Communication-Week 9

Hope everyone had a great spring break! I wish it was longer. Anyway to get to the topic we left off with before this wonderful week, communication. This is a very important subject when it comes to everything in life. We use communication every day. My favorite forms of communication are texting and email, but as we discussed in class these are also some things that I need to watch out for. Because this is a form of communication that is not direct, some things can be taken the wrong way. Sarcasm is something that can be misinterpreted in non-verbal situations. Speaking of misinterpretation, the picture-telephone that Chelsee and Brandon had us do was a great activity that we could use in the fall. I remember doing this activity when I was an incoming student. It puts a whole new twist on telephone. It adds to the message that verbal communication can be misinterpreted, visual communication can as well. It was also a lot of fun to see everyone’s beautiful pictures! In the book, a section focused how mentoring communication is different from other communication. It is important for us to focus on this because we are interacting with students during a great life transition into college. We need to encourage students to be independent. We need to be there for the students, but we cannot let them over rely on us in our interactions. We need to keep the student’s best interest at heart. They can tell when we are being fake, so keeping trust, being honest, and mean and practice what we say is an important part of interaction. I did say in class that texting and reminder emails were a big help in the past class I co-taught. I just want people to be aware that some do get a lot of text and emails, so make sure it is okay with your students to send them emails and text message reminders. If it becomes a problem not sending them, then get more involved. Lastly, twitter was fun! It was nice seeing what everyone else is doing and not only on Facebook. It is hard for me to keep up with it, but I am trying to look at it at least once a day!

Hope everyone had a great week! See you all Tuesday! Don’t forget about lesson plans!

Awareness of Culture and ISCORE-Week 8

So this week we conveniently had our lesson on developing cultural sensitivity and ISCORE. Both were to focus on what we identify with and how we should react to what others identify with. The book focused on things like how your beliefs affect your attitude, not only the way you act, but what you think about others. This is very important to recognize as being a peer mentor because we don’t know where our students are coming from and where they have been or even what they do identify themselves with. We know our way of thinking, but we don’t know theirs and we shouldn’t assume that theirs is the same as ours. It also gave us strategies to use to go along with that. We should accept people the way they are. I may not have been abused or segregated for the way I look or what I believe, but I do know how it feels to be attacked for not having the same views as someone else. Being a Christian and being Catholic with that is something that I am really proud of being, unfortunately I do not know what is in the background of that particular denomination, let alone any others. It is difficult to stand there and not be able to say anything when someone is telling you what you believe is wrong.

On a positive note, I also am a sister. I am proud of all my family especially my brothers and sisters. They have helped me through a lot and I have helped them through a lot. I love seeing my little sister accomplish what she does. I hope that I am a role model to her, and that I influence some of what she does. A lot of people in the class also identified themselves as being this. I think that it is important to have those connections with family. I know that no one in the class is an only child, so everyone is a sibling. It just depends on if they identify with it or not.

At ISCORE I went to the session called “whose decision is it”. It was about the values that Latino students have and how these values and differences from their culture affect their choice to attend 4-year college institutions. They talked about Latino students having a responsibility to their family to make money, stay close to home, and attend a community college if even that. They said that some don’t go on to college because they are discouraged by lower performance in high school. I think that some of the ideas they had could be connected to some of the students in the fall. They may not be struggling with the idea to attend college, or maybe they are, but they could also be struggling with the support from home or the idea that you will be somewhere where you do not know anyone. Latino students need to get through the barrier of not being able to completely support their family, which can be difficult, which is why so many do not attend college.

I had a lot more to say, but I can see that I am already over 500 words. I guess I’ll end with what I have this week, and I will probably incorporate my ideas into future blogs.

See you all Tuesday!