Indian Premiere League Controversy

Board of control for Cricket is the most powerful and most influential organization in the world of cricket. It is one of the richest sports organizations in the world. Mr. N Srinivasan came a long way starting as a cricket administrator in Tamil Nadu in 2001 to becoming President of Board of Control for Cricket in India in 2011. Indian Premier League is considered as the world’s show case for the T20 cricket. Eight teams will be participating in this tournament. An UK based consulting firm Brand Finance has valued it at 4. 3 billion US dollars in 2010. During N. Srinivasan term as president IPL has faced lot of controversies. Being the most powerful man in world of cricket administrators he refused to quit when his son in law was caught being involved in the purported illegal betting. He gradually worked his way to become the President of the most powerful board in the world of cricket. He has been charged with conflict of interest by owing an IPL franchise the Chennai Super Kings. He refused to resign from the president post after his son in law was caught for alleged illegal betting on the IPL matches. Former BCCI president AC Muthiah has filed a case in Supreme Court challenging the board rules that permits the BCCI officials to own an IPL franchises (Singh, 2013). Three players S Sreesanth, Ankeet Chavan and Ajit Chnadila from Rajasthan Royals were arrested for alleged spot fixing by Delhi police. Srinivasan clamorously said that the guilty will not be spared and was surprised and disappointed with the spot fixing events. Nobody expected his son in law Gurunath Meiyappan will be involved in the illegal betting allegations. Being in a responsible position, instead of stepping down as President on morality basis and this is one of the worst scandals of Indian Cricket he became argumentative and even criticized the media for going after him (Singh, 2013). The India Cements owner of Chennai Super Kings had issued a statement stating that Meiyappan is not a CEO of the company after he was subpoenaed by Mumbai Police and he is in anyway not related to the franchise. But twitter account status of Meiyappans’s said that he was the Team Principal of CSK, was titled as the owner of the franchise at a particular event , he was sitting in the player’s auction and was present in the dugout of CSK for all the matches where only the team management was allowed to be present in the dugout. So India Cements argument that he is not related to the franchise is absolutely false (Singh, 2013). He was involved in illegal betting of CSK matches too. This raises lot of questions as he may have passed the team combinations and planning to the bookies as he has access to all the players (Singh, 2013). If Srinivasan tries to brush off things and cover up the whole situation then BCCI will jeopardize the faith and entrust of millions of people who follow the game of cricket and where cricket is a religion in India. For the betterment of cricket, cricket lovers and inviolability of cricket in India Srinivasan must resign and ensure that all the guilty are served with the punishment. The other members of the board have resigned as they are not satisfied with the Srivasan’s decision and how he handled the situation (Singh, 2013). Source of Conflict: This conflict can be an example for Substantive conflict. This occurs when two or more organizational members disagree on their task or content issues. Conflict of values: This occurs when two social entities differ in their values or ideologies on certain issues (Druckman, Broome & Korper, 1988). Srinivasan differs with the ideologies and values of the BCCI this can be recognized as conflict of values. Level of Analysis: This can be an example of Interpersonal conflict. It refers to conflict between two or more organizational members of the same or different hierarchical levels. This situation has created differences between the board members and the treasurer and other board members have resigned it can be classified as interpersonal conflict.References:Rahim, M. A. (2001). Managing conflict in organizations. Westport, Conn: Quorum Books. Druckman, D., Broome, B., & Korper, S., (1988).  Value differences and conflict resolution: Facilitation or delinking?  Journal of Conflict Resolution, 32, 489 – 510.  Ã‚   Singh, M. (2013, may 26). IPL spot-fixing: Why N Srinivasan should quit as BCCI president. Retrieved July 7, 2013, from Zeenews.india.com: http://zeenews.india.com/blog/ipl-spot-fixing-why-n-srinivasan-should-quit-as

Classwork

Explain how flexible capacity can be created in each of the following situations: (a) a local library, (b) an office-cleaning service, (c) a technical support helpless. Local library: It has some flexible capacity regarding the entire building, but there are some options that It can be changed in order to make It more flexible. The building or the enable place capacity cannot be changed. HER capacity can be reduced or substituted In rush hours with online self-lending machines.It would save payroll cost for the library and time for the customers. Office-cleaning service: (number of workers, equipment, technology,) In this case we should focus on those times when the demand is higher than the capacity. If there is too much work and we have limited numbers of workers than we should hire part time, cross-train workers In rush periods. Moreover we should ask the employee to time their day-offs after these periods. Also a possible solution could be to develop the skills of the workers (cl eaning speed etc. And also a technical development would be also recommended to buy new equipment with which they can work faster but at the same level of preciosity. Support helpless: (number of lines or helpless) The main capacity what can be influenced is the number of helpless. It is really important for people to wait not too much time. The number of helpless can be Increased In order to reduce waiting times In lines. Also a technological development would be necessary If there are so simple questions, which can be answered by an automatic machine then it would be useful to introduce some self-servicing machines.This option would save HER costs for the company and also waiting times for the customers. 2. Identify some specific examples of companies in your community (or region) that significantly change their product and/or marketing mix variables in order to encourage patronage during periods of low demand. (5 points) Restaurant happy hours: Some restaurants in Pecs have offer ed happy hours meals with some discounts. It means that In those periods of the day when there are low level of demands between 10-11 am and 3-5 pm.Bakery: one of the major bakery chains In Pecs offers discount on In products each day before the closing time. It means that you can buy each product for half price. Swimming pool: The swimming pool of the university has Introduced discounted tickets for the university students in those hours, which are out of the rush hours. It is a perfect opportunity for the students to do some sports and also a good revenue generator I OFF Energy generating companies offer cheaper energy for companies through the night in those hours when the average consumption is much less than through the day. . Select a service organization of your choice and identify its particular patterns of demand with reference to the checklist provided on slide 14. A) What is the nature of this service organization's approach to capacity and demand management? We choose th e Menages solarium company at Razorback Street, Pecs. Usually demands are lower in the summer and it is also fluctuating within a week. Weekend demands are usually higher than the weekdays one. In their communication they focus on seasonal differences in term of the volume of the sunshine.It is a common thinking, that people with browner skin color are more attractive. B) What changes would you recommend in relation to its management of capacity and demand and why? In our opinion the company should make a shift in its communication in order to reach wider or different customer segment. For example for those who work through the summer, or working till evening, or people who don't have a good self-esteem the company should offer special opportunities to use the service. If they can achieve these people as well, they can improve the usage of the capacity.Therefore the demand level would be smoother for the firm. They also can lower their prices before lunchtime to shape the demand. 4. Give examples, based on your own experience, of a reservation system that worked really well, and of one that worked really badly. Identify and evaluate the reasons for the success and failure of these two systems. What recommendations would you make to both firms to improve (or further improve in case of the good example) their reservation systems? (10 points) In the summer we were abroad and we reserved a cruise.When we send the first inquire email, we immediately receive a personal contact person who helped us during the whole reservation process. If we had any problem, we could ask about everything, and our problem was solved. When we wanted to reserve the chosen room, our contact person suggested us a better option for the same price. So we could get the best option, and we were informed about everything. Kodiak Centre It often happens that 2 or more tickets are sold for one seat at the concert hall.If there are not free places available it causes unsatisfied guests and bad re putation for the place. The reason is people can buy these tickets in many places in Pecs and online too. They are not able to arrange and check the sold tickets, sometimes they don't know before the concert how many guests will arrive, how many tickets are available and for which places. A common booking system would be necessary to solve the problem. All ticket offices should use this to centre would be able to

“I’m A Fool” by Sherwood Anderson Essay

â€Å"I’m A Fool† by Sherwood Anderson takes the reader into the mind of a lying, ambivalent, uneducated and somewhat foolish youth. It is a story of a foolish incident in which he lies to a beautiful girl in attempt to win her love. His plan backfires when he realizes that she likes him for who he is, not the imaginary character whom he claimed himself to be. The theme in â€Å"I’m A Fool†, deals with the consequences associated with dishonesty and deceitfulness, and he is able to effectively reveal this theme with the use of dramatic irony. The narrator believes that stealing, swearing, getting drunk, and bandaging horses is of far greater importance than a high school diploma or university degree. Anderson is implementing irony because what the narrator says is not what the reader knows to be true; the reader knows that these skills are of little or no importance in our society. Another example of irony is when the narrator believes the whiskey and the well-dressed dandy caused him to lie to Lucy Wesson. We know, however, that the narrator lied in fear of rejection. One aspect of â€Å"I’m A Fool† is its incorrect grammar and simple, unexpressive and reoccurring descriptive words. The story is riddled with simple adverbs and injections that are used to describe the narrators emotions such as ‘Gee whizz!’, ‘Peachy’, and ‘gay’. The primitive vocabulary in some ways prevent the reader from receiving an accurate portrayal emotion therefore making the reader guess what the narrator is feeling in certain situations. For instance, â€Å"Gee whizz!† is used to describe four seemingly different emotions: enjoyment (paragraph 8), amazement (paragraph 10), regret (paragraph 38), and love (paragraph 55). Throughout the story, we see the narrator being deceptive and dishonest to others and him self on several occasions. For instance, he shows resentment towards the educated claiming that they ‘don’t know nothing at all,’ however he presents us with a new perspective towards the educated saying that ‘There are some†¦ that are all right.’ His ambivalent attitude is emphasized when he expresses thankfulness towards  his mother for teaching him ‘not be noisy and rough like a gang you see around a race track.’ If he was thankful for the morals that he was taught by his mother, one might wonder why he disobeyed his mother and became a swipe in the first place. The narrator dealt with his emotions in an immature way. Dealing with the self-disappointment resulting from his dishonesty towards Lucy Wesson, he convinces himself that he is worthless and undeserving of his job. Tragically, the narrator does not learn from his consequences. Most of us know that being dishonest towards other people is wrong and carries a consequence, yet we may deceive ourselves without realizing it. We should understand that before we can be truthful to others, we must be truthful to ourselves.

