decay.


The Pegasus are family run apartments which have been in Stalis for many years.
Situated just 20 metres from Stalis' large sandy beach and clear blue sea, Pegasus is ideal for seaside holidays. You'll find everything you need in Stalis for shopping and fun. If you choose to go further afield there are lots of car hire rentals to offer reasonably priced vehicles or if you prefer organised trips there are lots of local travel agents. Stalis has something for everyone, Cretan tavernas that serve traditional greek food and a busy nightlife with plenty of bars and clubs, all of which are close on hand to the Pegasus Studios.
There are also plenty of mini-markets close by for any little thing you need. From Stalis it's easy to visit the neighbouring towns of Malia and Herssonisos – either by bus, car or foot.
Lovers of traditional life and architecture will discover images of Cretan life all over the island of Crete – whatever your interests, remember that Stalis is within easy reach of most of the islands attractions and its best beaches.


It just takes love, cooperation and responsibility. If, instead, you see this as a way to become a better person, you can begin to take the necessary risk of being more open to feelings and emotions. There is one exception. Send you email alerts, text messages and other written or electronic communications. The inclusion of a link on the Site or the App does not imply endorsement of the linked site by Multiply. It takes a true man who is able to exercise his thoughts, feelings and emotions as well as competent enough to value his intellectual abilities to become emotionally mature in his marriage.
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Experiencing fear or pain or self-consciousness doesn't mean you're losing and shouldn't trigger aggression. Defeatism and moaning are things that a mature man sees no need for, and has no time for. It means you can nurture a great relationship. None of us are therapists — unless, of course, you are one. I talk with you because I care. Familiarity is capable of creating intimacy, but we need to find ways of renewing ourselves so it does not create stasis and stagnation. To deny that we are emotional beings is to deny a large and important part of what makes us who we are.
It creates productive members with no emotional baggage. Gone are the days when fathers mostly stood for command and fear; nurturing children today takes more than sheer discipline alone. Tap here to turn on desktop notifications to get the news sent straight to you. Another big issue many men have is that they feel insecure about the way they look, dress and act. Quality family time strengthens bonds and a mature man sees himself as being part of a larger codependent group. It can be overwhelming. Some people will often get disappointed and quit because they have set unrealistic goals for themselves, right from the start and are then unable to achieve them.
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Trond Reinholdtsen graduated as a composer from the Norwegian Academy of Music where he subsequently completed his diploma degree. Reinholdtsen's first pieces were modernistic, complex works in the German style, of which the best known is perhaps Psalm (Narrative Studies) for sinfonietta recorded on the CD Faces (ALBEDO, 2000) alongside other works by composers of the complexity generation. Reinholdtsen was one of the initiators of the contemporary music periodical Parergon, and is still on the editing board. He has also made a name for himself as a singer in the group Nordic Voices, and is frequently encountered in the form of a critic and commentator in a variety of media.
Trond Reinholdtsen's music has developed in an extreme, performative direction; pure music is laced with various extra-musical forms of expression such as essayistic interpretations, live-camera filming and elements including statistical facts, face-making etc. It has also become his trademark to round off his compositions with the "composer's speech to the audience"; the speech may be performed live on screen, via a recording, perhaps communicated by midi-drums, preferably in Norwegian but sometimes in German or English if the work is being performed abroad. Reinholdtsen is considered to be one of the most important and innovative composers of contemporary music of his generation.


Pierre Gasly believes that he is making progress each time he drives the Red Bull. The Frenchman has made some real progress since Australia and has said that he feels more confident after every session. Gasly finished 6th and was pleased to get the extra point for the fastest lap during the Chinese Grand Prix.
"I'm happy to score my first fastest lap in F1 today," said Gasly to The Checkered Flag. "We saw that we had quite a big margin behind us in the last few laps, so we decided to go for it and have an extra pit stop which worked.
"There is still work for me to do for the next race but the good thing is that I know what I need to improve and what I can do better," he added.
"We are quite happy to finish in the points and take the extra point for fastest lap with us.
Gasly will hope that he can continue to build his confidence in the car and that he can continue to improve throughout the next few races.
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\subsection{Texture Generation}
To train our network, five regular texture patterns are selected from DTD. During each training epoch, tiles are sampled from these five texture patterns. The DRAW network is fed the center tile and evaluated using both the latent and reconstruction loss. Different combination of loss functions, shown in table~\ref{tbl:loss_fns}, evaluates the reconstructed texture tile $L^c$. At the same time, a latent loss $L^z$ evaluates the latent variable distribution.\\
We use a Gaussian latent variable distribution for two reasons. First, the gradient of a function of the samples with respect to the distribution parameters can be easily obtained using the so-called reparameterization trick~\cite{rezende2014stochastic,kingma2015auto}. This makes it straightforward to back-propagate unbiased, low variance stochastic gradients of the loss function through the latent distribution. Since our latent prior is a standard Gaussian with mean zero and standard deviation one. The Kullback-Leibler divergence is computed by the closed form equation:
\begin{align}
{ L }^{ z }=\sum _{ t=1 }^{ T }{ KL(Q({ Z }_{ t }|{ h }_{ t }^{ enc })||P({ Z }_{ t })) } \\
{ L }^{ z }=\frac { 1 }{ 2 } \left( \sum _{ t=1 }^{ T }{ { \mu  }_{ t }^{ 2 }+{ \sigma  }_{ t }^{ 2 }-\log { { \sigma  }_{ t }^{ 2 } }  }  \right) -\frac { T }{ 2 }
\end{align}

The original filter bank, proposed in ~\cite{varma2005statistical}, computes a histogram for a texture image. Histograms are not differentiable; so, back-propagation becomes infeasible. To overcome such obstacle, loss is computed directly from LM filter responses. Thus no clustering assignment or binning is performed. Throughout this report, FB refers to LM filter bank response; while FTLBNK refers to a combination of FB with other losses defined in section~\ref{sec:regularization}. The total loss $L$ for the network is the sum of the reconstruction and latent losses $L = L^c + L^z$. Once the four networks are trained, neighboring tiles are generated by feeding center tile and stitching the tiles accordingly.

\subsection{FLTBNK Loss Function}
\label{sec:regularization}
We propose a novel loss function, called FLTBNK. It utilize the idea that filter banks are rotationally and partially color invariant.  The filter banks normalize the images and their filter responses. Thus, it is partially invariant to changes in illumination intensity. Neighboring pixels contribute to a pixel filter's response. Thus, unlike L2 loss, a pixel intensity is correlated with its neighbors. Such characteristics nominate FLTBNK loss function to train our texture generative network.

