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Gaylon Maddox, Oral History Index
No full textThis is an index of an oral history interview with Gaylon Maddox. It was conducted January 31, 2020. The interviewer is Louise Skinner. The videographer is Sandy Bond.
This interview focuses on Gaylon Maddox\u27s memories of growing up in Delta County, Texas and his career as a registered nurse.
Madox was born to Tommie Calvin and Clarice Pendergrass Maddox on September 25, 1955. His early memories include watching the Christmas parade from Adair’s Grocery on the Cooper Square, going to the Enloe Baptist Church and attending Cooper schools. He recalls the name of friends, teachers, and community members and his memories of them.
After high school, Maddox attended the Paris Junior College in order to become a registered nurse. He furthered his education at UT-Arlington with bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Maddox worked as a RN for forty-three years.
In addition to a career as a nurse, Maddox is also a musician. He became interested in playing the piano at a young age and has played for the Sunlight Quartet and the Stamps Quartet.https://lair.etamu.edu/scua-oral-history-all/1062/thumbnail.jp
Extraction and Quantification of Cardiac Glycosides from Asclepias viridis Leaves
No full textThe purpose of this research was to determine how to efficiently extract cardiac glycosides from the leaves of Asclepias viridis plants, and to analyze the concentrations of these compounds. Asclepias viridis, also known as the green-flowered milkweed plant, is native to northeast Texas and is broadly distributed from south Texas north to southeast Nebraska, east to Virginia, and south to Florida. It serves as a host plant for the larva of Danaus plexippus, also known as the monarch butterfly. The larvae spend their lives and feed on the plant and, in doing so, sequester cardiac glycosides consumed from the plant. Cardiac glycosides are a class of compounds that include cardenolides, which are found in milkweed plants as well as other groups of plants, such as foxglove and oleander. These cardenolides are a defense mechanism for the milkweed plant, as well as for the monarch larva. Cardenolides are toxic when consumed in high doses because they interfere with ATPase, a protein that regulates the flux of sodium and potassium across the cell membranes of animals. For this study, dried leaf material was ground to a fine powder and cardenolides were extracted in an ethanol solution. The crude extract was used to determine cardenolide concentration using a spectrophotometer. This technique used tetranitrobiphenyl as a colorimetric reagent that complexes with cardenolides to produce a colored compound, which was measured at 575nm using Beer\u27 s Law to calculate concentration. It has been shown in this research that female monarchs are being selective on the plants they lay eggs on some years, but not in other years. There was no evidence of cardenolide induction through the two years studied. Finally, there was no evidence found that higher cardenolide concentration leads to mortality in larvae
Exploring Novice Alternatively Certified Elementary School Teachers\u27 Perceptions of Their Preparedness to Teach: A Basic Qualitative Research Study
No full textThe overarching purpose of this basic qualitative research study was to explore the perceptions AC novice elementary school teachers had of their ACP pre-service and current training, their campus support and training, and the ability of those trainings and supports to prepare the teachers to teach. Teachers who are prepared and feel supported tend to remain in the teaching profession longer than teachers who report feeling inadequately prepared to teach (Dixon, 2018; Kini & Podolsky, 2016). The significance of this study was to (a) expand and enrich the literature in the field of new teacher preparation in ACPs and K-12 public schools, (b) assist educational leaders in understanding factors that can increase the AC novice teacher\u27 s level of preparedness to teach, and (c) identify elements in ACPs and public schools that help novice teachers feel prepared to teach.This research study was completed in a public-school district in the southeastern region of Texas. Using comparative analysis (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016) throughout the collection and analysis of the data, the researcher examined the experiences of ten ACP novice elementary school teachers. Through the use of face-to-face, one-on-one interviews with ten AC novice elementary school teachers, the researcher explored the perceptions of the participants. Open and axial coding helped the researcher decipher the data and answer the research questions and also led to uncovering emergent themes such as relationships matter, experience in schools is key, peer support and collaboration are essential, disillusionment overtakes presumptions about teaching, and self-efficacy and resilience arise through adversity.The results of this research study regarding AC novice elementary school teachers\u27 perceptions of their pre-service and school of employment\u27 s training and support imply findings that may be used to help prepare novice elementary school teachers to teach. These implications include ideas and suggestions for ACPs and school districts to provide direct experiences to AC teacher candidates before these candidates become classroom teachers. Future research is needed to explore additional ways to prepare AC novice elementary school teachers to be prepared to teach prior to being hired as classroom teachers
