Defining Roles-Week 4

There was a lot of information in this chapter about what us as mentors are to students and what the student’s role is. The first thing that really stood out to me in the chapter was the section on how my habits can affect my mentoring. They said “habit supports and guides your personal success as well as the success of your students”. That just sounds deep. After 3 years of being in college, I still feel that I am not quite up on my study habits. I have definitely improved, but we all know how hard it is in college. My schedule changes, my time changes. I have learned that I work on school better during the day then in the afternoon. I purposely schedule about 2 hour breaks between classes if possible because then I can do my homework between classes. I am looking forward to sharing this tip with the incoming students. The work habit section kind of confused me. I didn’t really see how it applied to work, but I guess it fit with working out, another thing that I really need to work on. I think I am pretty good on the thinking habits. I definitely ask questions all the time and figure out more than one way of doing things. “You fail to plan, you plan to fail”. I think I am pretty good at this too. I chose to blog about this subject because I can see a lot of room in improvement. The rest of the chapter I have kind of already experienced. I think that the hardest thing role is the being a student advocate. It is difficult to identify when a student may be having problems outside of the class. I recommend doing 1 on 1’s with your students. Last time Heather and I did this and we discovered one of our students was going through some really tough things, things that we could not even image. I think it is difficult to see some things because we aren’t with the students all that much. We don’t know how they were before the class, so what we see may be different, but we can’t see it. The last thing I need to improve on is my attitude. I should always come in with a positive attitude no matter how my day is going like the fish principle. Have a good week everyone!