Texture ~\ref{fig:regularization}\subref{fig:reg_fb} shows the noisy reconstructed texture image when using FB only. To address the color problem, we apply a color regularizer that optimize for the mean color within a tile; this generated texture~\ref{fig:regularization}\subref{fig:reg_fb_color}. In texture ~\ref{fig:regularization}\subref{fig:reg_fb_tv}, we reduce the noise by adding total variation loss to FB. To eliminate both color and noise problems, both total variation and color regularization are added to FB loss as shown in texture~\ref{fig:regularization}\subref{fig:reg_fb_color_tv}.
\input{figures_tex/fb_regularization}

\subsection{Deep Recurrent Attentive Writer (DRAW)}
\label{draw}
Deep Recurrent Attentive Writer \cite{gregor2015draw} (DRAW), introduced by Google DeepMind, is a generative recurrent variational auto-encoder. Figure~\ref{fig:draw-architecture} shows DRAW network architecture. An encoder network determines a distribution over latent variables to capture input data salient information; a decoder network receives samples from the latent distribution and uses them to condition its own distribution over images. This operation is performed iteratively to update attention mechanism that selects "where to read", "where to write", and "what to write".

\begin{figure}[!ht]
	\centering
	\includegraphics[width=0.45\textwidth]{figures/draw-architecture.png}
    \caption{DRAW, a recurrent variational auto-encoder network.}
    \label{fig:draw-architecture}
\end{figure}

\subsection{Texture Loss Functions}
We evaluate four loss functions for texture synthesis. Traditional image loss functions such as L2 loss and cross-entropy are considered; yet, other specific texture loss functions are evaluated as well. Sections ~\ref{sec:loss:fb} and ~\ref{sec:loss:vgg} describe filter bank loss and VGG loss -- a recent loss function used for texture synthesis. The equations for these loss functions are summarized in table~\ref{tbl:loss_fns}

\subsubsection{Filter Bank}
\label{sec:loss:fb}
Varma et al.~\cite{varma2005statistical} propose a statistical approach for texture classification. Before deep neural networks made their mark, it was a very competitive classification approach. Despite being primitive, it is popular for its simplicity and accuracy. To generate a texture descriptor, a filter bank is applied on a texture image. The Leung-Malik (LM), shown in figure ~\ref{fig:flt_bnk}, is a commonly used filter bank. After filtering, a texture image becomes a L-dimensional image, where L is the number of filters. Each pixel, L-dimensional vector, gets classified to pre-trained cluster centers called textons. Using these textons, a texture image is represented by a texton histogram. We propose such concept for training our texture synthesis network.

\begin{figure}[ht]
			\centering
			\includegraphics[scale=0.5]{filters/lmfilters}
        \caption{LM filters bank}
        \label{fig:flt_bnk}
 \end{figure}

\subsubsection{VGG}
\label{sec:loss:vgg}
Another recent loss function for texture generation is very deep convolutional networks (VGG). It is first introduced in a large-scale image classification work~\cite{simonyan2014very}. This texture loss function is proposed by Gatys at el. ~\cite{gatys2015texture}  for texture generation and adapted later for image style transfer. Basically, feature maps generated at different VGG-network layers, by similar textures, have high correlation. Thus, the correlation between input texture $x$ and the synthesized image $\hat x$ is a quantitative metric. To elaborate, $x$ and $\hat x$ are fed into the VGG-network independently, each producing their own set of feature maps, $F^l \in \mathbb{R}^{N_l \textrm{x} M_l}$ and $\hat F^l\in \mathbb{R}^{N_l \textrm{x} M_l}$, where each layer $l$ has $N_l$ distinct feature maps each of size $M_l$ when vectorized. $F_{jk}^l$ is the activation of the $j^{th}$ filter at position $k$ in layer $l$. The correlation between these feature maps  are stored in a matrix $G$ and $\hat G$ respectively. $G^l \in \mathbb{R}^{{N_l \textrm{x} N_l}}$ is defined as:

\[G_{ij}^l = \sum_k F_{ik}^l F_{jk}^l\]

	The distance, between two textures, is the weighted sum of layer-wise distance.

	\[D_l = \dfrac{1}{4N_l^2 M_l^2} \sum_{i,j} (G_{ij}^l - \hat G_{ij}^l)^2\]
	\[\mathcal{D}^{total}(x,\hat x) = \sum_{l=0}^L w_l D_l\]

\section{Introduction}
\input{intro.tex}

\section{Background}
\label{sec:background}
\input{background.tex}

\section{Approach}
\label{sec:approach}
\input{approach.tex}

\section{Experimental Results}
\label{sec:result}
\input{result.tex}

\section{Related Works}
\label{sec:relatedworks}
\input{relatedworks.tex}

\section{Conclusion}
\label{sec:conclusion}
\input{conclusion.tex}

\subsection{Results}

In this section, we show qualitative results of our model on two tasks:  texture reconstruction and large texture generation from a small texture sample. Then, a small quantitative evaluation of the synthesized texture is provided. Finally, we show a human subject study to evaluate generated textures.

\input{figures_tex/reconstruction.tex}
\subsection{Input Texture Reconstruction}
The first evaluation metric is sample texture reconstruction.
Figure~\ref{fig:reconstruction} shows reconstructed textures using four different losses: cross-entropy, L2, FTLBNK and VGG. It shows that corss-entropy, L2 or FTLBNK generates a blurry output. This happens because DRAW is a variational auto-encoder where the loss function is a variational upper bound on the log-likelihood of the data.

All the losses evaluated optimize the generated data likelihood using a latent representation $P_\theta(\tilde{X}|Z)$. In some sense we are averaging out and we are trying to fit a unimodal distribution to a multimodal solution which results in blurry images. On the other hand, the VGG
loss didn't work well with our approach. One reason is that the VGG loss requires large input images, since the VGG architecture contains many pooling layers.
To verify this reason, we ran a public implementation of ~\cite{gatys2015texture}, and
we confirmed that it only works with large images, while it generates almost random noise with small inputs (such as 28x28), as shown in figure~\ref{fig:gatys}

\begin{figure*}[t!]
	\centering
	\includegraphics[scale=0.25]{figures/gatys_vgg}

	\caption{Texture synthesis using an implementation of Gatys \emph{et al.}~\cite{gatys2015texture}. Results show that VGG loss needs large input images to work properly.}
	\label{fig:gatys}
\end{figure*}

\subsection{Texture Generation}
\input{figures_tex/generation.tex}
The second evaluation metric is sample texture expansion. Figure~\ref{fig:generation} shows qualitative output of generated textures using two different losses: L2 and FTLBNK.
Generation using the L2 loss captures texture colors well, but it doesn't perform very well on more complicated textures. For example, the first sample of green texture contains many fine details, and
the last sample texture contains curves instead of a simple chess-board tiles. In both cases, the L2 loss performs poorly. On the other hand, FTLBNK does a better job capturing the textures outlines, but it suffers from a color-problem.
This is probably because the color regularization term from section~\ref{sec:regularization} focuses largely on the mean color value for the red, green and blue channels independently and less on the correlation between different color channels.\\
To numerically evaluate generated textured without bias, generated texture is compared with original textures using two distance metric: VGG and texture histogram as originally proposed in ~\cite{varma2005statistical}.