Global Procurement Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Global Procurement - Essay Example The purchase in general includes the raw material that would be needed, the kind of expertise that would be needed to be acquired, the capital and budget allocation (Monczka, et al., 2010,205). All these can be evaluated and estimated in advance in form of process purchase model. General steps of purchase process include the invoice, bidding, solicitation of bids, and purchase at hand (Howes & Robinson, 2005). The paper further looks into most suitable purchase process models, along with number of organizations and their activities as to how they go about the process purchase models. List of successful organizations has been presented in the paper which explain how they have integrated and adopted the process models, what elements have been included and what other have been excluded. The model depicted in the figure has eight basic elements starting with internal customers, and ending with the suppliers who provide the end product or service. The overall process model can be divided into two phases, with first four elements making up for the first phase, while the second part consisting of latter phase. The first phase is preparatory and inside the laboratory phase, while the latter is pertinent to post delivery, evaluation and assessment in response to the product or service offered. The intermediate steps include specification evaluation, choosing the suppliers for respective process, formulating the contract procedures. Follow up, supplier dealings make up for the final part of the entire process (Havey, 2009). While the model provides description of the two phases of overall activity, it fails to cover up number of sections which are important and should be part of the overall homework plan for the purchase process model. These activities include the following: The first short coming is in form of scheduling. Scheduling enables knowing what to do and when to do. Scheduling enables

This paper presents the case study analysis of Charles Schwab Analysis Assignment - 1

Analysis of Charles Schwab and Zara - Assignment Example The first solution involved potentially granting customers complete access to the organization’s services, while at the same time offering a 20% discount on trades. The second solution involved granting customers an even greater discount on trades, but at the same time curtailing the services provided. The major dilemma was whether it was worth sacrificing service for price discounts. Another prominent consideration was challenged from outside organizations. A lot of discount brokerages emerged that challenged Schwab’s position as one of the preeminent stock traders. In response to these challenges, the organization was to work towards differentiating itself through innovative product design and services. The main backbone of this innovation was rooted in technology that, â€Å"to both generate productivity improvements and to develop superior customer service† (‘Charles Schwab Corporation.’ 2001, p. 3). As such, a multi-channel strategy was implemen ted. Still, the organization was faced with further questions of whether to expand deeper into Internet trading. While organizations such as E*Trade had been coming on strong, Schwab recognized that they retained significant portions of the market. These considerations factored into whether the organization should assume a lower pricing strategy per trade or if they should continue with the traditional model of business based heavily on attention to service. In the second case analysis, the company under consideration is Zara. There are a number of key issues facing this organization. Zara is recognized as the chain of stores of the main organization Inditex. One of the main issues facing Zara specifically is whether the point-of-sale (POS) terminals should be upgraded. One of the negative aspects of the current point-of-sale (POS) terminals is that they run on DOS.

Financial Reports of McDonalds Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Financial Reports of McDonalds - Assignment Example This paper discusses McDonalds’ 2013 annual report with focus on the company’s operations, income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow, and ratio analysis. Accounting information, often summarized and communicated in annual reports, is important to different stakeholders to an organization. This paper reviews and reports on McDonalds’ annual report for the year ended 2013 with focus on the company’s operations and financial statements. The discussion identifies positive prospects in the annual report but offers reservations on the company’s long-term stability due to overreliance on external funding. One of McDonalds’ operational activities in the accounting year ended 2013 was realignment of its subsidiaries, efforts that begun in the year 2005. The operations were geared towards two major goals, to realign the subsidiaries to external environments in the areas of operations and to realign the subsidiaries to the company’s global perspective. Theses aimed at attaining a desired corporate image by the company. The company also operates in two scopes, through its managed subsidiaries and though its franchises. Its branches however obtain commodities and services from independent suppliers but quality assessment centers exist to ensure threshold standards in all of the company’s outlets. The company’s operations also include collaboration with suppliers to facilitate efficiencies through innovation, outstanding practices, and continuous improvements. The company offers a standard menu to its customers though a level of variation may exist to accommodate geographical diversity around its outlets. It also offers seasonal products but majorly on promotions. Monitoring and evaluation of newly developed products also form a major aspect of the company’s operations. Research and development is another significant area of the company’s operations and research and development facilities exists in the United States, Europe, and

Summary of Transportation Research Record Assignment

Summary of Transportation Research Record - Assignment Example This explains why the last decade has seen the addition of only 7 runways. Nevertheless, quite a number of secondary airports have experienced tremendous growth, becoming the desired airports for specific destinations. This does not undermine the fact that they have been experiencing delays and congestion, especially in peak periods due to lack of places for the planes to land. The larger part of the funding for the airports in Denver, Colorado can be traced back to the federal government. However, decisions pertaining to the operation, building and expansion of the facilities are handled at local and state levels. It has been recognized that delays and congestion in airports can only be remedied by comprehensive remedies. This article examines air travel since it is always a pointer as to the direction taken by Gross Domestic Product of a particular state. In essence, there are concerns about the delays and congestion in many airports resulting from lack of space for expansion. Communities neighboring the airports are also against the expansion due to traffic as well as noise from the planes. This problem however would not be solved by simplistic remedies but a combination of solutions geared addressing the financial, technical and even social aspect of the airports, more so in relation with the

Business strategic management report of Ford Company Assignment

Business strategic management report of Ford Company - Assignment Example It has the legacy of providing cost effective cars along with the rapid technological change, proving to be the smartest among its competitors in the industry. Recent developments by Ford include the invasion of electrical cars in enormous amount in to the U.S consumer market. (Gomes, Donnelley & Collis, 2010) reports that the great recession of 2008 affected the automobile sector badly as the sales dropped down tremendously. The big guns in the industry were financially disturbed by the recession as loss reached new paramounts. Till the June of 2009, Ford was the only company left of Detroit’s â€Å"Big Three† which didn’t faced bankruptcy. General Motor and Chrysler were bankrupt and their borrowings from the financial sector increased. Ford was able to survive due to some active decisions made by the financial officer and the operational management team. However Ford faced a loss of $14.7 billion in 2008. The major cause of this downfall was the elimination of stockholders which pushed the company to this tragic fall. This report has examined all the chief causes of the catastrophic scenario prevailed in the automobile sector. What sort of political, economic, social and technological barriers were there in the industry and how companies indulged those? Determining the industry as a whole, what are the opportunities, threats and most important competitors of Ford; how they have challenged company’s repute and what steps should have taken by Ford. Also discussing the core competencies of the company, how do they actively utilize their resources, capabilities and what are its core competencies. Exploratron of the business level strategy; with the corporate level strategy plus making strategic plan of the company for the next five years are the major parts of this research work. PEST Analysis PEST Analysis is a vital tool for analyzing the market position of a firm. Political, economic, societal and technological factors are discusse d for understanding the standing of a company. Applying this tool to Ford presents the following picture: Political Factors: Ford along with other automobile companies was in turmoil due to the bad economic scenario of the country. After the Presidential elections of 2008, Obama Government started operating on January 1st, 2009 and encouraged people to purchase new cars and old ones were scrapped. The enforcement of this order was a beginning of a new sun for the automobile sector as people had to purchase new cars. The old cars were scrapped and this political decision thus really helped Ford too. The first quarter of 2009 brought good news for the company as Ford only had $1.4 billion loss in that tenure. These were promising figures because last year Ford faced mammoth loss of $14.7 billion. Hence the political decision of newly established government was appreciated among the automobile industry (Gomes, Donnelley & Collis, 2010). Economic Factors: Ford was the survivors of bankr uptcy so they had to utilize their finances very carefully. The economic factors suggested that now revival of the economy will start very soon. The Chief Financial officer of Ford estimated that breakeven would be achieved in 2011. The economic and

Immunosorbent assay (ELISA) Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Immunosorbent assay (ELISA) - Essay Example A comprehensive understanding of how an ELISA works would require the determination of what antibodies are and how they work. The basic definition of an antibody is that it is a protein produced by the immune structure in reaction to the foreign molecules in an organism’s body. Under circumstances that require the attainment of indirect semi-quantitative results, multiwall polystyrene wells are the most commonly used solid surface. ELISA, being quick and easy to undertake, is preferable given that its makeup also enables it to tackle voluminous samples consecutively during research and diagnostic targets. As a result, ELISA is considered the best choice when evaluating research and diagnostic targets (Killian et al., 2013). The process of performing ELISA depends on the relations between an epitope; it may be a small linear or a three-dimensional succession of amino acids established on an antigen and a corresponding antibody-binding site. This experiment aimed at determining how the concentration of antibodies in the body would be affected by the use of ELISA under indirect semi-quantitative and anti-human albumin antibody. This is because of the wide utilization or applications to which the enzyme can be put such as in the analytical implements in biomedical research to detect and quantify specific antibodies and antigens in a sample. In this experiment, the antibodies employed were either monoclonal or polyclonal (Rosie, 2013). When performing any ELISA test, there are four formats of performing the laboratory tests: direct ELISA, indirect ELISA, sandwich/capture ELISA, and competitive or inhibitor ELISA. These allows the experiment’s elasticity to fit basing on antibodies available, the needed results and complications of the essential results (Rodland, 2005.p.145-148). In this experiment, the variation employed is the indirect ELISA, which employs the human albumin ELISA test. Given that ELISA test utilizes the rudimental concept

The website have the right to choose the topic Essay

The website have the right to choose the topic - Essay Example Hence, being a multi-cultural country, it is difficult to pinpoint one dominant group (majority) in the US which has an advantage or edge over minority groups. However, it must be noted, that while the Native Americans were the very first people populating the USA, the very first settlers who brought â€Å"civilization† to the US were the Europeans who travelled with Christopher Columbus. Hence, they are termed as â€Å"Americans† and are also referred to as â€Å"the white race†. These settlers can be termed as the dominant group prevalent in the US as they were the supposed founders of the empty land back in Christopher Columbus’s time (Pasell, 1995). While the USA has opportunities for all ethnicities, religions, and cultures and laws prohibit discrimination upon the basis of race, gender, disability, and other factors, some people are still discriminated against or were discriminated against when they first immigrated to the US as part of a minority group. Minority groups are subject to unequal treatment by dominant groups and may be the victims of racism. They are in a minority in the suggested area and do not have as much power as the dominant groups may have. It takes ample time for them to be recognized, given equal opportunities, and lead a better and free life in the said place. Dominant groups or majority groups, on the other hand, and have power and authority in their area and may have racist feelings against other minority group settlers. Moreover, they have the most opportunities and the easiest access to their place of settling (Winnant, 1994). As mentioned before, while the percentage of majority and minority residents in the US is rapidly changing, the analysis of this paper will be based upon two groups: the Europeans (white) as the dominant group and the immigration of Chinese settlers into the US as the non-dominant group (Calavita, 1994). Immigration policies differed in various time

Article Review Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 26

Article Review - Essay Example The article explores the currents state of Treasury bond yields and prices in the US financial market. According to Zeng, the strengthening of the bonds is a sign that inflation has been tamed in the US market. As result, the Federal Reserves is not in a hurry to increase the interest rates, a factor that has highly boosted investor confidence (Zeng, 2014). The trading in the Treasury bonds has recorded little change in terms of yields. This is in addition to the fact that the prices of imported goods has also fallen. The article states that in the current US financial market, the prices of the treasury bonds face no threats, a reason why investors are confident when investing in the bonds. The goal of the author in this article is to explore the state of the treasury bonds in the US market. The author wants to show that the increased confidence of the investors, a depiction that it is the right time to invest in the treasury bonds as inflation appears to have been tamed in the US financial market. In order to do this and to achieve the objective of showing that the current state of the US Treasury bonds has strengthened, the author analyzes the trading and yields from the treasury bond over the last couple of weeks in order to prove to the reader that the bonds have indeed strengthened. Ming Zeng has been able to achieve his goal of showing that the prices of the treasury bonds have strengthened. His success in attaining this goal is clearly evident with the way he is able to clearly show the prices and the yields of the treasury bonds over the last couple of weeks to clearly depict the trend and prove that they had strengthened. His conclusion that it is a good time for the investors to put their money on the bonds is valid as he is able to use factual data from Tradeweb/WSJ Market Data Group to prove his point and the

The Great Depression Essay Example for Free

The Great Depression Essay Tillie Olson’s semi-autobiographic story â€Å"I Stand Here Ironing† focuses on a mother’s reminiscing of the decisions she’s made regarding her first child, Emily, and the resulting impact those decisions had on her daughter. The mother, also the narrator, paints a picture of guilt, resentment, and remorse toward her choices while raising Emily. Throughout the story, there’s several instances that point to the mother possibly being a victim of postpartum depression. Emily. Although the consequences of the mother’s choices have already taken effect, she can’t help but to think about what she could have done or what Emily could be if she’d made the â€Å"right† decisions, as deemed by then society’s standards. The setting takes place during a time of struggle and hopelessness in the United States, the Great Depression of the 1930’s. The birth of Emily, in this trying time, made for a much needed contrast to the sense of despair in the air. â€Å"She was a beautiful baby. The first and only one of our five that was beautiful at birth (312).† Here, it’s apparent the joy that every first-time mother has. This effervescent sentiment only lasts for eight months, though, when Emily’s father abandons his family. For a young mother living in those times, that is devastating. Being a single-parent mother in the 1930’s was unheard of and extremely taboo. She’d be seen as an outcast and a failure to her family. In her mind, the only option was to leave Emily to her ex-husband’s family, in order to make a better living herself and her daughter. Upon Emily’s return, at the tender age of two, the mother hardly recognizes her and sees her in a new light. The baby who was once beautiful is no longer. â€Å"I hardly knew her [†¦] All the baby loveliness gone (313).† The culmination of separation, as well as the angst and disappointment that she felt for Emily’s father has taken effect and is now transferred to her daughter. Everything about Emily, from her appearance to her walk, now reminded the mother of her estranged husband. That very moment reveals the reason behind Emily’s jaded life postpartum depression. Postpartum depression is a mood disorder that begins after childbirth and usually lasts beyond six weeks. Occurring in 8%-20% of all new mothers, postpartum depressed women exhibit behavior that is neither healthy nor motherly, which in turn has an adverse effect on the child. These effects became more than apparent in Emily’s case. PPD would help to explain the narrator’s constant distancing herself from Emily and difference of treatment her daughter received compared to her other children. The narrator’s environment, economic standing, social status, and many other factors contributed to her developme nt of PPD. According to a study by Child Psychiatry and Human Development, children of postpartum depressed mothers have results showing a plethora of adverse outcomes relative to community sample children. Children whose mothers were diagnosed with PPD demonstrated lower ego-resiliency, lower peer social competence, and lower school adjustment (Doesum). These results heavily support the claim that the mother in â€Å"I Stand Here Ironing† had severe PPD in Emily’s early stages of life. The mother acknowledges her daughter’s social awkwardness in a passage from the story. I am glad for that slow physical development that widened the difference between her and her contemporaries, though she suffered over it. She was too vulnerable for that terrible word of youthful competition, of preening and parading, of constant measuring yourself against every other, of envy, â€Å"If I had that copper hair, â€Å"If I had that skin†¦.† She tormented herself enough about not looking like the others, there was enough of the unsureness, the having to be conscious of words before you speak, the constant caringwhat are they thinking of me? Without having it all magnified by the merciless physical drives. (316). In addition to these findings, girls of postpartum depressed mothers show lower verbal intelligence (Doesum). â€Å"School was a worry to her. She was not glib or quick in a world where glibness and quickness were easily confused with ability to learn (315).† Emily, during her teens substituted in for her step-father while he was away at war, acting as the second parent to her siblings. She had to grow up quick and even as a child, she didn’t have much of a childhood. The mother admits that Emily’s aiding her at home may have had an influence in her shortcomings in school, stating, â€Å"There was so little time left at night after the kids were bedded down. She would struggle over booksâ₠¬ ¦ (317).† Surprisingly, daughters of mothers who had PPD were also rated as less externalizing by their mothers than girls in the community sample. One of the interpretations of this result may be a tendency among girls of depressed mothers to show more role reversal or â€Å"parentification,† in an effort to fulfill the parent’s need for comfort and care. An example of this is when a young Emily was sent to nursery school. She gravely disliked the nursery but she never outright expressed it to her mother. She would come up with excuses such as the teachers being sick in order to persuade her mother to let her stay home. Emily would feel pain on the inside and never externalize it to the outside world. Regarding the other children, the mother always describes them in a positive light and shows favoritism toward them compared to when Emily was their age. With her second daughter, Susan, the mother always chalks up in a highly favored fashion. â€Å"[†¦] Susan, golden- and curly-haired and chubby, quick and articulate and assured, everything in manner and appearance Emily was not (316).† Susan exemplified what it was to be the â€Å"it† girl during those times with her appearance as â€Å"a chubby blonde replica of Shirley Temple.† This created a tense feeling of envy and jealousy within Emily, according to the narrator. Even during the story, the narrator interrupts her monologue to announce that her youngest child, Ronnie, needs his diaper changed. Afterwards, she and he â€Å"sit for a while and I hold him, looking out over the city spread in charcoal with its soft aisles of light (316).† This, a scene that would never be depicted during Emily’s childhood. The only mention of her at that age is depiction of the mother picking up Emily from the babysitter at nights which was always met with an outbreak of tears and weeping, â€Å"a weeping I can hear yet.† She’s always look at Emily w ith an expression of tightness and worry. â€Å"You should smile more at Emily when you look at her (313),† a neighbor once said to her mother. Her less than motherly attitude to Emily is further exposed when she reveals that she’d let Emily be absent but is noticeably stricter with her siblings’ school attendance. These conclusions support the idea that Emily’s mother at one time had severe postpartum depression. A mothers feeling of self-confidence and self-efficacy is determined by many different factors including contextual characteristics such as social support, infant temperament, and maternal mental health. Defined, maternal self-confidence is the mothers perception of her own ability to take care of the child and to correctly interpret the childs signals. It governs adjustment to motherhood and is of great importance with respect to a positive mother–infant relationship (Doesum). The mother makes it clear throughout her retelling of Emily’s past that she doesn’t view h erself as a very good mother. She internally expresses her frustration with the way she raised Emily and the choices she’d made. Of course, motherhood doesn’t come with a handbook but she could have done some things differently. Ever since she was eight months old, Emily had continuously been neglected. Her father left her as a baby and as a result, her mother sent her off to live with his family for a while. Then, she was placed with a babysitter and later on dropped off at a nursery, then to a convalescent home. The narrator not once referenced to Emily having a best friend or a child over to play, at an age where forming relationships with peers is crucial. Even at the convalescent home, Emily had made a bond with another child, until her friend was immediately placed in another home. The establishment wouldn’t let children keep the letter they received in the mail from parents and had strict rules for visitation. This so called â€Å"home† established an â€Å"invisible wall† so to speak between visiting parents and the children above on the balcony (Frye). â€Å"They don’t like you to love anybody here,† explains Emily (315). It represents a separation Emily would feel for the rest of her life. All her life, Emily has invariably been pushed to the side and abandoned by the people whom she thought loved her or at least had her well-being in mind. Because of this, she became a lonely, isolated child. Even through her gift of mime, performing for high schools and colleges, Emily still felt isolated and alone. High levels of stress, low quality mother–infant interactions and insecure attachment early in a child’s life can adversely affect the development of the brain, which can have long-term consequences, for example for the child’s capacities to regulate emotions and cope with stress. Whenever Emily’s mother went out with her step-father, she couldn’t take it. She would open the door, thinking it might make her mother come back sooner and place the clock on the floor, claiming the clock â €Å"talked loud.† The clock is just one of many symbols in the story, representing the time mother and daughter never spent together and the separation between the two. The narrator is convinced that Emily is â€Å"[†¦] a child of her age, of depression, of war, of fear (318). As she reflects on her daughter’s life, she feels resentment, angst, and guilt yet she doesn’t let this consume her. She still has faith that her daughter will lead a different path and not have to go through the same painful struggles she faced as a lonely, 19-year-old, single mother during the Depression. Hardships turned her into what she is today, a strong and mature woman which is apparent due to her unbiased analysis of what she could have done better while raising Emily. The mother always heeded the advice of others and never herself as a first-time mother, always looking for validation through outside externalities. She corrected these mistakes with her subsequent children but by the time she realized it for Emily, it was too late. The damage has already been done. Although she may forever be reluctantly under the power of the iron, she wants Emily to be persuaded â€Å"[†¦] that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron.† She has the capability to make something of herself, regardless of the way she grew up. Emily, at 19, has more opportunities than her mother had at the same age. That slight tinge of hope leads readers to interpret their own future for Emily, which she jokingly hints to through her budding talent for comedy by inferring that the human race will be atom-dead in a few years. She has a strong resource with her talent for pantomime that hopefully will foster as she grows older and gives her a chance to see what life is like outside of poverty. Emily is a survivor, through it all and has the ability and capacity to take life by the reigns, if she so chooses (Yahnke). Bibliography Doesum, Karin T. M., et al. Early School Outcomes for Children of Postpartum Depressed Mothers: Comparison with a Community Sample. Child Psychiatry and Human Development43.2 (2012): 201+. Academic OneFile. Web. 30 Apr. 2012. Frye, Joanne S. â€Å"I Stand Here Ironing’: Motherhood as Experience and Metaphor.† Studies in Short Fiction 18.3 (Summer 1981): 272-292. Rpt. in Short Story Criticism. Ed David L. Siegel Vol 11. Detroit: Gale Research, 1992. Literature Resource Center. Web 19 Mar 2012. Gerstenlauer, Jakob, et al. Effects of Postpartum Anxiety Disorders and Depression on Maternal Self-confidence. Infant Behavior and Development 35.2 (2012): 264+. Academic OneFile. Web. 30 Apr. 2012. Olsen, Tillie. â€Å"I Stand Here Ironing.† 1953. Portable Legacies 4th Edition. Schmidt, Jan, and Lynne Crockett, editors. Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2009. 312-318. Yahnke, Robert E. Magill. â€Å"I Stand Here Ironing† Robert E. Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition, September 2006, p1-1 Short Fiction (Work Analysis). Literary Reference Center. Web. 28 Mar 2012.

