Spring Fever?

This week has been a long week, I had to remember back to class what we even talked about. I first thought it was the twitter class with Brandon and Chelsee, I guess you could call it spring fever or something like that. The facilitation class Silas and Allison did was really interesting because I saw some of the things that help me learn in class or studying. I also realized the importance of different teaching styles, just because we learn one way doesn’t mean we all learn that way. While looking through intelligences, I can see parts of most of them that I relate to. Some of my major ones would be Bodily/Kinesthetic or Logical/Mathematical because I learn best while working with my hands and converting what I am learning into tables, charts, etc. Not everyone learns best these ways, so next year when planning my lesson plans I need to learn incorporate different learning styles. As the semester goes on and I get to know my mentees I can incorporate the main learning styles that my mentees will best learn from.

In class we did an activity where we named off a bunch of problems freshmen might come across. Then we picked out our top learning styles and talked with others with like learning styles in how know what our learning style is like can help solve some of their problems. For example, Logical/Mathematical people like perform calculations and recognize abstract patterns. Using this we can find a way to relate things to our real life to study or fix any other problems. The Logical/Mathematical people like tables, charts, graphs, and working in groups, knowing this we can make tables, charts, or graphs to help us study the material. We can also get a study group together with others of the same learning style. Knowing these things I can farther expand my knowledge and help me study more. Then next year I can pass of these qualities so the incoming freshmen can get a start of on the right foot.

SPRING BREAK!!!!!

I hope all you guys and gals are having a good break so far, I know I am! There is nothing like waking up at 6 in the morning to stand out in 20 degree weather to build a house. If I would have been thinking, I would have wrote this earlier this week so I wouldn’t have to do it on my spring break trip in good old Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I will apologize for the shortness of this blog but we are heading out to eat soon then playing some games with my fellow ConE’s. See you all in Tuesday after spring break!

• What is your favorite way to communicate? What is a common communication tool that you don't like to use?
  I personally enjoy Skype as a communication tool because with the video chats, you can use sarcastic or tone of voice instead of a text or IM. If you don't want to see someone Skype allows to IM or just voice chat. One communication tool I despise is Web-CT
  "email" probably because I never check it.
• How has your communication style or mediums in which you communicate changed since coming to college?

Something I never would catch on is Twitter! I am not sure why I thought that but Twitter is becoming more popular. One that is very useful in professional world is Linked In, for those of you that don’t know that this is. It is a facebook site for businesses, you can find jobs, interviews, employers, or other colleagues

• How did you honestly feel about the Twitter activity or just Twitter in general?

I thought the Twitter activity was good, although the thought of sitting in class “Twittering” sounds a bit ridiculous. I was actually fun just tweeting back in forth about random stuff and then answering questions although it is hard to type on my phone as fast as people could on the computers.

Diversity/ ISCORE

This week was diversity week, which we all know is a touchy subject that we sometime joke around with. This can be bad because if we around someone of the diversity that we are joking about, we can hurt some people’s feelings. I personally don’t usually get offended by these types of jokes because I feel that I am a joking, laid back guy. Although, I learned from Tuesday’s class that just because I am not offended doesn’t mean no one else is (I apologize if I offended anyone in class with my actions during the activity). As a peer mentor I should work on this for next year, watching my joking behavior and being careful not to say anything that will offend anybody, especially during any diversity topic. This isn’t possible to never ever say anything that will offend someone but keeping an eye on myself will minimize offending some individuals.

Even though it stirred up some feeling Tuesday, I enjoyed Cory and Jenna’s activity they got from David Coleman. It showed me that diversity isn’t just race and sex, that these are just two of the major ones. The activity even opened my eyes to how I can treat some people different just because of a stereotype that I have in my head. Being aware of this will help me greatly in the future to treat everyone as equal. Like the golden rule that Cory mentioned, “Treat others as one would like others to treat oneself.”

On Friday, I attended the ISCORE event, "Minority Student Athlete Experiences at a Predominately White Institution" along with Beth and Karan. They had a couple football and basketball players and a gymnast come talk about their struggles as a minority in a predominately white college. Most of them talked about coming from high schools with about 1000 students and having a lot of their minority at their school. Once at Iowa State there wasn’t as much as their race here, but one way they all handle the change was hanging out with there teammate. While one individual I remember came from a small town in Texas where his race was the majority. He said that everyone knew each other and were friendly in his hometown. As for Iowa State, he talked about people being stuck up while walking on campus because he would say hello to someone and they just stare at him like why are you talking to me. That hit home with me personally, we shouldn’t out someone because of race, sex, or etc. We are all humans and it doesn’t matter if we are white, black, yellow, green, or anything a lot those lines. We are all equals!