Figure ~\ref{fig:texture_distance} shows the VGG and histogram distance between original and synthesized texture. The orange and green textures from figure ~\ref{fig:reconstruction}, first and third columns, are used for evaluation. From the figure, we conclude that a network trained with VGG loss generates a texture with smaller VGG distance. On the other hand, a network trained with FB loss generates a texture with smaller histogram distance. A merit for histogram distance is using textons which are clusters trained one a texture dataset. Thus, we believe the histogram distance is more informative than the VGG distances based on solely a pair of images information.

\begin{figure}[h!]
\centering
\begin{subfigure}[b]{0.40\textwidth}
			\centering
			\includegraphics[scale=0.5]{general_figures/vgg_distance}
		\end{subfigure}
		\begin{subfigure}[b]{0.40\textwidth}
			\centering
			\includegraphics[scale=0.5]{general_figures/texture_histogram_distance}
		\end{subfigure}
        \caption{Distance between original texture and synthesized texture using both VGG and histogram distances. The orange and green textures from figure ~\ref{fig:reconstruction} are used for evaluation. }
        \label{fig:texture_distance}
\end{figure}

\subsection{Human Subjects Evaluation}
To further evaluate the loss functions used to generated textures, we conducted a short human subject study. The study was designed as a survey asking human subjects to rate the quality of resemblance (5 point Likert Scale) between the original and generated textures for each loss function. All participants are machine learning students, thus, our study suffers some level of selection bias. Due to time constraints, we obtained 18 responses, but this is enough to run a statistical test. To avoid confirmation bias, the loss functions names are hidden in the survey. As the independent variable is categorical, and the dependent variable is ordinal (5 point Likert Scale), we perform the Kruskal-Wallis Test (non-parametric). The p-value is $<< 0.05$ and therefore we reject the null hypothesis that the medians of all groups (loss functions) are equal.

Figure~\ref{fig:responses} shows a summary of the responses. The key observations is that although traditional losses (cross-entropy and L2) have more `Excellent' ratings, our proposed loss, FLTBNK, seems to get better overall ratings. FLTBNK gets many `Very Good' ratings compared to other losses. We hypothesize that the results of traditional losses have high variance, while results of FLTBNK are more consistent, and so, we see that a majority of the responses to traditional losses are `Acceptable', whereas for FLTBNK the majority of responses are `Very Good'.
\input{figures_tex/responses.tex}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


The doctor said my knee is fine. Perhaps a contusion?? I took X-RAYS and paid $30 in co-pay fees. But my knee still hurts. I walk with a limp and it's hard to walk for more than a few minutes. I've been using a cane. Using a cane is interesting as people seem to be nicer to you when you have one. Perhaps I will use one no matter what.
I had only been to an IMAX theater a few times in my life. Mostly at amusement parks that have that as an attraction. Well, yesterday I went to the IMAX in downtown San Jose to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Guess what? Those movies are tough to watch.. The screen is so big that I can't concentrate. It's like riding a dizzying roller coaster for 2 hours. I had to close my eyes for long periods of time to stop myself from getting sick. The cost is $13 for an adult ticket. That's a lot of bread my friend. I could have gone to a normal theater and paid $6 for the matinee. Oh well. You learn.
This morning I woke at 7:15 AM and went for a bike ride. The doctor said that riding a bike is actually good for the knee, so I've decided to start riding three times a day. Morning, Mid Day, and at night. We'll see how that goes. I stepped on the scale at the doctors office and I weigh a stunning 218 pounds. DOH!! That's a lot of stress on the knees. I weighed 176 in high school. That's 42 pounds more. But I love food so much. I just want to eat and eat. It's tough. I don't think I'm fat. I excercise way more than the normal person, it's just that I love to eat. And in large quantities. It's so enjoyable.
I'm gonna try to take this training very serious. I'll post any weight differences in the upcoming weeks. Wish me luck.


Crafted from double-layered jersey. this soft. stretchy beanie is the ideal weight for adding a little extra warmth to your outfit. With a contrasting interior. it can be worn reversed for more styling options.


text:
Q: golang slice allocation performance I stumbled upon an interesting thing while checking performance of memory allocation in GO.
package main

import (
      "fmt"
      "time"
    )

func main(){
   const alloc int = 65536
   now := time.Now()
   loop := 50000
   for i := 0; i<loop;i++{
      sl := make([]byte, alloc)
      i += len(sl) * 0
   }
   elpased := time.Since(now)
   fmt.Printf("took %s to allocate %d bytes %d times", elpased, alloc, loop)
}

I am running this on a Core-i7 2600 with go version 1.6 64bit (also same results on 32bit) and 16GB of RAM (on WINDOWS 10)
so when alloc is 65536 (exactly 64K) it runs for 30 seconds (!!!!).
When  alloc is 65535 it takes ~200ms.
Can someone explain this to me please?
I tried the same code at home with my core i7-920 @ 3.8GHZ but it didn't show same results (both took around 200ms). Anyone has an idea what's going on?

A: Setting GOGC=off improved performance (down to less than 100ms). Why?
becaue of escape analysis. When you build with go build -gcflags -m the compiler prints whatever allocations escapes to heap. It really depends on your machine and GO compiler version but when the compiler decides that the allocation should move to heap it means 2 things:
1. the allocation will take longer (since "allocating" on the stack is just 1 cpu instruction)
2. the GC will have to clean up that memory later - costing more CPU time
for my machine, the allocation of 65536 bytes escapes to heap and 65535 doesn't.
that's why 1 bytes changed the whole proccess from 200ms to 30s. Amazing..

A: Note/Update 2021: as Tapir Liui notes in Go101 with this tweet:

As of Go 1.17, Go runtime will allocate the elements of slice x on stack if the compiler proves they are only used in the current goroutine and N <= 64KB:
var x = make([]byte, N)

And Go runtime will allocate the array y on stack if the compiler proves it is only used in the current goroutine and N <= 10MB:
var y [N]byte

Then how to allocated (the elements of) a slice which size is larger than 64KB but not larger than 10MB on stack (and the slice is only used in one goroutine)?
Just use the following way:
var y [N]byte
var x = y[:]

Considering stack allocation is faster than heap allocation, that would have a direct effect on your test, for alloc equals to 65536 and more.
Tapir adds:

In fact, we could allocate slices with arbitrary sum element sizes on stack.
const N = 500 * 1024 * 1024 // 500M
var v byte = 123

func createSlice() byte {
 var s = []byte{N: 0}
 for i := range s { s[i] = v }
 return s[v]
}

Changing 500 to 512 make program crash.

A: the reason is very simple.
const alloc int = 65535
0x0000 00000 (example.go:8)     TEXT    "".main(SB), ABIInternal, $65784-0
const alloc int = 65536
0x0000 00000 (example.go:8)     TEXT    "".main(SB), ABIInternal, $248-0
the difference is where the slice are created.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


This entry was posted in General Conference Calls, General Training, Leads Training and tagged Andy Riddle, Audio, Geographic Marketing Request, GMR, Lead Training, Lead Types, NAA, National Agents Alliance, Robbie Craft, The Alliance. Bookmark the permalink.
Geographic Marketing Requests, or GMRs, are a powerful tool for an agent. What is a GMR? How can a GMR be setup and what are the benefits? How can you tell if there is a GMR available in your area? How can you ensure the lead flow you are looking for?
Samantha Osborne of the Lead Performance Team answers all of these questions concerning Geographic Marketing Requests (GMRs) in this Pitstop with the LPT!


text:
Q: How to convert HTML date to ZonedDateTime in SpringBoot/MVC/Web? Im writing a code with spring boot, its a web project. Im also using thymeleaf and bootstrap.
I have a model that contains a ZonedDateTime variable called 'validade'.
In my HTML/Thymeleaf file, I have a datepicker that allows you to pick day, month and year.
However, when I clicks submit, I get a spring boot error. How can I tell spring boot to convert this Date to ZonedDateTime? I cannot change this variable to LocalDate or LocalDateTime.

