- What kinds of learning opportunities does the mentor provide to expose you to new learning?
My mentor provides me with videos of her dancing to the choreography for me to learn from home. It was hard to learn from just watching a video. The video didn’t have the same perspective as me as if I was watching her in front of me. My mentor’s right hand in the video was actually her left hand in real life which made it somewhat confusing. To fix this problem, I uploaded my video in private onto youtube. I learned that just replacing “youtube.com” with “mirrorthevideo.com” mirrors the video.
Example
Original Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRtc2oM-VTA
Mirrored Video
https://www.mirrorthevideo.com/watch?v=BRtc2oM-VTA
She gives me some exercises to do such as stretching and basic movements. I am working on becoming more flexible every morning. I am also trying to get used to the basic movements and smoothly performing them without having my mentor do it with me.
- What kinds of learning opportunities exist to reinforce new learning?
There are resources online that already exist. I have been watching a lot of videos online seeing what things I could emulate from the dancers. I have also been thinking about a better practice area as all the usual meeting places were closed due to COVID-19. My room does have a mirror but I didn’t think it had enough space for me to move around. The environment of my room makes me feel like I shouldn’t be practicing. After looking around the house I notice that my backyard could be a good place to practice. I went out to see how much space is available and I noticed that the glass door to my backyard was somewhat reflective! From this experience, I started practicing at my back yard which leads to the next question.
- What kinds of opportunities exist that might accelerate learning?
I think the only opportunity to accelerate my learning is to practice! Practicing is key to memorize and get used to the movements you learn.
Here’s a video from the choreography!
(There are some background noises)
- When you get together what do you talk about?
We usually just catch up with each other, talking about some things that happened during the week. We talk about how we feel whether I found something difficult in the dance while practicing or something that I learned. Then, we work on the things that I found difficult and show her some things I learned. For example, I would talk about how the fan wouldn’t open fully sometimes and how I can fix this problem. There is a way that some fan dancers use to open the fan faster. You can tape the rip of the fan when it is opened. The tape helps you open the fan fully without having any folded bits in the middle.
- What is going particularly well in your mentoring relationship right now?
Something going well in our mentor and mentee relationship is the trust between each other. Despite the flooding problems and moving my mentor experienced, she made sure to keep in touch with me replying to my emails every now and then informing me about her situation. I am comfortable telling about things that I struggle with the dance or even in school. She sometimes talks about her son, Alex, who is a year older than me. We are honest towards each other. She gives me constructive criticism if there are some things that I can improve on.
- What are you learning about one another?
I am not sure how to answer this question as I don’t know what my mentor has learned about me. I will come back to this question in the next blog post talking about what things my mentor learned about me. Because my project is almost entirely based on learning from my mentor, I am learning from my mentor a lot. I learned that she is very flexible in meeting times. If I ask her about her availability at a specific time she usually tries to prioritize our meeting unless there is a very important event she has to go to. I think she wants to take responsibility for the “mentor” role she has chosen. She is very interested in the program and everyone’s in-depth projects. She likes to look at my blogs too.