Analysis of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals

Analysis of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals When God died, what happened to the people? Therefore neither can an animal move about in the closed as such, no more than it can comport itself toward the unconcealed. The animal is excluded from the essential domain of the conflict between unconcealedness and concealedness. The sign of such an exclusion is that no animal or plant â€Å"has the word. (Heidegger: 1992:159-60) The concealed in Heidegger is that which conceals from us it’s being. What emerges in Heidegger, in his pursuit of this clearing, is the slim line – the slippery border, between human and animal. The animal in Heidegger cannot see the sun as it rushes towards it: it can never dissocial the sun as a being. It is at once open and non-open, or rather, it operates in an ambiguity between the two fields. Man in Heidegger becomes that which is produced precisely at this border: at the moment of caesura and articulation between human and animal: it is this that passes for man, and it is this than expresses well the relationship of man to language. Man is never outside language: language is always already expressed as a radical exclusion of that which is not which operates as a fundamental category of exclusion(Agamben: 2004a: 91) The last century and a half have been full of attempts to move outside of language: to pass into new notions of subjectivity that move outside of what it is to be human. Nietzsche’s attempt to destroy traditional notions of subjectivity stands out as a crystallisation point in a process that sees Delouse, Foucault and Derrida, to name the three philosophers this dissertation will discuss, move outside notions of the human trapped within language and the creation of the subject. In doing so they criticise a notion of the subject trapped within binary constructions and the hierarchical notions of the subject that one finds in Hegel; in doing so they echo the criticism of Christianity that Nietzsche made. This dissertation will analyse the reasons for which Nietzsche attempts to destroy the traditional notion of the subject and replace it with a particularism notion of the subject: forever in astute of becoming that escapes binary configurations. We will evaluate to what extent he was successful in his enterprise, and what type of subjectivity was brought forth. In analysing the ways in which Deleuze,Foucault and Derrida take up his project, we will analyse a genealogy of thought that attempts to successively move beyond what we understands human. These three methods open up a series of liberating possibilities to philosophy and politics, and the configurations of these possibilities we be analysed. However, in the radical indeterminacy of Derrida, in the pessimistic, frantic activism of Foucault, and in the schizo-analysis of Delouse we can detect the same problem that we find in Nietzsche: at work in him is that oblivion (or as Bataille would term it, that excess) â€Å"which lies at the foundation of the biologist of the nineteenth century and of psychoanalysis† and what produces â€Å"monstrous anthropomorphization of†¦ the animal and a corresponding animalization of man† (Heidegger: 1992:152). Heidegger still believed, as none of the philosophers considered in the dissertation do, in the possibility of a good project of the polis; that there was still a good historical space in which one could find a historical destiny grounded in being. He, later in life, realized his mistake. In this, he comes toe point where his criticism of Nietzsche becomes most pointed. Nietzsche’s eulogisation of man is that which pre-empts the emptying out of value we find a man at the end of history. Nietzsche is blind to what the caesura of naming man as such might mean: in doing so, and in asserting the gelatinisation of the truth of the polis, the ambiguous border between man and animal collapses. It is precisely the â€Å"essential border between the mystery of the living being and the mystery of what is historical† (Heidegger: 1992:239) that is not dealt with by Nietzsche’s work and it is thus constantly exposed to the possibility of an â€Å"unlimited and groundless anthropomorphization of the animal† that places the animal above man and makes a ‘super-man’ (ibid:160) of it. Life becomes reified over and above the precise condition of its existence; that very condition which makes it always already in dependency on those very grounds of its existence. We will find this same problem repeated in Foucault, who in his criticism of the construction of the subject in modernity illustrates the way in which modern notions of sovereignty act directly on the bios of modern man; this is where modernity begins to act on animal life(this time where equivalence has rendered the possibility of time null)and what is at stake in the construction of the subject is the possibility of his life. Yet, Foucault, like Nietzsche, illustrates this genealogy of dependence without being able to elucidate its historical specificity, which is in its construction of a zone of exclusion at the basis of ontology itself (this can be seen in Foucault’s error in treating bio power as a modern phenomenon). This same problem is manifest in the differ and of Derrida, and in Deleuze’s notion of the organs without a body: each in turns finds itself the symptom of the radical historicism. Each proclaims this symptom a cure, without realising that the cure they offer is precisely that which is the symptom. In all these theorists what this amounts to is misunderstanding of the nature of language. Thus, while Nietzsche manages to destroy stable notions of the subject, the unstable notion he replaces them with, while apparently liberating, exists within the same binaries he seeks to destroy, and moreover, allows for the exactly the same herd instinct that he seeks to overcome. I. Why I needed to kill God I.I We see ourselves in every mirror What, in all strictness, has really conquered the Christian God? (†¦) Christian morality itself, the concept of truthfulness taken more and more strictly, the confessional subtlety of the Christian conscience translated and sublimated into the scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness at any price. To view nature as if it were a proof of the goodness and providence of a God; to interpret history to the glory of divine reason, as the perpetual witness to a moral world order and moral intentions; to interpret one’s own experiences, as pious men long interpreted them, as if everything were preordained, everything a sign, everything sent for salvation of the soul that now belongs to the past, that has conscience against it†¦. In this way, Christianity as a dogma was destroyed by its own morality†¦. (Nietzsche: 1969:160) Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals outlines the way in which Christianity formulates its notion of the subject. The Christian super-ego is posited as salvation, as the point towards which one works. Thus, the Christian subject exists as, first and foremost, alack: it is not what it wishes to be. Yet, as Nietzsche points out, this lack is a condition and construction of the subject within Christianity: one resembles oneself and yet in order to find deliverance must become more of oneself and in doing so one finds justification for the present order of things. The Christian superegos to be found in God, and then, surprise, surprise, the Christian ego can be found placed in the soul of the body. This parallels the analysis that Foucault makes of the subject (1999, 1975). The law construct the subject as normal (and in doing so sets up an exclusion of the abnormal, or that which is not: that which has no voice – icon-human) and in this process creates a desiring-subject, who desires what the law has not given it. Yet these desires are what are created by the notion of the subject placed upon one: one is created absent, oars not that, not this, but always awaiting a day when one can be called by a proper name. It is this awaiting a proper name that Nietzsche attacks most strongly, and in this theory of language we shall see Nietzsche allows no place for such a proper name. A proper name relation, Nietzsche argues, is always a relationship between a creditor and a debtor; it is always typified by the dependence or lack, and as such prevents the possibility that of morality to be free and joyous. Nietzsche though, and is not commented on very much, reserves some tender thoughts for Christianity. It is a primal Christianity, a Dionysian Christianity, that Nietzsche can endorse. As much can be seen in the quote that started this section: Nietzsche’s criticism of Christianity should not be seen to be limited to Christianity. Rather, it extends to all relationships of debt and obligation to a structuring super-ego. It was not Nietzsche, he claims, that killed Christianity, it was Christianity itself, and Nietzsche loathes the nihilism that replaces it just as much. We can discern three criticisms of Christianity/nihilism in the quote that started this dissertation. Nietzsche elaborates that one of the structures of Christianity is the idea of a puritanical truthfulness, which has been sublimated into scientific consciousness. Nietzsche’s primary criticism of this truthfulness is that is relies upon a correspondence theory of truth: it requires an external state that can be matched in some way to an internal state (which then requires a subject to have such an internal state). For Nietzsche, consciousness created in such a way in simply ashram, an intentional lie: consciousness lies free and unbounded – it has no centre around which it can orientate itself. Furthermore, the mapping between a real world of existent things (Kant’s ding an such)and a subjective world of language is not possible. It is not possible because language only ever refers to itself. To use Saussure’s(1995:12) terminology, a sign can only have meaning within another setoff signs; it has no essential relationship to the world that is signified. A correspondence theory of truth attempts to hold up astatic a world that is in constant flux and in doing so negates the possibility of human freedom, which Nietzsche opposes to belief. The importance of this critique of the Christian subject will be returned to later in the dissertation when we consider Nietzsche’s theory of language. The second crucial critique of Christianity made in the quote that begins this dissertation is of history as possessing meaning, as divine providence being read into history as if it were a series of signs. This resembles the structural properties of psychoanalysis that Delouse(1983a, 1983b, 1984) was so devastatingly to criticise. One can read one’s entire life as a history of redemption, as Benjamin (1986:112)comments. In this reading, every moment of one’s life in which one fails, feels regret of guilt because one is not conterminous with the notion of the subject given to you, can be read as a sign of messianic moment to come: it is to deny the contingent and necessary existence one has in favour of a reified notion of being that removes life from life. Nietzsche realises that such a realisation about life is scary, and he realises that people will cling onto a Christian notion of belief even if it has no rational foundation: that is why in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1 969) he attempts to convince people through rhetoric rather than argument. Several elements of Nietzsche’s thought here are important to note. While he attacks Christianity, in the long quote we started the section with he already observes that the technological-scientific paradigm replaces Christianity while adopting all of its tenants. As Nietzsche(1974:108) comments: â€Å"after Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. -And we- we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.