The school called me today. They've found a kid to hook up with me for the mentoring program -- a sixth grade boy named Mick. I don't know anything else about him. I'll get to learn more, including meeting him, next Wednesday.
I'm excited -- and terrified.
6 comments:
Wow, that is really cool. Is it a particular kind of mentoring program?
The program is aimed at helping kids who are at risk of failing in school for reasons other than ones that might require the use of trained professionals (though you can invoke them if needed). Basically, you meet with the kid once or twice a week, and you do whatever you think you need to do to help him succeed. If you think the problem is organization, you help him learn to organize. If its a failure to study, you talk with him about methods to study, or you go over material with him.
Its more involved than I wanted to do -- all I wanted was to help kids who had difficulty reading -- so I don't know how it will go. I'm nervous that I'll fail at it -- not so much for me, but that I'll screw up the kid, or waste his time. The school people tell of mentors who get involved in the kids life, but I am reluctant to do that. It may sound funny, but I only have experience with one child. I don't KNOW that I can extrapolate from it. We're going to have to feel this one out, I think.
I wish they had stuff like that when I was in middle school (maybe they did, but I think not) I probably could have used the help. Realizing (or maybe accepting the fact) my sophomore year of college that I really don't have any study skills is not a great feeling, so I'm having to spend time now developing skills I should have worked on long ago.
I think any help you can provide would be a step in the right direction. Good luck!
I wouldn't say that mine were all that great. I tended to rely on brute force -- read as much as I could stand of whatever I was studying. I have heard the pitches for different systems, but I never successfully used them. Over time, I had the sneaking feeling that these things worked partially because they were effective, but mostly because the people using them were pretty bright; they'd have done well if they studied using a rock and an abacus. There was likely a small group that was 'bright enough' to get benefit from the method d'jour,pushing them over the edge toward the 'bright' camp, but the great mass of us didn't. We could have had Einstein tutoring and it might not have helped. Of course, you remember his quote about his own studying problems!
Did you ever hear of the Princeton Note Taking system? Still pretty popular -- a Gsearch on +princeton +"note taking" returns tons of references - and yet I look at it and think Yeah, right -- its like the people who take notes in multiple colors, or type up everything afterward, or record the lectures and relisten later. All useful (I guess), but not right for me. Direct infusion via RNA drip, thats what I want.
The thought of multiple colored notes just makes me shutter, definitely not my thing. Someone directly injecting the information into my brain would be nice but that might not happen till I am out of college heh.
I'm currently trying out different methods (ones that don't seem completely insane) and I gues I'll see how it goes.
Hey, don't knock the colored notes. Worked for me in high school biology.
My hunch is that there is a core 'right way' that says 'if you do NOTHING else, do this, however you can' -- and all the methods, processes, systems, whatever implement it in various and sometimes contradictory ways. And I would bet that the best way is different by person and by subject, too. Aw, geez...no magic bullet?
gimme that RNA drip...
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