Peer Mentors

One of the things that helped me get through my MA was having peer mentors. The program I was in didn't have assigned mentors, like the writer of tale 101, but there were two students in the cohort above us that seemed to take on that role themselves. It was really helpful to have people that offered themselves as references for any issues that we were having. The fielded questions that ranged from teaching issues to adjusting to a graduate workload. Even small tips, like "Make sure you mark any emails you send to Dr. So-and-So urgent or she won't read them and you won't get a response," helped us maneuver through this new terrain. There have been students here at Ball State that have done similar things, though I think not having a designated community area from grad students to congregate makes it a little more difficult. All in all, there's a lot of help that grad students get from the department and the faculty, but there tends to be a certain type of information given by peer mentors that is invaluable.

There are no stupid questions?

In my mentor's class on Friday we were discussing causal arguments. As one of the activities for the day my mentor had the students come up with 'Why?' questions. The book we're using had suggested this as a method for choosing a topic for a cause-and-effect paper. The students broke up into small groups to come up with ten different questions and then my mentor wrote some of them on the board. Since it was Friday, everybody was having a little fun with the questions. Why do girls wear Uggs? Why don't people flush the toilet? Why do people have ugly pets? The atmosphere in the classroom was light, if not a little goofy, and there was a lot of laughing. Then my mentor went on to explain the primary research aspect of the paper and asked if anyone had questions. That's when one of the of the students said, "This might be stupid, but can we interview ourselves?" And my mentor, having gotten caught up in the silly atmosphere of the classroom, responded, "That is stupid." Everybody giggled, including the student that asked the question. However, after class my mentor felt horrible for responding that way. The student in question has always had a goofy way about him and he tends to joke the most in class, so it didn't bother him at all, but my mentor still felt bad that she had called him stupid in front of the class. Monday, class went on as usual and it didn't cause any affect on that particular student's participation, but it is probably a good idea to make sure we don't get too caught up in the atmosphere of our students that we might accidentally offend one of them.

Freshman Comp as Disaster Response

Recently, I started reading this article by James Pangborn called "Freshman Composition as Disaster Response." I haven't finished it, so I can't actually say if it's all that great, but the content is pretty interesting. In the article he compares the way Freshman deal with writing assignments to how people deal with disasters. One of the main messages, that I've read so far, was that the effects created by the way students deal with their writing can be what lead them to plagiarize. In the article he talks about how many Freshman, like people in "high-stakes, time-sensitive" situations, tend to struggle with effective time management, they develop tunnel vision, which affects their ability to make decisions and evaluate consequences. When they get caught in these problems their first instinct is to revert back to something that has worked for them in the past. For Freshman writer, that tends to be the way they were taught to write in high school. That's about as far into the article as I've gotten, but it seems to make sense. Freshman don't deal with pressure very well and deadlines can create the time-sensitive situations that Pangborn was talking about. In those types of situations students fall back on what's comfortable or they may have a higher risk of cheating. Those are things that I'm going to have to take into account in my own classroom and try to develop my lesson plans in a way that deters that type of thinking.