After watching the video about the Hawthorne Effect, I realized how my recent job as a tutor counselor for RAHI meets many of the aspects of the Hawthorne Effect. When I first heard about the Rural Alaska Honors Institute program, I was a bit nervous about working as a tutor counselor due to all the pressure and responsibilities that I will be handed. The average amount of students that get in the program is about 50 students. Working with this amount of students seemed dreadful. However, the program director, Denise Wartes, changed my perspective and viewpoints about the program. She explained to me how working for RAHI can be very beneficial to me due to my college major, which is elementary education. The program can help build my foundation about my knowledge of working with students, except they are high school students. Working as a tutor and a counselor for this program can help me develop stronger communication and people skills which are essential skills for people who are pursuing an education degree. Some of the other benefits from my job are free housing, free meals, up to 20 hours of overtime, and being able to do fun outdoor activities such as canoeing, white water rafting in Denali, and a trip to the hot springs. Working with the students and receiving all these benefits are what motivated me to become one of RAHI’s most effective TCs (tutor counselor).

Moving on to the question of the supervisor who inspired and motivated me in my job to become one of RAHI’s best TCs, Denise Wartes is the one who inspired me to make a change in rural students’ lives through the program. Although she has retired and handed the throne to a different person, she continues to inspire more people to work in the program to help rural communities to achieve their goals, to send students to college to pursue higher education after graduating from high school. Wartes’ ability to keep everyone motivated is outstanding. She pushes everyone out of their shells to improve their work performance with the students. One of her advice to me during my first summer working as a tutor counselor is to keep socializing with the students to help them feel more comfortable around me. There are certain rules in RAHI that students and TCs should never overlook and that is making sure that everyone gets their sleep. However, when students are stressing about homework and want to keep working on it pass their curfew, that’s when I started breaking the rule because sleep is not going to do their homework for them. Wartes talked to me about how it’s fine to break these rules, as long as its for the students’ benefits and for the best. Wartes is one of those people who would allow rules to be broken as long as it’s not creating negative impacts on the workplace. She would always say the line “students come first’ and that’s what inspired me to continue working as a tutor counselor in RAHI. Denise Wartes’ ability to help her employees become a better version of themselves is the reason why I look up to her as one of the most inspiring and motivating people I know.

Resource:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3pDWt7GntI&feature=youtu.be

An article by Josh Clark called Are Climate Skeptics Right? from science.howstuffworks.com talked about the different factors that climate change deniers believe that influences the way scientists measure the temperature of the Earth. According to Clark, Anti-global warming skeptics believe that weather stations in urban areas produce inaccurate measurements due to the influence of a term called ‘urban heat island’ (NA). This term talks about the heat produced by cities’ transportation systems, heat-absorbing asphalt, and high concentrations of carbon dioxide coming from homes and businesses in urban areas (Clark). Reflecting back to the introduction of Chapter 7 about global warming, the author believes that climate change is caused by human activities and that it is damaging our planet whereas climate change deniers think that our measurements are influenced by urban areas due to the high temperature that they produced, so they say that “climate change’ is a result of inaccurate temperature measurement.

Link for the article: https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/climate-skeptic1.htm

1. The meaning and significance of ecology.

Ecology is the study of the relationship between living organisms and the physical environment. It helps us understand how animals, plants, and all other living things interact with their environment. For example, humans are using natural resources in their environment at a tremendous pace where we do not even give our environment time to recover from our actions. Another example of how we interact with our environment is how much waste we produce and mishandle which causes the majority of the pollution that is on our planet. Ecology is important because it’s the only way for us to come up with ways and methods of how we can help our environment to thrive and to stop it from dying. Without this type of study, our chances of worsening the condition of our planet would be far from what our brains can even imagine.

2. Does nature have value in itself?

Nature is the reason how we, humans, are able to thrive on this planet. Without our natural resources and the different factors of what helps us sustain life on this planet is a price that is unmeasurable. The different elements of our planet’s nature help us go through our daily lives, especially in this technology era where we are constantly building high-grade technology products that we use to improve our lifestyle. To summarize my points about the price of nature, it’s obvious that we cannot put a price on it because it’s priceless.

3. Who should pay the cost for protecting the environment — those responsible for causing the pollution or those who stand to benefit from protection and restoration. Explain your position.

I feel like everyone, those who caused the pollution and those who stand to save and restore our planet, should help each other out to pay the cost for protecting our environment. There are too many finger pointing and blaming going on, and it’s not getting us any closer to eliminating factors and other elements that are contributing to climate change, pollution, and other harmful products of human activities that are causing our planet to wither. We should all step up and be responsible for what we have done to our environment. We need to start walking on the right path to protecting our planet such as pursuing sustainability, recycling, and regulating the waste we produce to avoid any more damages to our environment.

After looking at other people’s research such as plane recalls, vehicle disasters, fraud, and other things, I chose the incident that happened in 1982 which was the Tylenol Recall (Stockton, 2016). In the northern Illinois area in the summer of 1982, reports started to escalate about cyanide poisoning from Tylenol pain-reliever pills where adults and children suddenly started dying. The authorities said that the poison came from an Extra Strength Tylenol bottle which is the most common pain reliever in the country during that time. According to Stockton, an unknown poisoner took the medicines off the shelves and contaminated them with potassium cyanide, and returned the bottles back on the shelves (Stockton, 2016).

Johnson & Johnson, who was the parent company for Tylenol, acted immediately by preventing any retailers from selling their Tylenol bottles for safety purposes. The company recalled 31 million bottles of Tylenol products which estimated at roughly $100 million (Stockton, 2016). Johnson & Johnson came up with a new design for their medicine bottles which is a tamper-proof bottle to prevent any tampering on their products. Due to this incident, Johnson & Johnson’s share price with Tylenol tremendously decreased because of the number of deaths reported and the number of recall bottles. However, their immediate actions helped them solve the problem and prevented any more deaths, which caused the company to rise back from the dead after several months and even surpassed their pre-recall price by the end of 1983. According to Stockton, Johnson & Johnson company pointed out that while bad things can happen to good companies, the damage can be controlled with a quick response and obvious good-faith efforts to protect customers (Stockton, 2016).

Link:

https://allthatsinteresting.com/worst-product-recalls

References

Stockton, Richard. 2016. Three Massive Product Recalls, and The Chilling Circumstances Behind Them. April 11. Accessed June 29, 2019. https://allthatsinteresting.com/worst-product-recalls.