This is the second blog post for In depth and so far, I have not gotten too much progress just yet. My mentor and I have only met up once so far to simply greet each other and have the forms filled out. But I really do like my mentor a lot. My mentor’s name is Daniel Kwong and is a music teacher at Kwayhquitlum Middle School. He was and still is one of my favourite teachers that I have had thus far. In fact, when I was leaving Kwayhquitlum, he actually offered to mentor me if I needed a mentor for any project that I had to work on. So I decided to take him up on his offer and here we are now. However, in terms of the In Depth project, we have only been able to meet up once. And because he is a teacher, I can only meet him about once per week because our different schedules. Probably the biggest issue that is preventing me from meeting him more times a week is the fact that school ends at roughly 3:00 for him while school ends at 3:40 for me.
1. How did your mentor gain their experience/ expertise?
Again, my mentor is a music teacher who works in the district and so his knowledge and experience around music is very big. But he is also the band conductor at Kway as well. So as a band conductor, he has a very solid understanding of all of the different instruments in the band to the point where he has the ability to teach just about any instrument in the band.
2. What were those experiences like for your mentor?
He really enjoys music as a whole. He is very passionate about music and likes to learn new things based around that subject area as well. So he truly enjoys teaching music and conducting the school band and choirs. Even is the band does struggle once in a while, his passion and care drives him to help each person in the band become better players and helps in different external ways as well. For example, he sometimes spends hours after school just simply maintaining each person’s band vests so that they can look their best on concert days.
3. What wisdom have you gained from your mentor so far?
Although we have only met once so far, he has helped me tremendously in my progress on learning the trumpet. He is very good at describing and explaining things, so I was able to grasp how to play the trumpet. My mentor knows that I know how to play the french horn and tries his best to relate everything on the trumpet to the french horn so that I can relate his explanations to something that I am familiar with. For example, he helped describe the emboushure of the trumpet by saying that I had to create an emboushure that is about 3 times larger than the one on the french horn.
4. What have you learned so far, in terms of facilitation strategies, that might contribute to your own development as a mentor?
So far, from what I can tell, I think that one of the most important things to keep in mind as a mentor is that you need to relate to your mentee. You need to keep in mind their own experiences and knowledge so that you can build and help grow their experience using their own knowledge as a base. In other words, you must keep in mind what your mentee does and does not know. So for example, if your mentee is a very skilled sketcher who is looking to learn graphic arts, it would benefit them for you to somehow relate graphic arts to sketching so that he/she can have a much easier time understanding the different ideas and concepts. And along the same idea, you must make sure that your mentee has the proper knowledge to understand you teachings. For example, if you’re trying to teach your mentee how to write novels, but he doesn’t know how to read, then it will be way too confusing for the mentee. He/she will not understand anything you are saying to him and it will just end in a waste of time. But making sure not to reteach anything to the mentee is also important as it may also result in wasted time.
Anyhow, I really hope that my In-Depth project will go well.
Myung Joon~
