Hunting down campus resources!

Hello again everyone, I hope you all had as much fun during Veishea and the Hixson Retreat. I know I feel a lot closer to many of you after the activities we had at the retreat. I especially feel closer to Kelly after our romantic campanile scene tonight, we had such a good fake kiss that Karen even thought we kissed and she was standing right there. After the retreat, video shooting, and scavenger hunt my excitement for next year grows. I think we have a good group of peer mentors and we will have a lot of fun with our freshmen.
The scavenger hunt was really fun and we learned where a lot of the campus resources are located. For instance, I didn’t know where the study abroad office was located nor would I have been able to find where it was located. It was like fallowing a maze to get there, but know how to get there. I am going to keep in mind this for my next year’s campus resources lesson plan. I will probably take my students up there to show them where it is if they want information on studying aboard. I also was unaware that the lake and swans were a gift from one of the Iowa State graduating classes. This way of doing a lesson on campus resources is way better than just teaching in front of the class and telling them about it. Well that’s all for now, I’ll see everyone in class Tuesday.

GOOOOAAAAAALLLL!!!!

Hey everyone, I am sure as many of you are, I am very excited to start filming for the digital story telling project. It should be a really fun video! That being said, Zach thanks for all the prep work you have down with the script and songs. Also Zach and Karan had a good lesson on Tuesday over setting goals with SMART and the M’s. I like SMART because it helps set your goals and I like M’s because it helps you figure out how to accomplish the goal.

My goal for next year as a peer mentor is to learn my students’ names within the first three weeks and make a connection with each one of them. This goal is Specific because I want to know names and connect not just I want to get to know my students. It is also Measureable because I put a time limit on it and I ether know their names or not but connection is a little harder to measure. One way I can maybe measure my connections could be, knowing personal facts about my students, something they like or where they are from. Achievable is the next one and my goal is reasonably achievable, with the retreat and a couple classes I think I can get their names down in three weeks. My goal is Relevant because if I show the initiative to learn their names, my students will be more will to approach me with any issue that may arise. As I already said my goal is Time-limited which I set to three weeks for learning names. As for the M’s – Motivation, Make comments, Modify environment, and Monitor actions. My goals have motivation to learn my students’ name because I don’t like it when people forget my name so I should at least learn their names. I also am terrible with names, sometimes someone will tell me their name and 5 seconds later I have already forgot so this will be good practice. I can make comments if I can remember someone name and then modify environment to aid in remember a name. I can monitor my process by attempting reciting my students’ name in classes.

Diversity Event/ Digital Story Telling Project

I went to “Politics, Policy and the Reality of Leadership” with Gwen Ifill on Wednesday night last week. Gwen Ifill is moderator and managing editor of Washington Week and senior correspondent for The PBS Newshour. She is also the author of The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama. Gwen talked about some issues of being a black women and struggling to succeed. In order for women to succeed, they have to break through some glass ceilings. When they do break through the glass ceilings, women should bring their youth with them even though they might not want to fallow.

I learned a few things about what black women go through working to succeed in the work force of a leadership role. The bar is set really low for women leaders so when they run for or are in a leader position everybody makes a big deal out of it (i.e. Hilary Clinton for President). While yes it is great having females in leadership position but it is hard for women since the bar is so low because no one thinks they will make it. Then some people think that women should be leaders and especially black women. Gwen talked about an experience she had with an individual in her office when she work at a newspaper. Someone left a disturbing, racist note on her desk, I’ll leave out the details of the note but in a nut shell it said she didn’t belong there and needed to get out. Gwen said that the when she saw the note her first thought was who is this note for. Then when she took the note to her boss and the person responsibly was not disciplined. Gwen was offered another job. I enjoyed this story because of how Gwen acted in the situation. She did not get angry publicly. She just shrugged it off and continued with her career. After Gwen’s lecture I am going to give women of leadership roles more respect and treat them as a human not just as the sex, race, and etc.

In class on Tuesday we had a work day for our digital story telling project. We had some great ideas thrown around and I am excited to get filming. I am glad the video I found was useful to our project. Although massively inappropriate for our class and the video we want to make. This idea seemed too good to pass up, so I apologize if anyone was offended by this video. I also like the GTL idea with Cy so kudos to whoever thought of that. One other thing, that I don’t think got overlook was something Beth had brought up having the freshmen be able to choose three different genres to work with. I personally think that it is a good idea because finding song from one genre and one genre alone will be extremely difficult.