There was an unexpected error (type=Bad Request, status=400).
Validation failed for object='tool'. Error count: 1
org.springframework.validation.BindException:
org.springframework.validation.BeanPropertyBindingResult: 1 errors
Field error in object 'tool' on field 'validade': rejected value
[2021-01-08]; codes
[typeMismatch.tool.validade,typeMismatch.validade,typeMismatch.java.time.ZonedDateTime,typeMismatch];
arguments
[org.springframework.context.support.DefaultMessageSourceResolvable:
codes [tool.validade,validade]; arguments []; default message
[validade]]; default message [Failed to convert property value of type
'java.lang.String' to required type 'java.time.ZonedDateTime' for
property 'validade'; nested exception is
org.springframework.core.convert.ConversionFailedException: Failed to
convert from type [java.lang.String] to type
[@org.springframework.format.annotation.DateTimeFormat
@javax.persistence.Column java.time.ZonedDateTime] for value
'2021-01-08'; nested exception is java.lang.IllegalArgumentException:
Parse attempt failed for value [2021-01-08]]

<form method="POST" th:object="${tool}"  th:action="@{/tools/add}">
...
    <div lang="pt-br" class='date'>

    <input th:value="${tool.validade}" th:field="${tool.validade}" lang="pt-br" id='data-validade' type='date' data-date-format="YYYY/MM/DD" class="form-control" />

    </div>
...
</form>

public class Tool{
...
    @DateTimeFormat(pattern = "dd-MM-yyyy")
    @Column(nullable = true, unique = false)
    private ZonedDateTime validade;

}

A: The pattern is not correct, according to your logs, the value 2021-01-08 was sent. That means that the date is following the pattern "yyyy-MM-dd".

A: The solution was to implement my own converter and inform spring boot of it.
The code below solves the issue.
    import java.time.LocalDate;
    import java.time.ZoneId;
    import java.time.ZonedDateTime;
    import java.time.format.DateTimeFormatter;
    import org.springframework.boot.context.properties.ConfigurationPropertiesBinding;
    import org.springframework.core.convert.converter.Converter;
    import org.springframework.stereotype.Component;

@Component
@ConfigurationPropertiesBinding
public class ZonedDateTimeConverter implements Converter<String, ZonedDateTime> {

    @Override
    public ZonedDateTime convert(String source) {
        try {
            if (source == null) {
                return null;
            }

            if (source.contains(":") == false) {

                LocalDate ld = LocalDate.parse(source, DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("yyyy-MM-dd"));

                ZonedDateTime atStartOfDay = ld.atStartOfDay(ZoneId.systemDefault());

                return atStartOfDay;
            } else {
                return ZonedDateTime.parse(source);
            }

