What I did today

I took a day off today because I was feeling bad and was exhausted and there was no work for me to do at work and I had a lot of reading to do for school. It worked well for me; we call them personal days, not sick days anyway. The reading I did was for psychology. When you take a psychology class at UTD, in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, as it is called you have to either participate in 2 studies or read articles from a scientific journal on two studies and write a description on the study or a combination of participation and writing an article in order to pass the class. The work is handed into the school, not your teacher. It doesn’t matter what you get in class, if you don’t do it you don’t pass.

Because I do not have a lot of spare time and I like the idea of choosing what I read and write about I opted for the articles. I decided to look at studies on mentoring since I am in a mentoring relationship. I found about 10 studies and narrowed them down to four. I ended up reading all four because the first two were so general and just a good introduction to the topic. I got the articles approved by my professor a few weeks ago. She was very excited when she found out what I was doing at the shelter. That felt really good because she is a person who really loves kids and is excited about the work she does which is working with kids affected by a significant caregiver who has an alcohol problem. She does assessment and intervention.

What I found out from the articles which was of interest to me was there isn’t enough good research on mentoring. There are two kinds of mentoring, tradition or informal and formal or structured mentoring.

Traditional mentoring just kind of happens. The persons in the relationship don’t always have a name for it, they just know over time a significant relationship formed that is mutually beneficial based on likenesses. The name mentor/protégé may come later upon reflection of the benefits of the relationship. Researchers conducted interviews with people asking them who played pivotal roles in their development in becoming who they are.

Formal mentor/mentee relationship have a third party involved who pairs people together. There are set goals and agreements are made that define what the relationship entails.
The articles I read where on mentoring at risk youth, how to assess the benefits and mentoring in a community setting. One thing that was brought up was how little research has been done on faith based communities and mentoring. However their conclusion was mentoring in community was the best situation and mentors that came from faith based communities tended to stick with their commitment to the mentoring arrangement compared to people recruited from other situations. They also concluded that formal mentoring relationships have a 50 % chance of failing in the 1st 3 months and that traditional mentoring where one individual approaches another was more likely to last and bare results which include increased self confidence in the mentee, a greater exposures to resources that benefited the individual, and improved relationships outside of the mentee/mentor relationship. The authors felt that encouraging communities to make mentoring part of their culture and allowing it to happen naturally is more desirable that formal programs. They suggested that educating the communities about the mentoring process and they were enthusiastic to see more communities adopt this practice.

It always helps me to write you first, if I can explain it to you than.........