Lessons Learned

Last Tuesday was a very crazy day for me. I started my day by unloaded vehicles for the career fair in negative 11 degree weather at 8 am. Then I had four hours of class and working the career fair for three hours, talking to employers and running around assisting where ever needed. By the time class rolled around I was exhausted, but I feel that I did a good job holding myself together during Kelly and I’s lesson plan. All and all, I felt good about our lesson plan, but it was good practice for next year when I’ll be teaching my students weekly. I now know some major things to keep in mind while planning a lesson plan next year. Both good and bad, but some of the things that I need to work on would be, being more confident in front of my peers. I feel that I was swaying and stumbling on my words when I was teaching. That is something I tried to focus on during our lesson plan but this also comes with experience too. Along with that, we need to keep in mind the seven second rule. After asking the group a question, in general we should have waited about seven second to see if anyone had anything else to add. When we asked if anyone had anything to add and then said ok next thing so I felt that I needed to stop and slow down to make sure my students can learn the material and not just rush right through it.

I really liked Deb’s and Joey’s way of doing skits to demonstrating relationship with our mentees. I think that Kelly and I should have done an activity more interesting like this. Ours wasn’t really that interesting and we should have had more discussing activity to engage the minds of the other peer mentors. That is just another major lesson that I need to keep in mind for next year when I am teaching to my students. I thought that the volunteers did a really good job role playing and knowing what to do as a peer mentor. I personally not that great at think on my feet so I give props to the volunteers for creating another person and being able to know what to do when thrown in that situation. My favorite was Greg’s sexy female voice hitting on Joey at a party. I thought Joey did a really good job handling the situation by just saying no and removing himself from that party. This also provided a good example of sometime that could maybe happen. Since most of us will be of age next year and none of our students should be of age we shouldn’t EVER supply or be around them while they or we are drinking if we do so. We as mentors also should remember that we shouldn’t become romantically involved with any of the 100- 2011 Hixson Scholar, at least for the fall of 2011.