My Soviet Youth: A Memoir With Critical Introduction To The Post-Soviet Cultural Identity
No full textThis dissertation proposes the analysis of the Russian memoirist tradition and its key trends. It includes a creative component representing memories of life during the late Soviet and post-Soviet period and explores how this creative work fits into the tradition of Russian life-writing and what gaps it fills. Chapter 1 (introduction) explains how the creative portion reflects the tension between the collective identity and individual strive for self-expression prominent in the Russian literature since its early beginnings. The work represents a category of the “every person†memoir - a term I propose to substitute the “nobody memoir†definition suggested by Couser to refer to the work authored by a common person, non-celebrity. While many memoirists from the Soviet period position themselves as active fighters for or against the political cause, or victims of the regime, I assume the stand of a detached participant, without claiming an overly active role in shaping or influencing socio-political events. The memoir continues the Russian literary tradition of “fictions of the self†(autobiographical statements combining elements of fiction and documentary with an element of self-imaging and self-evaluation)1 affected, although not completely governed, by the unstable and brutal socio-political environment and censorship. Additionally, I will explore the motif of cultural and spiritual continuity guarded and preserved mostly (but not exclusively) by women in a politically oppressed society, and how this motif is revealed in my creative portion. I will also explain a different angle of my memoir, which, in contrast to most post-Soviet memoir works focusing on the fiction of the Russian or Jewish ethnical self, attempts to reflect a construction of a Russian-Ukrainian cultural identity in complex geo-political environment. It also attempts to paint a relatively balanced picture of the late Soviet reality
The Lived Experiences of Veteran Career and Technical Education Teachers at a Specialized Career High School Regarding Student Career Readiness
No full textThe purpose of this qualitative study is to investigate the perceptions of veteran Career and Technical Education (CTE) teachers in a specialized career school model utilizing narrative inquiry. Specifically, the study will focus on veteran teachers and their lived experiences in the specialized school, exploring their perceptions regarding the new school model as a catalyst for student career readiness. The goal of this study will be to provide a textural description of teacher perceptions, identifying themes and commonalities to identify how an innovative school model promotes student achievement in career readiness.The researcher will utilize a narrative inquiry with an interview protocol, using open-ended questions in a semi-structured interview. New state accountability standards include a career readiness component, and the findings of the study will be used to identify commonalities in the data. This action research study is in alignment with the district’s strategic plan, which seeks teacher input regarding the implementation of curriculum
Principals’ Perceptions About a New System of District Core Values
No full textThis qualitative case study sought to examine the perceptions of school administrators about a new system of district core values, their efforts to incorporate such system into their respective schools, and the impacts of this incorporation. This phenomenon was analyzed in the context of a suburban school district located in southeast Texas. Using an embedded case study design (Yin, 2009; Yin 2014), school administrators provided information and explored their views regarding a new system of district core values, the incorporation of such core values within the walls of their unique school campuses and with their unique campus core values, and the impacts of such incorporation. As discussed in the literature review, core values are defined in multiple ways by different authors whose focus include, among other definitions: people organizations, institutional bedrocks, behavioral guidelines, organizational compasses, trust builders, and common beliefs. Despite these different perspectives, a common denominator is the existence of core values to significantly impact the work attitudes and job performance in an organization. Under this premise and due to changes in hierarchical positions and organizational structure, institutions may adopt new visions that may affect the mission and the core values of the organization. These changes bring within a set of challenges and opportunities for the entities that are part of the organization. In correlation with this idea, the purpose of the data-gathering artifacts in this study was to collect information to determine participants’ perceptions in regards the new system of district core values, its integration with unique campus core values, and the impacts of this integration. For this study, a total of four campus principals from elementary school, middle school, and high school were selected to participate. The researcher used face-to-face, open-ended-questions