Year 9 Mentoring: Getting to know my year 9 Mentoring class

 I am blessed to have a year 9 Mentoring class this year and I have so many wonderings.

• Who are these young people and how did they get here?
• What kinds of lives do they have?
• Are their homes and families loving and supportive?
• How will I mentor them and help them in their transition to secondary school?
• How do they feel about college?
• Do they know who THEY are?
• What do they want to be when they grow up?
• What are their values?  What do they care about?

I have a 13 year old granddaughter who started college this year.  I will take some guestimations on what I think the answers could be just from experience which may be completely off so here goes.

• Most of them live in the area and probably have siblings or relatives that have come to our school.  
• I guess they come from families who may struggle, both parents working. I think our Maori students are different to our Pasifika students and our one Filipino student.  I hope that their homes are loving and supportive but I know it might not always be the case so I need to be emotionally prepared to expect this.
• I've done an inquiry in the past about the impact of transitions from years 8 to 9 and know that this is one of the biggest transitional change in a child's schooling journey.  It would be scary not knowing what it would be like and I need to take this into account. 
• I think at 13 years of age, they care about about friends, peer groups and family.  Fitting into the right group may also be on their minds
• Some may know what they want to be when they grow up and some won't know which is ok.
• I would think some would say they value their families and it's part of my job to help instill in them our school values and what that would look like in action.

Ethnic Breakdown of the class

I did an ethnic breakdown of my class so I can understand what cultures we have present.  I have chosen to graph the 1st ethnic groups listed on Kamar although there are 7 students who have more then one ethnic group that they identify with which is important to note.

Of the 23 students,  16 are Pasifika, 5 are Maori, 1 is Filipino and one identifies with NZ European.  This information will help me with how I approach whole class interactions and individual discussions with my kids.

Building Trust

The first activity that I did with my class was to ask them to introduce themselves, what primary school they came from one thing they enjoyed doing.  I was interested to see who was confident and who was shy and all but one boy got up and spoke. 

I shared with my class some of ‘My Why’ and what gets me up in the morning.  I want to kids to know how important knowing who you are and where you come from right from the get go and sometimes I know as a teacher, I need to be willing to share what's important to me so that my kids can feel safe and will hopefully trust me.  I know it is important to build a relationship with my kids before even expecting them to engage in their classroom learning.  It's also a bonus that I teach my mentoring class for Social Studies.