        } catch (Exception ex) {
            //ex.printStackTrace();
        }

        return null;
    }

}


text:
Wendy Ryden
Liminally True: Creative Nonfiction as Transformative Thirdspace
for Marco
A student from twenty years ago who became an accomplished high school English teacher in a challenging urban district wrote to me recently and said: "I miss creative nonfiction. I want to enroll again. I need to write like I used to in that class." He also tells me that he tells his students—the ones who say they hate writing— about our creative nonfiction course and that one of his fondest memories of college is when the class went out to dinner at a Turkish restaurant and, as he describes it, watched the professor killing it on the dance floor.
I want to propose here a possible way of accounting for the satisfaction that a lot of students and I seem to experience in the creative nonfiction class, and that idea is liminality. It's natural to talk about liminality with regard to CNF in terms of literary genre that defies easy placement. Sometimes referred to as the fourth genre in literature, the essay and other creative nonfiction forms occupy a liminal space in the world of writing, existing at the interstices of various genres. As has been much discussed, the term itself—creative nonfiction—is paradoxical in several ways, including its definition by what it is not, the yoking of the word "creative" with what seems like the opposite of the imaginative, and even the implication that not all composing is, in effect, "creative." Such generic liminality gives rise to similar institutional ambiguity as attested to in Douglas Hesse's articles "The Place of Creative Nonfiction" and "Who Owns Creative Nonfiction?" Hesse discusses the way creative nonfiction texts seem to challenge our textual classification systems and raises this point: "Where to put certain books on library and store shelves is metonymic of more complex questions regarding creative nonfiction's place in English studies" ("Place" 238). The "creative" component of such writing has aligned it with a belletristic tradition and situated it within creative writing domains and pedagogies, while the "nonfiction" element invokes the expository mode, long the bailiwick of first year writing and advanced composition as well as the researched exploratory often situated in journalism departments. Where to put creative nonfiction still remains an active question. Far from a vexed position, however, we can see this interstitial placement between creative and expository writing—this liminality—as powerfully productive, not merely in terms of genre but in terms of method and pedagogy for the writing classroom. It is not the definitions of creative nonfiction that are important to the argument I am making here but instead the liminal space where the juxtapositions meet. Creative nonfiction both bridges and frustrates the divide between creative and academic modes; the personal and the scholarly; indeed, it can function as a hinge between the two in a way that reveals the artificiality of these dichotomies. Creative nonfiction's generativity derives in large part from this liminality, an idea of liminality evoked not only in the anthropologist Victor Turner's classic notion of the liminal but in more postmodern assertions of the principle, such as urban planner/geographer Edward Soja's concept of "Thirdspace."
In their Writing about Writing textbook, Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs consider the concept of the liminal in their discussion of threshold concepts for studying writing. They reference the idea of liminality with regard to the learner's entry into new discursive space:
While learners are struggling with the ideas [of a new discourse], they find themselves in a "liminal" space—a space where they move back and forth, start to get a handle on the ideas, then realize they don't really have a handle on them. Learning in this liminal space can be quite uncomfortable because learners have to examine their previous ideas and experiences and try to understand something that might conflict with those ideas.
But when learners finally do grasp these threshold concepts, the way they see things is changed--transformed, likely for good. (6)
In this model of liminality as applied to writing, the novice writer is akin to the cultural initiates that Turner describes in his landmark work on cultural liminality, and the idea of liminality takes on a teleological dimension as a phase that must be worked through to achieve a new, transcendent identity. In this way, liminality with regard to writing and being a writer is configured as a lack, one that eventually must be obviated. The discomfort that Wardle and Downs refer to can be accounted for in Turner's description of the liminal subject as one who is "at once no longer classified and not yet classified" (96). But while this description suggests a state of lack, it also describes potential, one which we might try to cultivate rather than simply resolve, not unlike Keats's concept of negative capability, in which one dwells in uncertainty. (Such tentativeness characterizes the subjectivity often found in the creative nonfiction persona, which the author might use to explore suggestions rather than eristically argue assertions.) As Jochen Achilles and Ina Bergman note, liminality is something that can occur when boundaries are transgressed (23), and we are no longer in fixed territories. It is this aspect in particular that Edward Soja articulates in his extension of the idea of liminality through the notion of Thirdspace that has particularly interesting applicability for creative nonfiction as both genre and method. As students practice resisting conclusion in favor of exploration in their writing, they try on the mindset of indeterminacy that invites this place of generative liminality, a liberatory place that can nonetheless be challenging to inhabit.
Soja's geographical concept of Thirdspace can be construed as both material and imaginary and can be described not as an uncomfortable intermediary of binaries but rather as a productive, transgressive site, as he says, "a meeting ground, a site of hybridity and mestizaje…moving beyond entrenched boundaries, a margin or edge where ties can be severed and also where new ties can be forged…it can be creatively imagined but obtains meaning only when practised and fully LIVED" ("Expanding" 276). Soja states that his notion of Thirdspace is an elaboration of Henri LeFebvre's theorizations on spatiality and cites several feminist and postcolonial critics, bell hooks and Gloria Anzaldúa among them, as enacting some of the essence of Thirdspace in their work ("Expanding" 270-75). Anzaldúa's borderland epistemology of mestizaje, for example, which Soja references in the quote above, captures certain aspects of the feeling he is after in his corrective of geography's traditional focus on what he calls "First Space" or "Perceived Space" and "Second Space" or "Conceived Space" ("Expanding" 265-66). He describes Anzaldúa's radical positioning as "being outside and inside at the same time" ("Expanding" 274), articulating a liminality of plenitude rather than lack that allows for not just hybridity but a questioning of both positions. This last point is key in my elaboration of Soja's applicability to the creative nonfiction classroom. For in addition to his assertion of a logic of inclusivity in which Thirdspace invites thinking that is "both/and" rather than "either/or" ("Journeys" 5), I see a further prospect emanating from Soja's rationale—what I would call a neither/nor positioning, a deep skepticism that aligns with essayistic thinking and practice. Far from a nihilistic position, it is one that is paradoxically productive, not just in the writing itself but in the way that writing comes alive, is "lived and practiced" in the physical space of the classroom. This possibility sometimes manifests when my students write about family and their placement within it from the perspective of an outsider, as they try the technique Lisa Knopp calls "perhapsing," by writing an assignment about what happened the day they were born. The imaginative leap required here as well as the research students do by reading newspaper articles from their fateful day positions them in a different relation to their family history than they previously occupied, one where they might, for example, imagine parents as people different from whom the students know, parents who were not yet parents, who were living somewhere else, who were not yet thinking about divorce, etc. The students simultaneously locate that history in a broader context and speculate about events they can never know first-hand. This process of estrangement, of disengaging and re-engaging with their own story, takes on added momentum as they witness other students in the class participate in the same act of reimagination.
While utopian in description, Soja sees Thirdspace as decidedly place-based in enactment, a literal space as much as a concept. Using a geographer's material groundedness has particular utility in discussing creative nonfiction because the word geography literally means "earth writing" (Teverson and Upstone 9), a phrase that resonates with the terrain of CNF (pun intended) reliant on what Donaldo Macedo has called (somewhat disparagingly) the "discourse of experience" (18) and a concretized reality. But this groundedness also allows educators to see the space of the CNF classroom itself as a literal meeting ground, one where the writing that is embodied through lived experience as an imaginary Thirdspace parallels the material Thirdspace of the classroom itself, serving as a point where the academic and other lives of our students meet. When a student of Armenian descent describes for the class her participation in an event marking the anniversary of the genocide, I observe the impact on other students who appear to be learning about history in a way markedly different than if this information had been introduced to them through a disinterested text. In its assemblage of both student words and student bodies that accompany their writing, this space has particular potential to serve as a fulcrum of possibility, one that is "open" and "dynamic" rather than "fixed and closed" (Campbell 68) as the various discourses and experiences of student lives that might otherwise remain separate are placed side by side in tensive ways. I find myself wondering if that is perhaps what my beloved student meant when he said, "I need to write like I used to in that class."
Much scholarship in recent years has taken a geographical turn in its interest in and insistence on the importance of place and the interdependence of locational ecologies. We are never "nowhere"; we are always "somewhere"—physically, psychologically, socially, environmentally—and that "somewhere" affords possibilities and enacts limitations on our thoughts, our actions, our choices and their consequences. It behooves us to understand where we are and its effects on us, how we construct and are constructed by location—and to consider pedagogy in light of our embodied presences in overlapping and relational spaces. As Robert Brooke and Jason McIntosh compellingly argue in "Deep Maps: Teaching Rhetorical Engagement through Place-Conscious Education," it is by exploring our "relationships to a place" that we begin "the critical and visionary work of writing for a place" (144) and that "Such work … is at the very core of rhetorical engagement" (147). They and others offer place-based pedagogy and composing as corrective to a governing metaphor of what Nedra Reynolds refers to as "placelessness," in which "successful pieces of writing are considered to be those that 'overcome' place and time, those that universalize an experience" (258) and, in effect, exist in some kind of fallacious vacuum. While Soja's perspective undoubtedly is in line with this geographical thinking, I see an interesting contradiction evolving from his Thirdspace trajectory that at first glance might seem at odds with "grounded" earth writing and is connected to the provisional nature of classroom space.
To understand this, I consider further Reynolds' idea of "placelessness." Her criticism in "Cultural Geographies and Images of Place" is contextualized in response to a specific analysis of a Harvard University video, Shaped by Writing, that features professors and students at the university extolling the virtues of writing and its instruction at Harvard. Reynolds' critique is incisive in identifying a belletristic assumption in the video's conception, one that relies on a traditional and privileged place of the liberal arts education and that in some ways belies the more interesting scholarship on rhetoric that places writing in active, meaningful contexts. Instead the video portrays writing as a "universal experience" steeped in the "values of a liberal arts education" practiced by graduates who are "products of one of the world's finest institutions of higher learning" (257). Further, this somewhat romanticized vision of writing and its role in intellectual development seems to ignore and exclude very different realities of non-elite institutions and writing located outside academic contexts. To be sure Reynolds' methodology of place, which relies on cultural geography's understanding of "how places reproduce the identities and power structures of those who occupy them" (252), gives her great insight into the video's shortcomings.
But is it possible that in our attempts to compensate for the fallacy of an ungrounded epistemology, we unnecessarily limit the role of the imagined that Soja's Thirdspace seems to invite and re-envision? Is it possible to see potential rather than deficit in a notion of space temporarily unmoored from its place-based constraints to create a provisional, ludic geography of realized imagination? Place-based theories, such as Brook and McIntosh's deployment of William Least Heat-Moon's "deep maps," allow for the abstraction of the psychological and the imagined, what Soja terms Second, or Conceived, Space. But it is the liminality of Soja's Thirdspace that asks us to think in terms of a carnivalesque collision of the imagined and real, as we might see in a classroom space that invites students to imagine and re-present lived experience safe in the assumption that it is a test, a try-on, not necessarily tied to lasting expectations or changes but something to exist within the transient classroom sphere.
Some have seen the practice of creative nonfiction as aligned with expressivism and writing to learn (see Bourelle), thus emphasizing the teaching of such writing as exploratory method (rather than product or craft), one that fosters the development of subjectivity. While the nature of personal writing itself may produce this effect, the classroom, where such writing is shared, contains the heightened potential for transgressive interloping. But it is not a space completely given over to the personal discourse of student lives as those might be practiced with families or friends. In fact, it is because the creative nonfiction class violates the terms of both those spaces—the academic and, let's call it "civilian," life—that I see a "critical thirding" (Soja, "Journeys" 5) occurring. When a student, for example, writes of a gendered double-standard she sees enacted in her family with regard to policing sexual behavior, her bravery in disclosing for class her family secret is not only a betrayal of a family code where she exposes an unsavory domestic truth. It is also an incursion into what constitutes academic protocol when she presents the problem as a personal, embodied reality rather than an abstract concept. But in writing the word "violate" above, I realize, in the time of "me too," that it is not a nice-sounding term. Don't I mean to say something more pleasant and positive, happier, like merging or hybridity, or talk about the way the class serves as a bridge between different worlds, etc.? Those nice sounding, community-oriented words. I don't mean to disparage or exclude the possibility of community at all, but I see that I want the violence, the edge, of the sister word violate, because it is that "nastiness" (another contemporary expression associated with female empowerment) that brings Thirdspace into play as a transgressive space, one that is not a "better" place per se, but which, in its provisional assemblage, allows us to call into question the tenets of those first and second spaces that bifurcate our lives. The creative nonfiction classroom is both a conceived space, but also a real space, assuming you are not teaching an on-line course, yet there is something Brigadoon-like about it in its performativity. It comes in and out of existence—for those times each week when the scheduled violation occurs.
The CNF class is particularly positioned to be this kind of authorizing class that can and should foster texts and lives by tapping into not just the communal, which is vitally important, but also the liminal that puts us in a place of wonderment about where we are and how we live. In Lucille McCarthy's composition classic "A Stranger in Strange Lands," in which she follows a student progressing through the writing assignments of his various college classes, she discusses the reaction of students to the workshopping community that was created in a composition class, making the observation that "… an important social function [must have been] … served by these students' work with each other" evidenced "by their clear memory, a year and a half later, both of their essays and of each others' reactions to them" (255). This is no small thing, this important social function, when I consider that many of my students tell me they barely remember what happens in their classes as a whole from week to week, let alone semester to semester. But my hope is that the nature of the CNF workshop can take us even further, in terms of investment, insight, and self-efficacy, by mining the perspectival changes of creative nonfiction. By inhabiting the liminal irony of the creative nonfiction space, students may become not just "mature" writers—those "able to satisfy … [their] own purposes with a wide range of audiences" (McCarthy 261)—but aware beings who appreciate the ecological range of their enmeshed existences.
As I mention above, in describing the potentialities of Thirdspace, Soja says that it opens up the possibility to "At least temporarily, set aside the demands to make an either/or choice and contemplate instead the possibility of a both/and also logic" ("Journeys" 5, my emphasis). If we add, as I suggest, the possibility of neither/nor logic too, then we have that which allows for something different to occur when all other avenues have been excluding a particular epistemological orientation to an idea. The CNF class also has the power to take lived experience out of its home contexts and render that experience strange and secular, new and exciting, to leave it not just as it is, but to make it a world to be explored and created. This of course is the nature of the genre itself, but in creating a place where there is a real embodied audience to hear our words, the classroom changes the performance from an interaction with the anonymous audience that many creative (and other) writers have internalized to a vital one that will identify our stories with our actual selves, our embodied selves, that will not disappear once we read the last word of the text but that will remain stubbornly, obtrusively there. Does/can this happen with workshop pedagogy for any genre of writing? Yes. But I think this dynamic takes on particular saliency when we have identified and performed our words as "true." When students read their stories of love, betrayal, success, death, loss, family conflict, or the "tea cup" dramas of realism, romance, parties, getting drunk, favorite pets, these experiences are released from the claustrophobic constraints of domesticity and familiarity to be constructed, not as transcendent or universal, but as artifacts of our human narrative. The sharing that changes them from private to public necessarily changes their meaning and significance for the teller when students hear how their stories, whether similar or different, exist in concert with the life experiences of others. When a student reads her essay about her mentally and physically abusive boyfriend, this violence is no longer just a social issue without referent, and neither is it just one individual story. It becomes both those things, as it lives in the classroom.
Soja's "both/and" logic as opposed to "either/or" that he sees as a feature of Thirdspace suggests that thirding is in some ways about eliminating or re-seeing binaries. But perhaps more than that, it is about providing a means for negotiating the pathology of dichotomy. And Thirdspace will do this by unveiling, allowing us to see first and second spaces in new ways. It, Thirdspace, doesn't transcend as much as it reveals (Miley 67). This disruptive thing will take existing structures and bring them together paradoxically through dislocation. This is the kind of disruption described by scholars of intersectionality, such as Jen Soriano, who, in "Multiplicity from the Margins: The Expansive Truth of Intersectional Form," writes of "intersectional form" that rejects "homogenous truth in favor of a more complex reality … for the sake of conveying and even modeling new ways of being in the world." The student who brings her story of patriarchal family oppression into the classroom changes for the moment not only the way she sees her family story but the way we see the "objective" classroom for that period of time, what counts as academic. It is precisely because Thirdspace may be temporary, elusive—akin to a traveling show that sets up and breaks down—and free from the burden of definitive change that it can open up possibility. (The student perhaps is only beginning to question the values of her family or see their relationship differently. She is not willing to make some kind of permanent break or change with all she has known.)
What this means in the context of a college curriculum is that not every course can or should be this kind of space where the imaginary and the real collide. But providing curricular apertures through courses like creative nonfiction that juxtapose disparate discourses can serve to help students re-see other parts of their curriculum and other parts of their lives and perhaps contribute to the transformation of both. While the satisfaction of bonding over intellectual discussion may not always be apparent to all of our students, the sharing of represented lived experience can sometimes scaffold that connection. As one of my CNF students explained with regard to her experience of sharing her work and hearing the stories of others, "we were more than just a class; friendships were formed there based on the stories we told." James Engelhardt and Jeremy Schraffenberger, in "Ecological Creative Writing," identify this as a potential of creative writing classes generally in the way they can create zones the authors call "ecotones," those "transitional areas" or "'between' places" that foment "dynamic tension" (272-73). Engelhardt and Schraffenberger extoll the advantageous positioning of such courses as trickster-like, able to "traverse seemingly rigid disciplinary boundaries" (274). This is by way of saying, then, that such courses are not luxuries but rather essential, strategic components of critical development based ultimately on fostering that cornerstone: agency. Students may come to see their education not just as something to be endured or apart from them or, worse, "done" to them, as so many of my students seem to imply, but as something meaningful in which they are active participants.
In their book The Meaningful Writing Project, Michele Eodice, Anne Ellen Geller, and Neal Lerner discuss the ways in which students might experience writing as agentive. They write, "[a]gency is strengthened by offering experiences that get students to notice they have the capacity to direct energies for themselves, in and beyond classrooms" (53). We typically understand this in terms of assignments and classes inviting connections between what students see as their academic work and what they see as their lives—such as creating literacy narratives or service learning projects—or, as The Meaningful Writing Project suggests, assignments that connect students to future and past selves, or as applying writing to real-world problems, or even seeking outside publication of work. Indeed, this sounds right, and certainly the creative nonfiction class can and does participate in the project of fostering this kind of agency. But I want to suggest that viewed through the lens of Thirdspace, the CNF class might do something else, too. Rather than synthesizing the different, CNF understood as Thirdspace, disrupts and elucidates the normalized. This is a different kind of agency, one that students might not realize they even want—until they do.
Recently I asked my students to practice place-based composing, using Derek Owens's foray into such writing as inspiration. In his book Composition and Sustainability, Owens writes about living on Long Island, NY, an apt example for my students who are well-acquainted with the communities he references and the problems he identifies. Despite what almost seems like a begrudging acknowledgement of his privileged middle-class position, he presents an overwhelmingly negative view of his habitat, the "sea of suburban sprawl," a view that my students seem both to agree with and resent him for expressing. Owens is very thorough in cataloguing the natural, historical, and social dimensions of his environment, and he observes that the lack of authentic "public commons, of meeting places, of coffee shops or bookstores, or independent movie theaters or parks" (46) produces a dysfunction felt most acutely by the young and old.
Owens's piece led my students to take on, with a new-found sense of irony, the ersatz "meeting places" passing for a public sphere that gobble up the suburban sprawl they and I call home. One student wrote about her favorite Starbucks with a now jaded perspective, seeing its dystopic dimensions as evidence of disconnection and isolation even as the chain tries to project intimacy and creative/intellectual community. She describes a world where sugar and caffeine are dispensed in an assembly line fashion to keep the alienated and disaffected functioning. And yet she confesses to being no different, to craving her macchiato that she has been drinking since she was a little girl. Another student revisits with fresh eyes the annual car show she has been attending since adolescence, describing as tawdry and banal that which is meant to celebrate elegance and affluence. She wonders, then, what this says about her, that she will continue to attend this event with her family as part of their yearly tradition that has shaped her life. As the students discuss together these and other narratives, considering what it means to call Long Island home, they call into question the lives they lead and create a momentary space, suspended, free from the immediate constraints of first and second spaces, a "contracontextual space" that allows them to temporarily break the sutures of normalizing discourse (see Anderson 66-77) and to create essayistic worlds where the terms of such discourse can be examined.
When I think of my beloved student's image of his dancing professor and his rendering of me that has taken on a second life with new students I will never even know—let's call them my grandchildren—I find it to be not just an apt image of joy (although it is that) but a metaphor of eccentricity that captures some of the edge I am after here: the violation of space and dislocation where something that shouldn't be is—the belly dancing body of a text-bound English professor amidst a group of students who have tested their definitions of what it means to be friends, students, colleagues, who in many ways now know each other better than they know their families, or at least differently, who now return to families and friends different people than they were, who bring some of that new self to those places (students tell me sometimes about how they read their essay to family members brought to tears by their revelations), who go back to their classes with a perspective of school that is a bit more wry, wise, ironic but also joyful and invested in themselves and the work they might do. That, I think is an ideal, a "conceived" space, but an essential one, a brass ring worth striving for.
Click here to download a printable PDF with Works Cited.
Wendy Ryden is a Professor of English at Long Island University Post, where she oversees the writing across the curriculum program. She teaches a wide variety of courses in writing and literature, including creative nonfiction and writing and healing. Publications include Reading, Writing, and the Rhetorics of Whiteness (Routledge) co-authored with Ian Marshall and Haunting Realities: Naturalist Gothic and American Realism (University of Alabama), co-edited with Monika Elbert. She is also co-editor with Peter Khost of the Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning (JAEPL).
J. Drew Lanham
On "Joyas Voladoras"
4.1 Spotlight
Marco Wilkinson
Self Speaking World
Jennifer Case
Place Studies: Theory and Practice in Environmental Nonfiction
Return to Pedagogy