interviews, participant observations, and direct observations as the primary tools to collect and triangulate the data. Participants were school principals of a school district, located in southeast Texas, who meet the following criteria: (a) they held a Principal’s certificate approved by the Texas Education Agency (TEA), (b) they served as school administrators since 2017 or before the adoption of the new system of district core values, and (c) they were the current principal at their campus. There were modifications to some of the data gathering instruments due to the global pandemic identified as Coronavirus or Covid 19. These modifications were filed and approved by the Texas A&M Institutional Review Board. After the researcher analyzed the data gathered, four main themes were developed to represent the sentiment transmitted in the participants’ responses: 1) A common language, 2) Collaborative effort, 3) The inner circle within a circle, 4) Action always ignites reaction. These main themes produced a variety of subthemes that provided a better explanation to the findings in this study. Implications of findings, implications for the practice, and recommendations for future studies are discussed in the last chapter of this work
Radar Returns with Artificial Neural Networks
No full textThe research discussed in this project is based on previous results that examined the use of neural networks to classify radar returns (Sigillito et al., 1989). In particular, in the field of radar modeling used by the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), one must accurately model aspects of the radar systems, including the complex algorithms for the signal processing of radar returns, to accurately classify radar return signals. Previous results demonstrated that radar returns from the ionosphere could be adequately classified using machine learning techniques such as neural networks. In this research, we looked at improving the classification results of such radar modeling. We compared the performance of a single layer with multi-layer feed-forward networks, and looked at the effects of modifying various meta-parameters of such networks, such as varying hidden nodes and learning regularization parameters on the performance of the machine classifiers. In addition, data augmentation techniques were explored in an attempt to expand the data set and improve the trained classifiers. We also applied more recent deep-learning network techniques to the classification of such radar returns, to see if more modern architectures and methods can significantly improve the model’s performance. We demonstrated that in fact recurrent network architectures can improve on past best performance reported for this task
The East Texan, 2020-01-30
No full textA color copy of The East Texan, a student newspaper published at Texas A&M University-Commerce.https://lair.etamu.edu/scua-east-texan-browse-all/1215/thumbnail.jp
Landscape Performance of Buck Roses Under Minimal-input Conditions in North-central Texas
No full textGriffith Buck (Iowa State University) bred roses (Rosa sp.) to survive long, cold winters and hot, humid summers yet still retain their foliage without fungicides. Unfortunately, there is little known about the performance of Buck roses in the southern United States. Thirty-eight Buck rose cultivars were evaluated for flowering, disease resistance, drought tolerance, and overall landscape performance in alkaline soils with no fertilizer, no pesticides, and only limited irrigation. Flowering occurred on a bimodal basis, with the highest per plant mean bloom number (16.3 blooms) and bloom coverage (9.7%) in April, and a second flowering in the fall, with 13.7 blooms per plant and 6.9% bloom coverage in October. Drought stress symptoms were most evident in October, with a wide range of symptom severity across cultivars. Black spot (Diplocarpon rosae) and powdery mildew (Podosphaera pannosa) incidence were rare across all roses and years. Landscape performance scores, rated using a 0 to 10 scale with 10 representing a perfect plant and 0 a dead plant, were highest in April (6.5) and lowest in June (4.6) and July (4.6). Landscape performance was not correlated with bloom number or coverage. While unable to recommend many of the Buck roses for north-central Texas, the cultivars April Moon and Freckles, and possibly a few other roses, can join Carefree Beauty™ (BUCbi) as recommended roses for the area
The Impact of Role Ambiguity, Stress, and Burnout on Elementary School Counselors
No full textThe purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between elementary school counselors’ perceived stress, role ambiguity, and burnout. A quantitative correlational design was used to explore the role confusion that exists in the field of school counseling. In addition, stress and burnout levels of professional school counselors were investigated. A hierarchical linear regression was utilized to explore the relationship between these variables. The findings from this study underscored the importance of unambiguous role definition in the field of school counseling. The results indicated that school counselors are less susceptible to stress and burnout when they are assigned appropriate duties that align with the ASCA National Model. Ultimately, clear role definition serves to advocate for students who need the services that professional school counselors are uniquely qualified to provide