College Mentors for Kids Student Project
This project was completed by three of my English 106 students: Lauren Murrell, Rachael Trevino and Darshana Umakanth. The group assignment asked the students to find a person or organizationg doing heroic work in the community and to research their work and then make a documentary about them after getting all pertinent release forms and permits signed. Along with the documentary, the students wrote a paper in which they shared their research with the class and analyzed their rhetorical choices when making the film.
College Mentors for Kids at Purdue University – Documentary from Darshana Umakanth on Vimeo.
College Mentors for Kids: The Organization
“Allow humans to be themselves
and celebrate that selfness.
Love the metaphoric mind
and respect the rational.
Nurture Motivation.
Consider any attempt
at communication appropriate.
Celebrate the whole person.”
-Bob Samples
The most delicate stage of life is inarguably childhood. This is the time when we just start to identify with the confusing world that we are born into and start the seemingly eternal search for our niche in society. We have our parents, who, in most cases, support and encourage us to follow our dreams and do whatever makes us happy. But the unfortunate few who do not have this proper guidance in life soon find themselves at a crossroads and the path they decide to take could very well be the wrong one.
We belong to a generation where there is a lot of competition and a lot of judgment, where one of the many sure-shot paths to success is academics. Go to school, go to college, and get a job. That’s the stenciled life most of us have grown up talking about. No doubt, this time-tested route is the only way one can guarantee oneself a good life. But we all find ourselves in a pickle sometimes; when all we need is someone to talk to, someone who is empathetic and most importantly, someone whose confidence in us does not waiver even when we ourselves feel useless and unimportant.
The word ‘mentor’ was derived from the character Mentor in Homer’s Odyssey, who was left in charge of Odysseus’ palace and son Telemachus during the Trojan War. Although the character himself is not of much consequence in the story, the Goddess Athena appears in his guise in order to guide Telemachus in his time of struggle. She serves as a mentor to both Odysseus and his son. Thus, mentorship basically represents a “personal relationship in which the more experienced ‘mentor’ guides the less experienced ‘protégé’” (Wikipedia.org).
So what does a mentor have to do? Well, at times, the mentor “sponsors a protégé for a new position, coaches him through the nuances of a new task, or gives a challenging assignment intended to stretch a protégé beyond his or her comfort zone” (Johnson 1). Simply put, a mentor stretches his/her responsibilities and forms an informal relationship with his/her protégé in order to ensure that the latter is on the right track and is comfortable speaking to him/her about any social or academic problems.
Over the past 20 years, there have been numerous organizations that have been founded to mentor children, adolescents and even adults. Most of them focus on ‘youth mentoring’, which is pairing a child with an adult who takes the place of a possibly absent role model at home. A few such organizations are Big Brothers, Big Sisters, Boys and Girls Club, MENTOR, etc. One such organization is College Mentors for Kids (or College Mentors as they are now commonly called), which was established in 1995 in Indiana University by two students Heidi Schmidt and Kristin Huang, who “assessed current youth programming and identified a gap in services for elementary school students” (collegementors.org). They went on to create a program prototype that “paired the needs of first through fourth grade elementary school students with the talents and resources of undergraduates and the college campus” (collegementors.org). After about a year of careful planning and deliberation, College Mentors was incorporated in Indiana and Butler University.
The Purdue Chapter of College Mentors was founded by Erin Slater in 1998, who is the current CEO of the program on the national level. As Kenneth Case Sands, President of the Purdue Chapter, proudly states in the documentary, Slater recently won the Dreamers into Doers Award, which commends selective people that have made a big impact on society. The award is granted by the Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Foundation. College Mentors aims at mentoring kids that are potentially “at risk,” meaning that have the potential to miss out on having a responsible role model or adult to guide them. The kids are mostly from families that have lots of children, where there may be lot of financial pressure on the parents and where individual attention to the child may be scarce. The main idea behind assigning a “big buddy” to his “little buddy” is to “cultivate on-going relationships between college and elementary aged students through shared experiences on the campus and the community” (College Mentors for Kids at Purdue). These relationships are intended to nurture a child’s knowledge and interest in higher collegiate education in a healthy and warm environment.
In the Purdue Chapter, activities take place with the children of Glen Acres Elementary on Tuesdays, Oakland Elementary on Wednesdays and Miller Elementary on Thursdays, each from 2:45 to 5:45 pm throughout the year. The children are involved with various activities like community service, education, arts and crafts, etc. The day our group went to film the kids, they were working on a community service project based off of the Compliment Guys at Purdue. The children were asked to write as many compliments as they could think of, and for every six compliments, they were given a treat. One of the children wrote,“Even if it is raining, your smile can make the sun shine.” This level of innocence, lack of judgment and unconditional respect for others is what College Mentors aims at nurturing in these children.