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Would you party with a python?
A 10-foot reticulated python curled its way around Tony Rivet's body, flicking its tongue and fixing its persistent gaze on nearby objects and people.
But Rivet wasn't worried about becoming a snake dinner. In fact, he hopes to make the demonstration a business strategy.
Rivet, a 24-year-old Thibodaux native, and his girlfriend, Niki Scott, are in the beginning phases of creating "Party With Reptiles," a business where, for a fee, the two will show off exotic reptiles and animals for birthday parties, family gatherings and other events.
Rivet said has been fascinated with snakes and other reptiles since he was a boy. He hopes "Party With Reptiles" might one day allow him and Scott to turn their passion into a viable, full-time job.
Scott, a 27-year-old Houma native, said they are still in the process of collecting animals. They plan to stock several species of snakes, frogs, turtles, exotic birds and a monitor lizard to perform at shows.
They can be booked now for shows with three different kinds of pythons, including the reticulated python, a tiger reticulated python and an African rock python. Scott also said she picked up a sulcata tortoise — one of the world's largest land turtles — Saturday. The tortoise, about 10 pounds now, can grow to be as large as 200 pounds, she said.
After showing off the animals, participants would be allowed to touch and hold the safe ones, Scott said.
The two said their hope is to use these shows to educate people about animal care and to diminish the fear of exotic animals like snakes. One of the reasons for that fear, Scott said, is because of a mistaken assumption that most snakes are venomous. They will not handle or show any venomous snakes, she said.
For now, Scott and Rivet are managing the business in between full-time jobs, but their long-term plans are ambitious.
"We eventually even want to open a pet shop," Scott said.
Rivet said the shop would specialize in selling exotic animals and in showing people how to take care of them. He said that breeding, selling and handling snakes requires a permit from the state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, which he has.
For more information about "Party with Reptiles," visit www.partywithreptiles.webs.com or call Scott at 209-6962.