† Science is this shadow: it refuses an engagement with the world in favour of a mystified detached observer who can sit back and observe the world rather than engage within its context. This DE contextualisation actually ends up relativizing the world. This is a radical historicism that believes the role of the pasties to come to the rescue of the future: temporality is shortened tallow only a pre sent, an immediate process of desiring-lack and sustenance. It allows for the feigned equivalence of all men, as they are all equal as subjects, and as all in this equivalence all notions of importance and goals are emptied of meaning by an effectively moribund set of values that deny life in favour of a search for authentic experience. This search for authentic experience is termed active nihilism in Nietzsche: it is an attempt to confront the emptiness of value categories with frenetic action: this is what Size (2001:48) calls the passion for the real: the passion for frenetic experience that ultimately culminates in its simulacrum. It culminates in its simulacrum because the passion for the real (as opposed to the empty appearance people inhabit) eventually becomes the passion for the real without risk – for one only risks if there is something one is willing to die for: for Nietzsche the chance and contingency of the eternal return – and thus we see the Nietzsche an concepts of passive and active nihilism end up, in late modern capitalism, becoming one. We can see that the co-existence of what we could term the correspondence theory of truth and the history as destiny theory (where everything is able tube reconciled to the present) inevitably end up in this structure of nihilism. Both of these theories rely on several underlying structures of thought that Nietzsche was also quick to criticise in Christianity. Innis analysis of the origins of Christianity, he notes (1956:112):â€Å"Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life’s nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in another or better life.† Christianity was always underlined by a series of binary logics: this is not the right life: this one is better; hate: love, God: Satan. It is this binary thinking that comes in for a huge amount of criticism from Nietzsche. It is these binaries that ignore that the world is in astute of becoming, that it is forever in a state of flux. Nietzsche notes (1966:12): â€Å"it may be doubted, firstly whether there exists any antithesis at all, and secondly whether these popular evaluations and value anti-thesis, on which the metaphysicians have set their seal, are not perhaps foreground valuations, merely provisional perspectives. â€Å"Therefore, Nietzsche’s criticism is not simply of our values, as we have seen in the previous paragraphs, but of the way in which our values are constructed. Nietzsche’s theory of language illustrates that each of the terms in binary series is dependent on the other. Butler (1990,1993) undertakes similar enterprise inspired by Nietzsche when she investigates the dependency of the category women on the category man and vice versa. Power is exercised, Nietzsche understands, in the formation of the very categories themselves, not merely in the ascription of certain people to good and certain people to bad. It is a mistake to fight for the category of lack, because the detestable thing is the very category: by fighting against the lack (e.g. of women for rights) one is accepting the terms of the herd mentality; that one must accept the givens of the situation and its binary categories. This is why a genealogy of morals is necessary, to (Butler: 1990:ix)â€Å"investigate the political stakes in designating as an origin and cause those identity categories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, discourses with multiple and diffuse points of origin.† Such pursuit unseats the claim of a binary logic to an objective reality: they show them as temporal formations that constitute a world for the subject. However, such a world is always shot through with lack. One can illustrate this using Alcan’s (1981) theory of mirrors, which he derives from Nietzsche’s view of the subject. In Alcan’s view, one is never identical to the role one has been assigned in life. The social formation of life (which is an appearance) is full of inconsistency and incompleteness. As Christina Wolf (1980:151) comments in her novel: Nelly couldn’t help it: the charred building made her sad. But she didn’t know that she was feeling sad [my emphasis], because she wasn’t supposed to feel sad. She had long ago begun to cheat herself out of her true feelings†¦.Gone, forever gone, is the beautiful, free correlation between emotions and events†¦. It wouldn’t have taken much for Nelly to have succumbed to an improper emotion: compassion. But healthy German common sense built barrier against it: anxiety. The character Nelly feels the dissonance between the world she is in and the world she experiences: she experiences anxiety over it. Such anxiety is the mark of the problem of binary categorisation. This categorisation does not resemble the world, which is in flux, but it places over it a series of categories that are power relationships designed to constitute you as a subject. We can perhaps draw a parallel here between what Nietzsche analyses in his philosophy of language as the productive power of the grammar of an age and what Laplace(1989:130), following Alcan, calls the source-object of drives. These unconscious formations are an encounter between an individual whose psycho-somatic structures are situated predominantly at the level of need, and signifiers emanating from an adult. Those signifiers pertain to the satisfaction of the child’s needs, but they also convey the purely interrogative potential of other messages—and those other messages are sexual. These enigmatic messages set the child the difficult, or even impossible, task of mastery and symbolization and the attempt to perform it inevitably leaves behind unconscious residues†¦. I refer to them as the source objects of the drives. What one must be careful to do here is to distinguish between the early Nietzsche and his later work. In early work such as the Birth of Tragedy (1956), Nietzsche can still talk about an essential essence that the Christian or Apollonian reasoning hides. In his later work he fully endorses the view that consciousness is but surface: a radically anti-essentialist position that refuses the possibility of an outside of language or of consciousness. There is then, no real that one can break through the appearance to get to, as one might in psychoanalysis. However, that does not necessarily mean the psychoanalytic reading were doing here is incorrect. Laconia analysis departs from the Freudian analysis that Delouse criticizes in its conception of the subject. For Nelly, the character in Wolf’s novel, the state fore-anxiety might be referred to as true, but a sense of what it is would be to call it uninhibited: free from the strictures of power. In the later Nietzsche, the ability t o escape the possibility of the subject is ambiguous. What Nelly asks for is not an absolute escape, as Laplace does not ask that the child can master the symbolization of his parents and escape the drives. Rather, what is inferred is continual tension and thrust against that which claims to be objective and masks desire, put in a Delusion idiom: it is the consistent schizoid refusal to stasis. As such, it parallels the construction of the subject in Foucault. Like Nietzsche and Butler, Foucault performs a genealogy. Like the later Nietzsche, Foucault realizes the impossibility of breaking through language. One is always already constructed as a subject: any attempt to break out of this trap relies on an exterior moral framework that simply replicates the binaries of an existing power discourse. Foucault (1979:178) notes that â€Å"discourse creates the object of which it speaks.† Discourse gives rise to a subject, and an attempt to break out of the subject through a call to a value (such as revolutionary purity, truth) falls into the same power trap as existing political discourse. What Foucault and Nietzsche both call into question is the notion of valorisation itself: that which always assumes a dichotomousbinarisation. However, rather than placing their project within an appeal to the real outside of language, both claim the most one can does attack language thro ugh language. This task means to constantly reveal that which appears as objective as actually a temporally structured mask of power. Thus for Foucault (1984:217): The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the working of institutions which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight them. This task has no end or limit: indeed, an end or limit is part of the notion of the structure of power; that there is this goal that you must attain, that you are not this, though at a certain point you may indeed attain it. We can see such notions of end goal rely on the interpretation of history as divine providence (or in the secular historicist version, history being called to the rescue of the present)that Nietzsche was so quick to criticise as ignoring the contingency and chance of existence. Both of these parallel Deleuze’s criticism of hierarchical structure as that which inhibits desire and presses it into the service of power. What this entails is not simply the refutation of God at the centre of the world, defining the notion of our being. It is a refutation of a centre of the world. Secularism simply replaces God with man, and declares that the self-autonomous mains that which defines our values, when we do not act in a way accorded to by the hegemony, then it is u s who are lacking. Thus, Nietzsche(1962:346) makes a comment much like Marx when he says â€Å"we now laugh when we find ‘Man and World’ placed beside one another, separated by the sublime presumption of the little world ‘and.’ Thus, in Nietzsche it is not simply Christianity but its zombie replacement rationality that needs to be criticised. Foucault continues this task in The Order of Things (1994), attacking the Human account of causality and truth than requires a one to one mapping between things and their referents. This criticism is possible because, as Nietzsche notes (1968:616) â€Å"the world with which we are concerned . . .is not a fact . . . it is in flux, as something in a state of becoming, as a falsehood always changing but never getting near the truth: for—there is no truth.† This is the strongest statement of Nietzsche’s project. He wants to undermine the notion of truth and reveal it for a set of power constructions and particularities. With the notion of truth, the notion of the proper name (the proper place for the human subject) becomes impossible, and what opens up is decentred multitude of consciousness like that which Delouse (1980:332) outlines in Mille Plateaux . This project would have what is productive as that which is nomadic, which refuses all forms of hierarchy in favour of that which is additive. To carry out such project it is necessary to destroy the possibility of belief. I.II Our beliefs are our weakness If there is today still no lack of those who do not know how indecent it is to believeor a sign of decadence, of a broken will to livewell, they will know it tomorrow. (Nietzsche: 1990:3) For Nietzsche, belief requires something outside of oneself. Indeed, belief can be understood as the opposite to freedom in Nietzsche’s thought. To believe in something is to believe in what that thing has made you into: it is to believe that one has something internal (belief) that can be referred to the world. As Nietzsche notes (ibid:347): Once a human being reaches the fundamental conviction that he must be commanded, he becomes a believer.’ Conversely, one could conceive of such a pleasure and power of self-determination, such a freedom of the will that the spirit would take leave of all faith and every wish for certainty, being practiced in maintaining himself on insubstantial ropes and possibilities and dancing even near abysses. As we have noted above, it is not enough to simply get rid of God. What happens to the people after we get rid of God? They run together, as a herd, scared, into other formations of command, such as nationalism. It is interesting to note here Foucault’s comment, that the challenge of nationalism (1994:228) was to â€Å"establish a system of signs in congruence with the transcendence of being.† It was to believe in a new grammar that replaced the old certainties of life with new certainties: the certainty of the glory of the death of the unknown soldier for the transcendent nation. That is why Nietzsche says,(1990:15): â€Å"we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar.† Nietzsche’s real challenge is almost a challenge against language: it is an attempt to consistently run up against the limit of language and refute its hegemonic possibilities (e.g. in the distribution of tenses) at every turn. A grammar forces one to give lie to a real ity: the only such lies Nietzsche thinks are acceptable are innocent lies, those lies that enable communication in contingent fashion, that are not totalising and do not exceed the moment of their own expression. What happens with the new certainties is that they still rely on a concept of will. They ask one to partake in a world in which one is necessarily excluded (you are not this, yet†¦). For Nietzsche (1924:14),to believe in the will is to believe â€Å"every individual action is isolate and indivisible .† Thus runs counter to the idea of flux Nietzsche takes from Heraclitus. Actions are not simply formed but are always already part of a social world that means individual isolatable action is impossible. As is thinking. Thinking (Nietzsche: 1968:477)â€Å"as epistemologists conceive it, simply does not occur, it is a quite arbitrary fiction, arrived at by selecting one element from the process and eliminating all the rest, an artificial arrangement for the purpose of intelligibility.† This process of intelligibility constructs a world in which one is dependent on the process of selection: thought, like and will, becomes a tool to be used: a means-end relationship that requires the a priori separation of subject and object, thought and world, that Nietzsche so convincingly refutes. He notes (1990:54) that â€Å"the man of faith, the believer of every sort is necessarily dependent mansuch as cannot out of himself posit ends at all. The ‘believer does not belong to himself, he can be only a means, he haste be used, he needs someone who will use him.† In the hands of God, or secularism, agency is always placed outside yourself in the objective world that you lack. The weak believer who does not think that he wills(which is already a mistake) at least (ibid: 18) â€Å"puts a meaning into them: that is, he believes there is a will in them already (principle of â€Å"belief†).† To change this it is not enough to attack reason (as Adorn and Horkheimer do in The Dialectic of Enlightenment [1972]) but to attack the notion of the instincts. Instinct, while normally associated with that which is most natural, is in Nietzsche a product of discourse and habit over centuries, it is an unthinking subjectivity masquerading as the natural order of things. It is given by the law, and (Nietzsche:1990:57) â€Å"the authority of the law is established by the thesis: God gave it, the ancestors lived it.† To free habit, as we noticed earlier, requires not an attack on reason but an attack on habit, on unreflexive action: we need to liberate man from cause and effect. This task requires that man be liberated from the notion of the name. As Nietzsche (1956:20) claims: The lordly right of giving names extends so far that one should allow oneself to conceive the origin of language itself as an expression of power on the part of the rulers: they say this is this and this, they seal everything and event with a sound, as it were, take possession of it This feat requires a liberation from language. Here Nietzsche is at his most powerful, for he realises that it is in the very nature of language itself that the origin of power lays. Indeed, there is strong correlation between the attack on the sovereign in Nietzsche and Foucault and Saussaurian linguistics. In both the argument relies on the non-relation between signs and what they represent, and yet the continued claim of signs to be coterminous with what they represent, taking possession of it. Against this, Nietzsche wants to liberate us from names (1990:8). That no one is any longer made accountable, that the kind of being manifested cannot be traced to a cause prima, that the world is a unity neither as sensorium nor as spirit, this alone is the great liberation. This flux of things, clearly prevents the emergence of a subject: consciousness here, and for Nietzsche’s thought as a whole has, has no predetermined pattern. What we need to fight, for Nietzsche, is the giving of the pattern, the idea that the whole is no longer whole(1974:22). What is the sign of every literary decadence? That life no longer dwells in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, the page gains life at the expense of the wholethe whole is no longer a whole. I.III The Grammar of the Age, or how I learned to love the Word Life (Nietzsche: 1990:11) is a â€Å"continuous, homogenous, undivided, indivisible flowing.† For it is not the world that is simple and exact(what one could call the assigning of the world to the word: or to its lieu proper), rather through words we â€Å"are still continually misled into imagining things as being simpler than they are, separate from one another, indivisible, each existing in and for itself.† When Nietzsche writes this, he has abandoned the distinction between the apparent and the real world. There is no ideal for (ibid: 6): â€Å"with the real world we have also abolished the apparent world.† Such a world allows no notions of predestination, and no correspondence theory of truth. Anyone who speaks of such things is a liar (ibid: 38): One must know today that a theologian, a priest, a pope does not merely err in every sentence he speaks, he liesthat he is no longer free to lie innocently, out of ignorance. The priest knows as well as everyone that there is no longer any God, any sinner, any ‘redeemerthat free will, moral world-order are liesintellectual seriousness, the profound self-overcoming of the intellect, no longer permits anyone not to know about these things. What do we replace this met discourse with? We cannot replace it with a singular subject: a new revolutionary ideal or perfect subject, for this would be to become but another priest. Nietzsche (1968:490)argues: â€Å"the assumption of one single subject is perhaps unnecessary; perhaps it is just as permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects, whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought and our consciousness in general? . . . My hypothesis: the subject as multiplicity. . . The continual transistorizes and fleetingness of the subject.† This is precisely what Delouse echoes half a century later when he claims (1983a: 5): â€Å"production as process overtakes all idealistic categories and constitutes a cycle whose relationship to desire is that of an imminent principle.† This multiplicity, one might ask: how does one get there, and what does one do when one is multiple, when one is the Dionysian figure who Nietzsche claims (1956:45) is in constant state of becoming, who is â€Å"the nominal â€Å"I† that is always becoming and his intoxicated state sounds out the depth of Being.† In one sense for Nietzsche this is an idle question: one cannot assume multitude is something in itself, indeed (1968:560): â€Å"that things possess a constitution in themselves quite apart from interpretation and subject