College Mentors is an organization that is very selective in its process of accepting mentors. As K.C says in the documentary, even if the applicant mentions having this voluntary project on his/her resume, he/she is almost immediately ruled out. This exemplifies how deeply rooted this organization’s love for children is and how they do not want even the slightest hint of negative impact to touch the children. As our group observed while filming this documentary, the relationships that are formed between the big buddies and the little buddies are not ones that are taken lightly on either side. There is present between them a symbiotic link filled with respect and love, which has been fostered and made possible by the opportunities given to them by this outstanding establishment that can most certainly be deemed truly phenomenal.
Analysis of Documentary
The goal of our documentary was to portray the organization College Mentors for Kids as a fun program with the purpose of helping kids by providing influential mentors for the children to look up to. We wanted to show how serious the program is and how it’s a lot of work; it’s not just about the fact that you can play with kids but you also have to work hard and be a good mentor. Still, we wanted to show how the program is a lot of fun not only for the kids, but also the college students that participate. Our documentary is for anyone who either wants to learn more about the organization, or may be interested in partaking in the program. We were able to display this information for the audience with who we interviewed, the questions we asked and the scenes we showed.
We had a list of questions that we wanted to ask Kenneth Case Sands (K.C.), the President of the Purdue chapter, Michael, a college mentor (or “big buddy”) and the kids (who would allow us to get a better feel for what the program does from an insider’s point of view). We decided to ask K.C the more informative questions about the history of the program, what the purpose of the program is, what they look for in mentors, and any future plans they might have for the program. We figured he was the best to answer these questions since he had worked his way up from being a mentor to becoming President. When it came to asking Michael questions, we were more concerned with how he got involved with the program, what he does with his little buddy, what he likes about the program, and any personal stories that he would like to share that illustrated what the program is about. Trying to interview the kids was a rather challenging job; we had to ask questions that would help us get the point across without confusing or scaring them. But since they were also elementary school kids, they had a sense of innocence that was great to film. We noticed that the fifth graders were much more camera-shy as compared to the fourth and first graders. Having these restrictions we came up with basic questions like how long they’d been a part of College Mentors for Kids, what they liked about college mentors for kids, and what they liked about their mentor.
We interviewed many different kids to try to get the best variety. Since K.C and Michael were both Caucasian males, we tried to find non-Caucasian females to help balance out the diversity in the video; however, as we learned the hard way, you don’t always get exactly what you want on film, so we didn’t have as many as we would have liked. We also interviewed fourth and fifth graders because they would be a lot easier to work with and a lot more understanding of what we wanted than first, second or even third graders. Another problem we faced while interviewing was making sure that whoever we interviewed was comfortable with being on a documentary that would be watched by others. The first little girl we tried to interview said she would do it when we first asked her and explained to her what we were going to ask her, however when the time came to speak, she froze up and said she wanted to leave. Since we didn’t want her to feel uncomfortable, we sent her back into the room. We also were going to interview Michael’s roommate since he is a mentor as well; however, he too was not comfortable, so it was only ethical that we not force them to participate if they didn’t want to, especially since it would be viewed by not only us, but a whole class. Also, we chose to cut some of our interviews out of the film, in particular a girl named Jordan, because she was too soft-spoken and portrayed that she was uncomfortable through her body language, so it didn’t work with the upbeat tone we wanted to represent.
When filming our documentary we wanted to make sure to have a lot of B-roll of the kids and their mentors interacting and luckily, we got just that. We also wanted to make sure that during the sit down interviews with the kids, K.C and Michael, there wasn’t a busy background so the audience could focus easily on what they were saying. We opened with some B-roll of the kids and their mentors and then we went to K.C explaining about the program. We have the rest of his interview over some B-roll of the kids. After K.C’s interview we went to the kids’ interviews so it was more mixed up. We also chose to display diversity in the kids between gender and race to have a nice variety while editing the kids’ interviews. From there we went to Michael’s interview of him explaining his experience. To help break up Michael’s interview we have a small slide show of some pictures we took of the kids with some instrumental music playing in the background. After the small slide show we continue with Michael’s interview. To end our film we have one of the groups of kids, the fourth graders, with their mentors shouting “We love College Mentors!.” We thought this was a good idea because it was fun, lively and just a good way to end our film on the high, uplifting note we wanted. A lot of the time we have background music; the music we chose was the instrumental version of ‘Move Along’ by The All-American Rejects, a popular pop-rock band. We chose this song because it has a heartening beat and when you think about the title ‘Move Along’, it goes well with College Mentors and how the goal of the program is to help these kids move along responsibly in their life. However, we will have to change the song to something else when we give it to K.C if he wants to put it on the website, to avoid violating copyright laws.
Overall, the documentary was very fun to make, taught us about a different style of art and helped us appreciate how difficult it must be for professional filmmakers to make two hour movies when we had to put in so much effort for a four-minute video!
Works Cited
Johnson, Brad. Elements of Mentoring. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Print.
“College Mentors for Kids”, www.collegementors.org, Accessed 03/29/10. Web.
“College Mentors for Kids at Purdue”, http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~cmfk/, Accessed 03/29/10. Web.
“Mentors and Mentoring”. www.wikipedia.org, Accessed 03/29/10. Web.