text:
104.00 Anti-Bullying/Anti-Harassment Policy Menu
68 students received the Seal of Biliteracy for the 2020-2021 school year
104.00 Anti-Bullying/Anti-Harassment Policy
The Ankeny Community School District is committed to providing all students, employees, and volunteers with a safe and civil school environment in which all members of the school community are treated with dignity and respect. Bullying and/or harassing behavior can seriously disrupt the ability of school employees to maintain a safe and civil environment, and the ability of students to learn and succeed. Bullying and/or harassment of or by students, staff, and volunteers is against federal and state law, as well as local policy and is not tolerated by the board.
Therefore, school employees, volunteers, and students shall not engage in bullying or harassing behavior while on school property, in a school-owned or school-operated vehicle, while attending or participating in school-sponsored or sanctioned activities, and and/or while away from school grounds if the conduct materially interferes with the orderly operation of the educational environment or is likely to do so.
Complaints may be filed with the superintendent/designee pursuant to the regulation accompanying this policy. Complaints will be investigated within a reasonable time frame.
A school employee, volunteer, student, or student's parent/guardian who promptly, reasonably, and in good faith reports an incident of bullying or harassment, in compliance with the procedures outlined by the district, to the appropriate school official designated by the school district, shall be immune from civil or criminal liability relating to such report and to participation in any administrative or judicial proceeding resulting from or relating to the report.
Retaliation Prohibited
Individuals who knowingly file false bullying or harassment complaints and any person who gives false statements in an investigation may be subject to discipline by appropriate measures.
Any student found to have violated or retaliated in violation of this policy shall be subject to measures up to, and including, suspension and expulsion. Any school employee found to have violated or retaliated in violation of this policy shall be subject to measures up to, and including, termination of employment. Any school volunteer found to have violated or retaliated in violation of this policy shall be subject to measures up to, and including, removal from service and exclusion from school grounds.
For the purposes of this policy, the defined words shall have the following meaning:
"Electronic" means any communication involving the transmission of information by wire, radio, optic cable, electromagnetic, or other similar means. "Electronic" includes but is not limited to communication via electronic mail, internet-based communications, pager service, cell phones, and electronic text messaging.
"Harassment" and "bullying" mean any electronic, written, verbal, or physical act or conduct toward an individual based on any trait(s) or characteristic(s) of the individual which creates an objectively hostile school or work environment that meets one or more of the following conditions:
Places the individual in reasonable fear of harm to the individual's person or property.
Has a substantial detrimental effect on the individual's physical or mental health.
Has the effect of substantially interfering with the individual's academic or career performance.
Has the effect of substantially interfering with the individual's ability to participate in or benefit from services, activities, or privileges provided by a school.
"Trait or characteristic" includes but is not limited to age, color, creed, national origin, race, religion, marital status, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, physical attributes, physical or mental ability or disability, ancestry, political party preference, political belief, socioeconomic status, or familial status.
"Volunteer" means an individual who has regular, significant contact with students.
A Complainant who wishes to avail him/herself of this procedure may do so by filing a complaint with the superintendent/designee. An alternate will be designated in the event it is claimed that the superintendent/designee committed the alleged discrimination or some other conflict of interest exists.
Complaints shall be filed within 15 days of the event giving rise to the complaint or from the date the Complainant reasonably should have been aware of the complained-about occurrence. The Complainant will state the nature of the complaint and the remedy requested. The Complainant shall receive assistance as needed.
School employees, volunteers, and students shall not engage in reprisal, retaliation, or false accusation against a victim, witness, or an individual who has reliable information about an act of bullying or harassment.
The district will promptly and reasonably investigate allegations of bullying or harassment. The superintendent/designee shall name an investigator to handle a each complaint of bullying and/or harassment. Initial complaints of bullying and harassment start at the building level unless there are circumstances in which the investigation at the building level would be inappropriate.
The named investigator shall consider the totality of circumstances presented in determining whether complained-of-conduct objectively constitutes bullying or harassment.
The superintendent/designee shall be responsible for developing procedures regarding this policy.
If, after an investigation, a student is found to be in violation of this policy, the student shall be subject to appropriate discipline, which may include but is not limited to suspension and/or expulsion. If after an investigation a school employee is found to be in violation of this policy, the employee shall be subject to appropriate discipline, which may include but is not limited to termination. If after an investigation a volunteer is found to be in violation of this policy, the volunteer shall be subject to appropriate disciplinary action, which may include but is not limited to exclusion from school grounds.
Publication of Policy
The board will annually publish this policy. The policy may be publicized by the following means:
Inclusion in the student handbook,
Inclusion in the employee handbook
Inclusion in the registration materials
Inclusion on the school or school district's web site.
20 U.S.C. §§ 1221-1234i.
42 U.S.C. §§ 2000d-2000d-7.
42 U.S.C. §§ 12101 2et. seq.
Iowa Code §§ 216.9; 280.28; 280.3.
281 I.A.C. 12.3(6).
Morse v. Frederick, 551 U.S. 393 (2007)
Cross References:
102 Equal Educational Opportunity
402.13 Harassment
502 Series Student Rights and Responsibilities
503 Series Student Discipline
504.45 Bullying
506 Series Student Records
Adopted:
COMPLAINT AND WITNESS FORMS
104.00 R&R 1
ANTI-BULLYING/ANTI-HARASSMENT INVESTIGATION PROCEDURES
The district will promptly and reasonably investigate allegations of bullying or harassment. The superintendent/designee shall name an investigator to handle each complaint of bullying and/or harassment.
Initial complaints of bullying and harassment start at the building level unless there are circumstances in which the investigation at the building level would be inappropriate.
If the Complainant is under 18 years of age, the investigator shall notify the Complainant's parent(s)/guardian(s) that they may attend investigatory meetings in which the Complainant is involved.
The complaint and identity of the Complainant, Respondent, or witnesses will only be disclosed as reasonably necessary in connection with the investigation or as required by law or policy. The investigation may include, but is not limited to the following:
A request for the Complainant to provide a written statement regarding the nature of the complaint;
A request for the individual named in the complaint (hereinafter "Respondent") to provide a written statement;
A request for witnesses identified during the course of the investigation to provide a written statement; and
Review and collection of documentation or information deemed relevant to the investigation.
The Investigator shall consider the totality of circumstances presented in determining whether conduct objectively constitutes bullying or harassment. Upon completion of the investigation, the Investigator shall issue a report with respect to the findings. The complainant and the alleged wrongdoer will receive notice as to the conclusion of the investigation.
The principal will maintain a log of information necessary to comply with Iowa Department of Education's reporting procedures. If it does not meet the definition of the Iowa Department of Education's Inappropriate Student Interaction and harassment law, but meets the district's definition, the complaint will be reported in Infinite Campus.
If, after an investigation, a student is found to be in violation of the policy, the student shall be subject to appropriate discipline, which may include but is not limited to suspension and expulsion.
If, after an investigation, a school employee is found to be in violation of this policy, the employee shall be subject to appropriate discipline, which may include but is not limited to termination.
If, after an investigation, a volunteer is found to be in violation of this policy, the volunteer shall be subject to appropriate measures, which may include but is not limited to exclusion from school grounds.
Revised:
42 U.S.C. §§ 12101 2 et. seq.
Morse v. Frederick, 551 U.S. 393
102.00 Equal Educational Opportunity
503.01 Student Discipline
503.60 Good Conduct
506.01 Student Records Access