Numeracy Levels in BT1 Training Programme

Numeracy Levels in BT1 Training Programme Research Methods BT1 Numeracy Abstract This research will investigate the readiness of students to join the basic training program. It will focus on the perceptions of staff at No1 Radio School while marrying these comments to student performance. The research will focus on the levels of numeracy within the student population and their ability to apply this to the course material, whilst relating this to their current level of qualifications. These issues are not purely associated with the Royal Air Forces training but are prevalent throughout the education and training sectors. The subjects of literacy and numeracy have been identified as areas that are vastly under research, it is hoped that the issues raised in the short research project will identify further research questions that in turn may form part of further research. Introduction The field of work this research will investigate lies within the MoD, specifically the RAF at DCAE Cosford. The school being used to conduct this research is No1 Radio School, delivering training to Basic Trainees and Assimilation Trainees for all ground trades now known as Trade Group Four (TG4). The students ages range from 17 to 30 years of age. This research will focus on one specific target group, Basic Training 1 (BT1). These students are new members of the Royal Air Force and will have just completed their basic training at Halton (Ten weeks); they have come to Cosford to begin their trade specific training. The course is ten months in length, over which the students will cover both principles and trade training. The entry requirement for this trade is a minimum of three GCSEs, in Physics, Maths and one other subject. However they do accept some individuals with lesser qualifications as an exception and occasionally current members of the RAF who wish to change their trade. The trade requirements are specific and therefore it would be reasonable to assume the students basic level of literacy and in particular numeracy, would be sufficient to allow them to develop throughout this course. Research Issue. This research will look specifically at the levels of numeracy within the BT1 student population. It will try and identify if there is a problem and seek to provide evidence of any issues while providing recommendations for improvement. To ensure that there is no breach of ethics, the research will focus on the perceptions of the staff and the results from the students. This research issued raised questions that required answering, why is it that qualified students find the level 2 key skills and the level 2 maths phase of the BT1 training difficult? It is these issues that have intrigued me for some time. I believe this issue is worthy of research, however it is quite possible that additional questions will be raised that fall outside the scope of this research and may require additional research before they can be answered. Research Focus It has become apparent that new students entering the Royal Air Force as trade group 4 operator maintainers, although qualified for trade do not appear to posses the prerequisite knowledge required to complete the Key Skills at level 2 and the Maths phase of the course. That is not to say they all fail. That would be far from the truth, it is the difficulty they demonstrate when completing this phase of the course. The reason that this research is so important is this first phase of the course is crucial for the students. It gives them the skills and knowledge they require, which in turn will allow them to apply this knowledge to new problems and situations as they progress through the course. These skills could be considered tools of the trade, without a good grasp of these concepts the students will not gain the maximum benefit from the course. Literature Literacy and numeracy have become major issues in the field of education since the Moser report 1999, the working group chair by Sir Claus Moser in the opening statement of the report stated, Something like one adult in five in this country is not functionally literate and far more people have problems with numeracy. Moser, C (1999) This statement is met with surprise when you discuss this subject, however Moser states, We have found that people are staggered when one confronts them with the basic facts about literacy and numeracy, and rightly soIt is a state of affairs that cannot be allowed to continue, and our Report proposes a wide ranging approach to the challenge Moser, C (1999) Many organisations have concerns about the statistics when it comes to Literacy and numeracy in the adult population, Wells, A (2004) states, Surveys in the 1990s suggested that between 15 and 19 per cent of adults had poor basic skills. However, the International Adult Literacy Survey in the late 1990s suggested a much higher figure of 23 per cent or seven million adults. Wells, A (2004) Are we seeing a true picture of the problem? This research has highlighted concerns from staff about the students abilities. It would seem from the statistics that there is a strong correlation. One area this research was unable to quantify was how does gender affect numeracy, It was not possible to confirm or deny this because there were insufficient females included in the sample group to make a good judgement. However a recent article published by the DFES suggests there is a considerable difference between females and males when it comes to numeracy. Grinyer, J (2006) states, Women and men perform near equally for literacy, but men significantly outperform women at numeracy. Grinyer, J (2006) At level 2 this is an interesting fact and one that is perhaps worth of further research. If gender is an issue then what about current qualification level. Grinyer, J (2006) states Highest qualification appears to be the best predictor of an individuals literacy and numeracy level, with parental background and local deprivation having larger effects than current employment status Grinyer, J (2006) Research Hypothesis. The research hypothesis should be constructed in such a way that the research can disprove the hypothesis. So while the researcher believes students have issues with numeracy that directly affect their ability to perform throughout the course, and that the accepted entrance qualifications standards do not reflect the abilities of the students, the hypothesis should refute this. (See the hypothesis) The Hypothesis for this piece of research is: All BT1 trainees are sufficiently numerate to attend the BT1 course, as all trainees are qualified to a minimum standard. (Three relevant GCSEs) Research Hypothesis. There are a number of possible questions encompassing a range of different methodologies the scope of this research will be limited to one Research question, below are two possible questions. Why do students on the BT1 course suffer with the issue of numeracy when attending the taught lessons, completing assignments and examinations when they are course qualified? How do staff perceive the readiness of students on the BT1 course to deal with the academics of the course? After consideration and due to the constraints of this research it was decided to use the later, an interpritivest approach. Using this question offers the research some distinct advantages, firstly a limited scope and secondly and more importantly, it eliminates the students from the research which removes a large percentage of the ethical issue that may arise from questioning the students directly. This research should identify how instructors feel about the perceived problems students have when using the different forms of numeracy. Mercer, N states, one function of theories is to set agendas for research  ¿Ã‚ ½ to generate certain kinds of questions which the research will attempt to answer. Mercer in Walford (1998 p.42) This question could use a likert style method of answering, thus allowing the individual to grade their agreement or disagreement of the above question. This question as it stands would not necessarily be suitable for the students to answer as it is likely to produce a Yes/No response, however it could be acceptable for the staff. The same question could be asked in a different way. i.e. How has the GCSE maths helped the students with their study of the other principle subjects? Although it would be more difficult to analyse a short answer would bring out more of the individuals feelings, where as the likert style just grades the agreement or disagreement. Other questions that might be asked are: I. Do you feel the students could complete this course successfully without this qualification (GCSE maths)? II. How did the students maths affect their ability to complete this phase of training? III. Has the student qualification helped them with their studies? Youngman (1986) in Bell said, The more structured a question the easier it will be to analyse. Bell (1999 p.119) Research Paradigm What is a paradigm? A Paradigm  ¿Ã‚ ½ group of coherent ideas about the nature of the world and of the functions of researchers that are adhered to by a group of researchers, conditions and patterns of their thinking which underpins their research actions. What paradigms exist? There are a few key paradigms that exist within educational research positivist and Interpretiveist. Positivist research uses scientific, Statistical analysis and empirical methods, Cohen and Manion said, Traditionally, the word refers to those techniques associated with the positivistic model  ¿Ã‚ ½ eliciting responses to predetermined questions, recording measurements, describing phenomena and performing experiments. Cohen and Manion(1996 p.38) Interpretiveist research deals with human emotions, personnel perspectives. Cohen and Manion said, The central endeavour in the context of the interpretive paradigm is to understand the subjective world of human experience. Cohen and Manion(1996 p.36) Ethnographical methods are interpretivist. Gall, M. et al (1996, p607) say, Ethnography involves first hand, intensive study of the features of a given culture and the patterns in those features. Judith Bells thoughts on quantitative and qualitative research identify that quantitative researchers collect facts and study the relationship. They are measured using scientific techniques producing quantifiable and generaliseable conclusions, where as a qualitative perspective is more concerned with individuals perceptions of the world; Seeking insight rather than statistical analysis. In addition she concludes that on occasions qualitative researchers draw on quantitative techniques and vice versa. This would suggest that one method alone does not have all the answers and therefore we could consider various methods when conducting research. This research will use an interpretiveist methodology, this approach has been selected as the most appropriate as the information will come from members of staff, the information they provide will be their interpretation of the situation hence interpretiveist. This approach has been chosen as more appropriate than positivist approach because there is little scientific evidence and the amount of data collected would be insufficient to produce any valid statistical analysis. Ethnographical and eclectic research was also dismissed although it bridges the gap between Positivist and Interpertiveist research. It would however,still have positivist elements as mentioned previously. However the over arching reasoning for adopting an interpretiveist approach was the limited nature of this research project. Although, it is hoped that the findings from this research will generate further questions and spark yet further research questions for future research Research Methodology This style of research could be considered a case study, as its focus is centred on a specific group of students, belonging to a single organisation. Cohen and Manion state, a case study researcher typically observes the characteristics of an individual unit  ¿Ã‚ ½ a child, a clique, a class, a school or a community Cohen and Manion (1996,p106) While this approach would work it is more suited to a continuous improvement program and not a specific piece of research, in addition the length of time it would take to conduct a program of this nature makes this approach unsuitable. In planning the research, various methodologies were considered, however due to the limited nature of this research and to limit the impact of ethical issues, this research decided that an Interpretiveist approach would be most suited. This style of research is relevant, as the research will investigate the attitudes and opinions of the staff and not the students, while using student data to support or refute the findings. To facilitate this research there were a number of preferred techniques available for gathering the data: Interviews / Meetings Academic results Reference to external sources (Collages, Universities, Schools, Government Departments) The main reason behind this strategy, methods and analysis tools was time. The other key issue was ethics, for these reasons this research will be conducted through focus group meetings with staff using structured questions, this data will then be compared with the average results for a class. This approach will limit the impact of ethical issues and allow some conclusions to be drawn. This approach was discussed with the staff that felt that due to busy teaching commitments this was the most appropriate solution. Judith Bell states, Talking through problems and possible topics with colleagues is an essential stage of any plan. Bell (1999 p.21) The focus group will consist of five lecturers and four instructors, it is envisaged that a single meeting will take place to pose the questions to the staff. The data will be collected via questions directed to the staff in discussion groups; the responses of the staff were recorded. (See Annex B) To support the findings from the discussion groups the students results will be analysed. Data Collection instruments The data collection will be achieved through structured questions delivered at group meetings where the responses will be tabulated; this will give a feeling for the staffs concerns and perhaps some misconceptions. It will also allow any further research to focus its attention on specific areas of concern. Once the data has been collected this can be cross referenced to the student results, identifying any disparities, in addition student results and student retention rates may be useful sources of information. The other methods considered were, interviews, these