One of the first times I ever truly felt challenged was in my Junior year of high school. I had a honors English instructor that assigned a hefty paper due by the end of the school year. He gave us the prompts in the spring, and every single one of them had to do with secret societies in America. At first, I figured it was just another research paper, but the more I delved into the material, the more I began to understand his intention. This paper wasn't just another assignment, it was an introduction to the clandestine history of the US, and it ended up completely shifting my civic, social, and ideological paradigms. I won't get on my soap box about it though, because I could go on for pages and pages, covering a dozen topics or more. However, the truths that I uncovered--though extremely difficult to come to terms with at the time--made me much more aware of the world around me, and helped me become a more skilled critical thinker.
That said, the peer mentor program probably isn't the appropriate venue to talk about socio-political matters, but I will use my experience to challenge my mentees to think about their educational hurdles in a much broader sense. It's important to break the habit of thinking of projects, assignments, and essays as mere busy work, and start using them as tools to become better individuals that can think individually, critically, and effectively. I would make sure it's a positive challenge by tailoring the conversation to the individual needs of each mentee, giving them personally identifiable examples, and doing further research of my own to provide answers for questions I don't have answers to.
Hello Jeredyn,
ReplyDeleteI really like the perspective you bring about viewing hurdles more as big-picture. I would utilize this method with my own mentees.