To help National Honor Students at Saipan International School meet their community service needs, Ingur Lee, a high school teacher, started a mentoring program pairing NHS students with students in need of help in certain academic subjects.<\/p>\n
The program, which started school year, has now 40 mentors in the program, according to Lee.<\/p>\n
Mentors usually help students two hours a week, for a total of 50 to 80 hours a year.<\/p>\n
He said the program is similar to peer programs at other school but these mentors add a different dynamic in that they are not too close to the ages of their mentees but not too far apart in age as adult tutors or teachers would be.<\/p>\n
He called it a good mix of \u201caccessibility and authority.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said mentors deepen their understanding of subjects they are already strong in, as they now have to teach them to others.<\/p>\n
\u201cTeaching makes it permanent,\u201d he said. \u201cMentees sometimes ask questions that you never thought about.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mentors sign up, list down areas of academic strength, and are then matched with students who have also listed down their areas of need.<\/p>\n
Reading, vocabulary, spelling, geometry and even penmanship are some of the few examples seen on the sign-up sheet.<\/p>\n
He hopes to continue the program into the future as he has gotten good feedback from students.<\/p>\n
A couple of students were even surprised they enjoyed it, he said.<\/p>\n
He noted mutual respect as important in the mentor-mentee dynamic.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe best teacher is not the one with the highest skill. The best teacher is one that can connect,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
SIS headmaster Tim Bray called the program \u201cpositive for all the kids\u201d involved.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe young students have someone to look up to. The older students learn a lot of leadership skills because they are helping someone younger than themselves. It\u2019s like a brother or little sister, it\u2019s really a nurturing, positive environment,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Mentoring goes on after school, from 2:50pm to 3:40pm, according to Lee.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
To help National Honor Students at Saipan International School meet their community service needs, Ingur…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[699],"class_list":["post-181978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-sis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/47"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181978"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181978\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}