text:
https://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local/article/Bexar-County-ME-seeking-information-on-14571935.php
Bexar County Medical Examiner seeks information on unidentified man
By Taylor Pettaway, mySA.com / San Antonio Express-News
Updated 3:22 pm CDT, Tuesday, October 29, 2019
Digital rendition of John Doe.
Photo: Bexar County Medical Examiner
The Bexar County Medical Examiner's Office is seeking the public's help in identifying a John Doe found in May.
The office released a digital postmortem rendition of the unidentified man, in hopes of finding a relative to positively ID the man.
John Doe was found May 5 at a VIA bus stop in downtown. A witness called 911, and the man was transported to St. Luke's Baptist Hospital where he stayed until he died on Sept. 7.
FIND OUT FIRST: Get San Antonio breaking news directly to your inbox
The Medical Examiner describes him as a 5-foot-8-inch tall white or Hispanic man, 40 to 70 years of age and 103 pounds with several tattoos.
The digital rendition was completed by the Texas Ranger Forensic Artist with the Evidential Art and Facial Information Office in Austin.
If anyone has any information on the John Doe, they are encouraged to call the Medical Examiner's Office at 210-335-4011.
Taylor Pettaway is a breaking news reporter and general assignment writer. Read her on our breaking news site, MySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com | taylor.pettaway@express-news.net | @TaylorPettaway


No matter howw long ago you passed your test we have some videos and links to sites that could really help you improve your driving, increase confidence and make you more aware of your driving environment.
Please note that these clips are sted via youTube and we are not responsible for content inc. links or ads.
Official DVSA to guide to what happens during the driving test and what it takes to pass it - including the eyesight test, 'show me, tell me' questions, reversing exercises, and independent driving parts of the test.