Reflection

The rhetorical situation of my project is the mentoring program in schools. I decided to create the project I did because I consider that children's education and development are important, and one of the best things to achieve that is that they grow up next to a mentor, who can guide them to success at school and in life.

To create my project, I used different resources: formal research and my service-learning experience, I also used them for inspiration. I started volunteering at Lincoln Elementary School, especially for the Loot Store activity, I helped the kids to count their money and to decide what they wanted to buy from the store. 

The first day that I helped with the activity I saw a little girl walking alone in the hallway, “Lily”, a teacher told me that it was the first year at school for Lily, but it was difficult for her to adapt. I started to talk with the social assistant to ask her if there was a way that I could start being Lily’s mentor, also like an older sister to her, and she accepted. Lily and I started to have conversations during her recess. Knowing her better was the first thing that I wanted to do, in that way, I could know how to approach her and how to help her better. She used to skip classes and didn’t present her homework on time, but after a few sessions, she improved in class. Now she stays in class, but sometimes she leaves the classroom (this happens once a week), she started to participate more in class and present most of her homework on time, sometimes she has bad days but now she knows how to calm herself. 

For the formal research, I started looking for organizations that provide mentoring. One of them is “Big Brothers, Big Sisters”, on its website I found stories of mentors and how meaningful was the time they spent with their “mentees”. Also, I found an article about the personal experience of a woman who didn’t have a mentoring program in her life, and that she didn’t know anything about that, she never heard about it. Finally, I used some statistics information that some organization share in their websites regarding to mentoring, and I look the papers that they cited.

I think it is important to mention that I learned a lot from doing this project. I learned how powerful and meaningful mentoring programs can be, how they can change children's lives, and the benefits that come from the program, not only for the students but also for the mentors. I am planning to do major in psychology, focused on children's mental health and ways to improve it. This project helped me understand more about how I can help them, what they need, and what is best for their development. I would like to make more people aware of mentoring programs and how important it is that they are included in all schools. In Salt Lake Community College there are many clubs and programs focused on helping the community, one thing that I can do regarding my experience doing mentoring could be considerer to propose to create a club or a mini organization in which the students can be trained to be mentors for children at different schools.

There was two threshold that had an impact on me, those were fundamental to the development of my article, and they made more sense during the article development process. The first one is “Writing is a resource people use to do things, be things, and make things in the world”. I truly believe in those words, it was kind of difficult at first to try to understand that, but after analyzing each part I could understand. Writing is a powerful tool, I learned that with writing we can be things, like writers, it doesn't matter if we are not professionals or if we have never taken a writing class before, we all can write.

Also, with writing we can change the world, do things on it, and inspire people too. This threshold inspired my article, I wanted to write about something important and at the same time motivate people to participate in the change. In my paper, with writing, I want to make people know more about how they can contribute to the development of children, how can they impact positively in their education, make a better environment for their development, and improvement of their education. I want to make people know about the good alternatives for make children be better at school and personal development.

Although with writing we can change the world, I believe we can change our inner world too. One of the things that we can do with writing is knowing who we really are, start the process of self-knowledge. We can write all the things that we have in mind, which are often in it, but messily or that even seems impossible to stop the thoughts and begin analyzing them, but once written it is possible to understand it and meditate on it. Writing tells who we are, we can find our voice, also in the research process we can get to know ourselves a little more, or perhaps begin to know ourselves, and learn who we are.

The second threshold is “Meaningful writing is achieved through sustained engagement in literate practices and trough revision”. I wanted my article to have an effect on the reader, to motivate them to be part of the change, and for that I needed the article to be good. Although I felt that I had good information to complete it, it needed more than just that for it to be able to fulfill its function, that is when I understood how important it is to make the correct use of literate practices. It was not going to do any good to simply fill out the paper with data and evidence that supported what I wanted to make known, I needed to make good use of all the strategies and indications that I learned during the semester so that the article could be good and fulfill its purpose. 

I understood how important it was that I commit myself to the development of my article, I had to take the work I was doing seriously. For this, I needed to make correct use of literacy practices for the development of this, in each revision that I gave to the article I had to be objective in order to identify what I needed to correct, listen carefully to the feedback that my drafts received and put myself in the place of the reader to check that the text was easy to read.