could be time consuming, as staff are not always available. A well constructed questionnaire could produce valid reliable results in a reasonable time frame. However due to the limited time constraints, this research will utilise meetings with a number of groups and evaluate comments from those meetings to produce an Interpretivist style report. This will not provide hard evidence, however it will illustrate any concerns or trends that may be apparent which in turn could instigate further research. This approach although less structured will give a general feel for the issues, which could lead to further research questions. Sapsford and Jupp note the following facts about collecting data, There are both advantages and disadvantages to both highly structured and less structured methods; in no sense is it true to say that one is more objective than the other. Sapsford and Jupp (1996, p94) Research validity ensures the data collected is accurate and meaningful, collecting data in a non valid way would affect the final analysis; which may produce misconceptions when analysing the research data, thus rendering the research valueless. The research will improve validity through accurate data collection and careful analysis of the results, in addition reliability and repeatability could be enhanced through the triangulation of the data collected. Triangulation is method of verifying the data, checking and ensuring accuracy and ensuring that the findings are qualitative and thus reducing the chance of unsubstantiated data. Cohen and Manion said, Triangulation may be defined as the use of two or more methods of data collection the study of some aspect of human behaviour. Cohen and Manion(1996 p.233) The triangulation of the data was achieved through data collected from the meeting notes; these were then supported by student results and reference to national statistics. Chosen methods of data collection. This project will use a structured set of questions derived from the research question. The aim was to ask these questions at the focus group meeting, where the staffs responses and opinions were recorded. The rationale behind the choice of research and the methodology is predicated upon the limited nature of the research this in turn has limited the choice of methodology (interpertiveist). The limited time scale in which this research was conducted has in turn restricted the modes of research used to produce the data for evaluation; the aim was to gain a feeling from the staff as to how they perceived the research issue. The use of structured questions helped guide the process of data gathering and allowed the collection of data within a very short time scale, this was imperative due to the limited time constraints of this research. The interpritiveist approach allows the staffs feelings to be represented against the set criteria thus giving a good degree of relevant data for analysis. While this approach aided the collection of data at a rapid rate it did not offer the widest selection of data. Other methods could have produced further data to support or refute the findings. However this research hopes to triangulate its findings against student data (examination and assignment results). Research ethics. The matter of ethics is an important one; if the researcher wants to achieve open and honest answers they must consider ethics when conducting the research. To reduce the impact of this research the methodologies have been carefully chosen to reduce the data collection to that of the staff. The students results will be anonymous, to such an extent that the research will not identify the individual students, thus reducing the opportunity for others to identify individuals through the results and class group. Researchers cannot always predict what they might find and they may not like what they find; however it is the duty of the researcher to be open and honest about the research they are conducting. These are some of the things to consider when conducting research: Peoples amenity, that is to say protecting an individuals identity, ensuring that a respondents comments cannot be tracked back to a single individual or group. The Oxford Brookes University classifies research ethics and says, The integrity of any research depends not only on its scientific rigour, but also on its ethical adequacy. Ethical issues are many and varied, and may be quite complex. Research involving human participants is undertaken by many different disciplines and conducted in a broad range of settings and institutions. While some issues are specific to professional groups, all research should be guided by a set of fundamental ethical principles to ensure the protection of human participants. Wood,L (2006) Design Constraints One of the main issues when conducting any form of research is time; given enough time the research could produce massive amounts of facts, figures and an impression of peoples feelings. In addition to time there is always the cost of conducting research. However most organisations would expect any form of research to be conducted within certain time constraints, thus limiting costs and obtaining results within that time frame. Therefore the research can only be expected to deliver some of the information that is available, and that data would need to be substantiated through triangulation, generalisability and reliability. It is the limited nature of this research that has influenced the chosen methodology, interpertiveist. Although this may limit the validity of the research, the triangulation of the staffs comments and answers to the set questions when linked to student results, should give a reasonable confidence in its findings. Analysis of Results The questions asked at the focus group and the responces are given below: The group was asked, Are current BT 1 Trainees academically equipped to join this course? The staff responded with the following statements: Although students are qualified they do not seem to be prepared for the challenges this course offers. Some staff feel that GCSEs are a lower level qualification than a traditional O level (This used to be the entry requirement some years ago.) Although the students are qualified they do not seem to have the prerequisite skills to work effectively on the course. Students do not seem to remember some of the basics of mathematics. It would appear from the response that the staffs perception is that students are not prepared for this course and that the qualifications they hold do not reflect the students abilities. The BBC news web site on 30 October 2003 stated, The survey found 47% of the adults in England or 15 million people had a lower level of mathematical knowledge than was needed to gain a grade G at GCSE. The Department for Education and Skills blamed decades of neglect for figures showing millions of people lacking basic literacy and numeracy skills. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/3227263.stm There seems to be a general distrust of current qualifications as opposed to the traditional O Levels. This was the minimum entrant standard for this trade. The group was then asked, Which area of the course do students find difficult? The Maths is the most difficult for students because they do not possess the basic skills required to complete the work. Key Skills, Numeracy Some struggle with Electronic fundamentals mainly due to a lack of maths ability. They coped well with Addition and subtraction, however multiplication, division were more problematic. Additional areas where students struggled were percentages, area and fractions. These are not the only subject areas where students found difficulty, however they cover the major problem areas. These issues are similar to those identified in a recent TES, they stated, In last years skills action plan, the Assembly government revealed that 24% of the working age population lacked level 1 literacy skills and 53% level 1 in numeracy. In Wales, 20% have no qualifications compared with 14% across the UK (TES Cymru, June 30 2006) The focus of the problem seems to be centred on the Maths / arithmetic elements of the course. One of the key areas was Key Skills, in particular numeracy. Students seemed to find this difficult; they did not seem to posses the basics. Staff were asked to consider, Are there any circumstances that might affect students ability to perform on the course? Poorly prepared when leaving school. Length of time away from a learning environment. Lack of ability Some seem unable to apply previously learnt knowledge to new situations. Its is difficult to believe the students were poorly prepared as they all are qualified, suggesting they once had the knowledge, however it is interesting to note the comment about the length of time, as it is well known that constant and repetitive use of knowledge aids retention, lack of use leads to little or no retention of knowledge. A recent news article in the Daily Mail by HARRIS, S (2006) stated, One in five about to embark on teaching careers still have problems spelling and using punctuation as well as doing the most simple multiplication, division and percentages. Harris, S (2006) The question, Do you believe the students are suitably qualified? Staffs response to this was, Yes, they are for the trade and on paper, but do the qualifications match up to the expectations of the course? This alludes to a previous question about students being prepared. Do the qualifications meet the minimum requirements of the course. The answer is yes they do, however there seems to be a void between students retained knowledge and the paper qualifications. To illustrate this issue the House of Commons raised the issue of literacy and numeracy with the Secretary of State for Defence being asked, how many and what proportion of new recruits to the army in the last 12 months had (a) literacy and (b) numeracy skills at or below (i) entry level 3, (ii) entry level 2 and (iii) entry level 1. Mr. Touhig replied, Consolidated literacy and numeracy initial assessment figures for recruits to the army in the period 1 November 2004 to 31 October 2005, are provided as follows. Literacy Numeracy Entry level 1 Entry level 2 Entry level 3 Entry level 1 Entry level 2 Entry level 3 Percentage 0.71 7.81 32.51 0.19 7.65 37.11 Number of recruits 72 795 3310 19 770 3737 Total number of recruits(11) Literacy Numeracy These figures were given from an Official Report, column 98W on departmental staff literacy and numeracy. No Author (2005) The group was also asked, Are students prepared for the academic rigor of this course? No, Students are ill prepared when it comes to learning in this environment. This may also relate to the time away from a learning environment, the beginning of the course is quite intensive and therefore the students find it difficult to get back into a learning environment. In summary of the responses, the staff feel the students were inadequately prepared for this course. However this was not for lack of qualifications more a perceived difference between the more traditional O Level and the existing GCSE qualifications, while the time away from the learning environment may have its part to play. Student results for the first eight classes illustrate that not all students struggle to achieve good results. (RAF pass is set at 60) So could this purely be a staff issue and not one of the students. As the results below indicate some classes obtain reasonable results, that is to say, not all struggle. The results for the first eight classes are shown below: Maths BT1/01 BT1/02 BT1/03 BT1/03 BT1/05 BT1/06 BT1/07 BT1/08 59 66 75 56 72 66 68 62 Electronic Fundamentals BT1/01 BT1/02 BT1/03 BT1/03 BT1/05 BT1/06 BT1/07 BT1/08 68 73 82 77 73 74 59 While these classes passed the respective subjects, there are some low scores in maths for classes 1, 4 and 8. Electronic Fundamentals produces better results, however class 1 and 7 have still scoured low marks. This information is not entirely conclusive as can be seen from the results, some classes did well. Findings The hypothesis has been refuted through the data collated from staffs responses to questions and the student data, all be it limited in nature this research has been shown to support the staffs comments. The analysis of the questions suggests a lack of ability on the students part, this however does not seem to be predicated on qualification. The staffs perceptions of students abilities seem to suggest the students are not sufficiently prepared to attend this course, more over they are not used to the training methods utilised within the MOD. These facts when grouped together cause the students and staff some problems, however this is not to say that large numbers of students are failing to achieve a pass in these subjects, therefore is there a problem? On the face of it, no. However modifications to the training methodology and some additional sessions may improve some of these issues. This research has investigated a broad range of issues relating to new students entering the RAFs BT1 training program, their ability to cope with the academic pressures of the course and their ability to complete the work to the required standard. It would appear many students, although qualified on paper have some difficulty when it comes to the Maths and Electronic Fundamentals phases. Some of the underlying problems relate to the methods of delivery on the course as it is unlike traditional academic institutions. This means that the students take time to adjust to this training methodology and as the Maths and Electronic Fundamentals phase of the course is at the front end, it does not allow sufficient time for this adjustment to take place. On the subject of time between learning, many students left school twelve months before joining the course and have not practiced these skills for some time. As with the maths unless a student continues to use these skills they are quickly forgotten. However this does not explain why students do not remember when prompted. Perhaps this could point to a lack of understanding at the initial point of learning and may require further research to substantiate this theory. Recommendations This piece of research has been limited in its nature, however it has allowed the researcher to gain a wider perspective on these issues, to further improve this work and make the findings more valid it is proposed to include the students in any future research. The students were excluded in this case to speed up the data collection and to reduce any ethical issues that may arise from the research. Further research could be developed from the fi