Friday I was
able to attend two sessions for the Learning Communities Mid-Year
Institute. The first session I went to
was about bullying and what to do if you witnessed it happening and how to prevent
it from happening. I wanted to go to
this session because I wanted to know other possibilities to look into if
bullying occurs and if I’m not able to take care of it, being the little ol’ me
that I am. The room was probably set up
for at least 20 people however only 5 people in came including me, but I liked
it because it felt more interactive. They
mentioned different scenarios that would happen and asked us what we would do
about them; this helped a lot because it had me picturing what could possibly
happen, although I hope I don’t have to encounter it, and what I would be able
to do about it.
Say if guys are playing
flag football and out of frustration someone says the three letter F word. The best thing to do if you happened to be on
a team with the person who said it would be like “dude, that’s not cool don’t
say that.” That has a huge impact on
people only if it is a few simple words.
They said silence = acceptance, so if you don’t stop that from happening
they’re going to think it’s okay to say that and keep saying bad things that
shouldn’t be said. So step up and just
say that it isn’t cool, and hopefully to whoever you’re saying that too looks
ups to you and understands that it’s not okay to say that. I also went to a time management session, and
we talked about how to better manage your time, and where to study and how to
better yourself as a student. I’m in the
process of working on that for myself.
Today, I went
to two more sessions for ISLE and the first one was very helpful for me. It was about what to do with groups and we
talked a lot of ice breakers, but he preferred to use the words team builders. He gave us many options to start with our
students next year in the fall. Some of
them obviously we won’t be able to do the first day because some team builders
are a lot more intimate about our personal lives rather than asking what you
like to do in the free time. There are
many different team builders that we will be able to use next year and they
will help us tie into the real lesson we will be doing and hopefully then they
will be able to tie into what the team builder was and the lecture or whatever
we happen to do. Overall, all the
sessions were very helpful for me to help the incoming freshmen I mentor next
fall and I’m really looking forward to get started with their Iowa State
adventure.
I think not saying anything, when bullying is happening, is a huge problem. It's just too easy to say nothing, even when you don't agree. It isn't as easy to see that doing nothing is the same as agreeing with the bully.
ReplyDeleteThe team building ideas are good and I think it's nice to be able to have very easy general ones for starters and then later on the more in depth ones can be effective too.
ReplyDeleteI think your thoughts on bullying and what you learned are very insightful. I also hope that none of us has to deal with that problem, but it's good to be prepared!
ReplyDeleteJess-
ReplyDeleteGood comments on the bullying session. Your comment that "silence = aceeptance" was something that I had not thought about before. Good points!
At first I was like "What is the three letter f-word?" Then I realized what it was and was like "oh." Great story. Anywho, I agree that we should stop and say something about these things. The world won't change if we sit by and do nothing.
ReplyDelete