¶ … Play material
Defining Play
To define what it means to 'play,' I first turned to the dictionary. Immediately, when I looked at the entry for "play" given by freedictonary.com, I was confronted with a seemingly limitless list of different definitions of the word "play." To play can mean to act in "jest or sport," or "to occupy oneself in amusement, sport, or other recreation." The noun "play" can also mean a drama or comedy on the stage, and the verb to play can mean to play a part a work of theater. A play can mean to employ a particular maneuver during a game, or to play a particular position in a sport. These definitions suggest responsibility rather than the apparently free and discursive nature of play.
As someone who has played football in college, I appreciate the sense that 'play' can be both fun and serious work. I began playing sports for recreation, like most children, and gradually grew more serious about the pursuit as I played at a more competitive level, finally becoming the kicker for the University of Miami. Professional athletes commanding salaries in the millions must play their games with even more deadly seriousness, while nonprofessional athletes consider the same sporting games a fun way to unwind after a hard day. No one is a 'recreational' doctor or lawyer, but you can be a recreational athlete. Yet playing activities like playing a sport can be a job, or feel like work, and sometimes working on a challenging problem at a job can feel like fun.
This uncertainty of what it means to play is evident in the title of Brian Sutton-Smith's essay on "Play and Ambiguity." Sutton-Smith suggests there are different kinds of play 'scripts,' what he calls seven rhetoric types of play. Sutton-Smith says that one type of play is "play as fate," which is playing a game of chance, like the lottery. This is not necessarily play as fun, and certainly not play as hard work. Another type of play...
However, according to Johnson, Christie, and Yawkey, (1999), "play is an extremely difficult concept to define -- there are 116 distinct definitions listed in the Oxford English Dictionary!" Some adults think play is trivial while others believe play makes vital contributions to all aspects of child development. While we cannot define play, there are telltale signs of play that are recognizable. Some examples of play involved students freely choosing to
Instead, Phillips sees that the issues surrounding #2 are the most important and neglected. He finds a lack of commonality in number of sessions, time of sessions, intervention, and even parental involvement (Phillips, 19). By its very nature, though, since each individual client is coming from a diverse background, would it not stand to reason that some children might need a longer session, or more sessions, than others -- depending
Warren's business partner and has in fact invested 40,000 pounds in the venture. In his own words, "The fact is, it's not what would be considered exactly a high-class business in my set -- the county set, you know.... Not that there is any mystery about it: don't think that. Of course you know by your mother's being in it that it's perfectly straight and honest. I've known her
Play-within-the-Play Developing a cultural understanding of the relative power of theater upon culture creates a sense of the traditional and the dramatic. Within many works of antiquity is a demonstration of analogy, in much the same manner as the analogous representations of doctrine. Creating a thematic web of understanding about the nature of humanity, through the play-within-the-play technique many play writes of today and yesterday demonstrate the power of drama upon
The strangeness of the judicial system whereby confession lead to freedom and truth lead to death was accurate in spirit in the Miller play, as were some aspects of the accusations, such as favoring older women to accuse and pressing one man to death for a refusal to enter a plea beneath heavy stones. According to the PBS documentary "Secrets of the Dead," the real origin of the hysteria in
Post positivism Defining Post positivism: definitional exercise in identity politics, in expanding cultural and semiotic discourse, and reinterpreting the continuing the literary effort of the 20th and 21st century to deconstruct human life and society Postmodernism, the literary buzzword of the past century, is often considered to be a 'liberal' form of hermeneutics, in the sense that rather than attempting to define what makes the canon great, it attempts to expand the
Our semester plans gives you unlimited, unrestricted access to our entire library of resources —writing tools, guides, example essays, tutorials, class notes, and more.
Get Started Now