Past peer mentor panel, DST, and Retreat!

Being a part of the past peer mentor panel in class on Thursday was a very interesting experience to me.  I had a lot of fun answering the questions do not get me wrong, but sometimes it was not easy to think of a good example of problems I had with my group last year.  Even though it took a long time for my group to open up last year, they all got along really well (thank goodness).  In my opinion the hardest thing I had last year was learning to deal with personality differences between my co-leader and myself.  We did not go to all out war and duke it out, but we just had very different styles of teaching.  Something that I want to take away from the panel was Megan's system for make up assignments.  She had a very precise way of handling make ups that would be beneficial to the student.

Now for DST!  I do not think there are words to accurately describe how amazed I am at how it turned out.  We all know the credit for how it turned out goes to Josh and his awesome editing skills! Woot! Woot!

Finally, our final retreat of the year.  Bowling! I had a ton of fun bowling with everyone.  It was a great way to spend a stormy day and to do something fun together.  If anyone is willing to do it again randomly next fall I would be happy to do it!!

Final week of learning sessions

Last Thursday was our last class with learning sessions.  I have to give credit to Makayla and Nicole their chapter was a challenging one to teach.  I had it last year.  Most of the chapter is a bit of review of previous chapters so you have to find a balance of trying to teach new material and incorporating bits of the old material.  The "dating game" for peer mentors was a really fun activity and helped solidify the importance of peer mentors and used the peer mentors that are most commonly used by students on our campus. We need to be aware when other peer mentors on campus could be more helpful to our students than us.  I think it is also important to recognize some of our duties as a peer mentor for the Hixson program will overlap with other peer mentor positions on campus.

We were also able to finally figure out when our class will be held next year.  I think we have had the chance to understand the difficulty scheduling this class when we look at the difficulty we have had getting time to film our DST.  We have had the chance to learn from our mistakes with this DST project so that we can encourage our mentees to not make the same mistakes next fall.  I am excited to see how our DST turns out on Thursday.  It always amazes me how various clips can be incorporated together with some editing and form a pretty good short film.