Role Models: Strengths and weaknesses

Last week’s class and book reading was over being a role model, the main point that Rachel and Amy talked about was the different types of values. This was really cool to think about between the three words we had to choose our strength and weakness. I never really thought in to these values too much to know which ones I needed to work on. One of my main weaknesses out of all these values would probably be focus because I am so easily distracted especially while doing something I don’t enjoy. Silas brought up a good point with this weakness. When have multiple things to work on to set out only the things that you need to work on in front of you. That way if you get distracted, it is by something else that you need to work on. I have start to do this while studying and doing homework at home. I have also found to remove myself from the living room area where my Xbox, DVD player, cable with all movie channels are, and Netflix. This help resist the urge to do any of those things and to focus more on my homework or studies. It was also cool to see where our other peer mentors stood on their weak or strong values. I notices that majority of the group ended up at the same word, which for some words is most likely the case because we are all leaders and have similar leadership traits. This chapter was quite a bit shorter than previous chapter but still very important to becoming good peer mentors. We will be these students’ first mentor/ impression of college, we really are role models for them. To be good role models we need to first know our own strengths and weaknesses so we can be good examples of college students.

Who Am I?

This week's class Anthony and Bethany talked about self-awareness, at first glance felt like knew exactly what that was but putting it into words was a lot hard than I expected. The book's defines self-awareness as "understanding your own thoughts, feelings, and actions." Now the tricky part of self-awareness is teaching our students to be aware of their thoughts, feelings, and actions and how these things affect them. I liked what Anthony and Bethany did with the go around talking about something that really changed your perspective and help shape the person you have become. Doing this made me think back at myself and what things changed my life, may it be a hardship I went through (i.e. My Mom's passing) or something that I was involved in that shaped me in to who I am today (i.e. FFA active member). Realizing where I have come up from makes me more self-aware, what choices do I make today that could affect my future self.

Our jobs as peer mentors are to help our students become self-aware and self-motivated. We need to push them to think about their choices they make but yet as some point to let them fly free and be self-dependent. Some ways I think I will help my students with this would be taking them to the rec so they know what is there and so we as a group can play a game or do something active. Another good physical awareness thing is already done with the big lecture of freshmen Hixson Scholars is the sex talk. It is good to go over since high school Sex Ed is sometimes pretty poor and the guy who spoke to us in 2009 (whose name escapes me at the moment) was a good speaker and funny. For social awareness, I personally sometimes need to be force into a position where I have to talk to a group where I know no one to get me to open up. For example the trip to Omaha zoo, we had a game that forced us to interact with others outside of are small groups so we opened up to more people and got to know more people. Some of the best questions a mentor can ask a student are an open ended question that makes them think about themselves and their choices. Perfect example would be Anthony and Bethany's question asking us to look back at a something in our lives that changed us in to who we are now. Another one of my favorite questions I like to ask myself is "Where do I see myself in 5 years, 10 years, or 20 years?" and then once I figure out that out I ask myself "What can I do to make this possible?" and set goals to achieve.

Looking at my Activity 5.4, my highest scored type of awareness is social awareness but lowest two is spiritual awareness and intellectual awareness. I figured social awareness would be highest because I am aware of my social status and I am happy with my social life. I also figured my spiritual awareness would be the lowest because I am not a very spiritual person. Don't get me wrong I believe in God and all that but I am not big on being a consistent church goer. I am happy with where I am at with my spirituality. I am at peace with myself and I feel like I have a purpose in life. With my intellectual awareness, I believe I could use some work here. I don't like to study so I usually put it off until I finally tell myself that I have to study. I am trying to actually "learn" the material for class as we go instead of figuring out what I need to know for the test and memorizing as much as I can. I have some work to do before I feel happy with my intellectual awareness level. I didn't score a 20 on any type of awareness but I believe that there's always room for improvement that I can always be trying harder in every type if it may be my social awareness (highest score) or my spiritual awareness (lowest score).