Knowing Your Learning Style

Knowing your learning style is probably the most important things in college in my opinion. With limited amount of time that no amount of time management can completely help, knowing the most effective way you learn in crucial to success in college. I’m pretty set in my Reading/Writing style and my roommate for the past two years struggles to understand it.

To study, I make notecards. I do it to chunk up the information and break it down and to rewrite it together to study it. People with R/W are usually told to write and rewrite notes and I’ve never had the patience to do that directly from page to page and I get frustrated with repeat material. My roommate on the other hand is very tactile and does a lot of different things depending on the course. She’s always been trying to tell me to do what she does to study because she doesn’t understand my system because to her it looks like a lot of wasted time making these cards especially since I only go through the cards two or three times before the test. Not to mention the waste of paper. But my method works for me and she’s come to accept it, even sitting watching me make them for four hours while watching movies with me even though she really wanted to say something about it.

Next year when working with the students, I think that having this background understanding of learning styles is really important especially if problems with studying comes up. We can’t automatically dismiss their ideas of effective studying but we need to look at their styles to try and find either a better fit or adjust their current efforts but never automatically tell them our methods are the best. 

ISCORE

I went to the session on privileges of US citizens. I found it really interesting and I really enjoyed how the presented their information.

One of the things they talked about was the image of undocumented residences and how most peoples view of “illegals” are instantly drawn to the view of Mexicans. They presented a graph showing the origins of undocumented people in America and 25% aren’t even from South America at all and the other 75% are from all over South America and NOT just from Mexico.

Another thing they did was talk about legislation about immigration from the past and especially the new Arizona laws that allow officers to stop anyone and ask for proof of citizenship, which the presenter brought up a very good question. Does the average American even carry the proper identification at all times to prove that we ourselves are citizens? I know I walk out of the house without my ID frequently and if I was just walking down the street and asked to provide proof I probably couldn’t. Also it was good to hear about laws from the past that I vaguely knew the outcomes of but I wasn’t aware of the laws themselves, such as the laws that provide education for any undocumented children up to the 12^th grade.

It was also interesting to hear and think about the fact that only 5-10% of undocumented children, most of which were brought here by their parents, go on to college because of the lack of finical support they can receive because they lack a social security number. Most finical support required SSN on the application so they don’t apply. And the average income of an undocumented family would be completely eaten up by tuition because students are either charged out-of-state tuition or in-state-and-a-half because of their status even if they’ve lived in their state their entire life.

It makes me really grateful for what I have in life and I’m really glad I had the opportunity to sit in for this session! 

Teamwork!

Kat and Tyler did a great job this week! I had a great time thinking about group teamwork and group dynamics with everyone!

I think teamwork is especially good to think about because, as it was brought up, we will be doing teamwork for the next two semesters. Even though we will be facilitating in groups of two, we will still be working with all the other peer mentors to help the students.

I really enjoyed analyzing the video! I know Kat and Tyler were short on time but I think it would be interesting to discuss it further and see what parallels we could come up with. It was kind of what triggered me thinking about teamwork for us next semester when I sat down to write this. If we don’t all move and act together, the students might not take us seriously. A few times last semester when my co-leader and I had to alter lesson plans to fit our difficult group and our students called us out on it since they were in communication with some of the other sections and they didn’t take those days’ activities seriously which took us off guard since we assumed they’d like ours better. Move all together and everything being deliberate means no weakness!

I can’t wait until we practice our teamwork this weekend when making our video!