Queen Latifah’s strategies
Imagine you’re mentoring one of the people in the scenario below who is experiencing a stressful situation in the workplace.
Ashlee and James both work together in accounting and are each responsible for half of an extensive presentation. Ashlee tries to work on the presentation a little each day, while James tends to wait until the last minute to turn in his portions of the project. But, because they rely on each other for certain tasks, Ashlee is often forced to wait for James and then rush to complete her assignments.
Ashlee complains that James’ procrastination is causing her to worry about his work as well as her own and is giving her unnecessary stress. Likewise, James is stressed by Ashlee’s anger and constant hovering. Because of the conflict, James is missing more work, and you suspect it’s because he wants to avoid Ashlee.
Review Queen Latifah’s strategies (either reaching out to others or time management) to help Ashlee or James with their situation.
How can you help either Ashlee or James rise above their stress using one of the two strategies?
Respond to one or more of your classmates’ posts.
Sample Solution
If Ashlee is feeling overwhelmed with her workload due to James' procrastination, you could help her by suggesting she use some time management techniques. Offer to help her break down the project into manageable chunks and set realistic deadlines for herself. Encourage her to take breaks when needed and reward herself for completing tasks on schedule. You could also suggest that she practice mindfulness or meditation exercises in order to take a mental break from the stress of the presentation.
Lamb, S (1997) portrays the idea that poor literacy and numeracy achievement is linked to early school leaving and periods of unemployment. Evidentially, having the key fundamental skills in numeracy and literacy are essential. Students should not be able to leave school without the very minimum knowledge to be able to implement these skills in all aspects of life. Quinn, R (2011) stated that literacy and numeracy are amongst the most important life skills that schools teach. Without these skills, students would not be able to access the different subject areas; moreover be successful and have a positive effect on society. The importance’s of these skills are the responsibility of each individual subject area and should not just be thought of as being a focus for the English and Mathematics departments.
Numeracy is defined as ‘the ability to use mathematics in everyday life’ (National Numeracy, 2015). Not being able to apply mathematics in life would result in not being able to carry out the simplest of tasks needed every day. For example, being able to count change or telling the time. Besides, regardless of the subject, the National Curriculum states that being confident in numeracy and other mathematical skills is a necessity to help students be successful across the curriculum. (DfE, 2014, p.9). Undoubtedly, by incorporating basic numeracy skills in my lessons, I am not only preparing students to be successful in education but for everyday life tasks.
In the activities to be conducted, a basic knowledge of numeracy is crucial in order to solve simple programming tasks, where students are required to use standard arithmetic operators and data types. Furthermore, students need to know about these basic skills for example; adding or subtracting two integers together in order to be able to work out whether the output from their program is correct before executing it. The National Curriculum framework says that: