At Risk Teens Are Desperate in Need of Mentors
Tiffany Truong
California State University – Los Angeles
Art 3170 – 03
Professor Aziz
October 6th, 2020
As the society becomes more modernized, the young generations should observe and learn more knowledge. Teenagers right now are going to be those who improve the society later. Since the dropout rate keeps increasing, it becomes a community problem. They don’t know what to plan or their purpose of what they are looking for in the future, because of this, it leads to dropout. At-risk teens are in desperate need of mentors. The rate of high school students drops out is increasing through time. They don’t have any good mentor or counselor that can advise and figure out the ways for them. They need someone that can guide them or plan out their school journey, because they don’t know what to do. The younger generation will be adults soon, and they are those who continue to advance the community. If the rate of dropping out is so high this also means that there is a high rate of lacking education of the younger generation. This affects the society heavily. The reasons for the drop out can be tons of different things, such as negative school climate, lack of community support, low parental expectations, etc. All the things that become modernized is the invention from human being. It is needed for teenagers to have enough education and mentoring in order to fulfill knowledge and basic needs that allow them to work and advance the community.
From one of the sources, it shows that when teens get more opportunities to contact or involve into different activities, it will help them know what they are interested in. Those interest might help them thrive through their school and daily life. That will reduce the dropout rate and create better future for teenagers. The article calls Generation NXT: Building young engineers with LEGOs, is about Texas Tech University, and many other universities offering lots of different engineering programs for middle school students in order to let them know whether they are interested in engineering or not. They offer the young children to have more opportunities to get closer to the program, let them go to different competitions that bring them closer to the activities or their interest. The author states “The implementation of the GEAR program was considered a success by the authors simply from the fact that 35 competing teams from 13 schools, accounting for more than 140 students in grades 3-6, participated in the tournament the first year it was held in Lubbock. Additionally, surveys were taken of the teachers, participants, and ECE students to evaluate the effectiveness of the program” (page 82). They use the program for middle school kids, so the young children will have more passions to keep them persistent work hard, then apply into engineering programs later in the future. When people have interest in something, it gives them more efforts to keep going to achieve what they want. It helps to reduce the high school dropout rate, because their interest keeps them work hard.
Moreover, since the dropout rate does not seem to improve, so many mentoring programs start to partner with different high school in order to give the students the better services. The source is called Mentors offer students the tools for job success. The mentoring program is a partnering between Cincinnati's Woodward High School and The Procter & Gamble Co., also based in Cincinnati to provide better plan and attitude to teenagers. It is about how the mentoring program bring more than a mentor to a child, but a friend who goes along with them through their journey. The mentor is also a friend who leads the teenagers to their goals and support them to be successful. According to the author, “Peters, a sophomore at Woodward High School, isn't the only student who benefits from the ASPIRE program. Any of Woodward's 2,000 students in grades 7-12 can apply for a tutor or mentor” (Laabs 1993). These mentoring programs are helpful programs that should be promoted more for everyone to know. Teenagers and adults need to get more information about these mentoring programs in order to lead themselves or their children to the correct track. Mentoring program does not only support about academic, but also about mental and physical health for all teenagers. It is open for all the children with the purpose to lead teenagers to stay healthy and successful.
Not only that, there is a big mentoring program which called Big Brothers Big Sisters. Its goal is to give the mentees more than just good mentors, but friends. In Are youth mentoring programs good value-for-money? An evaluation of the Big Brothers Big Sisters Melbourne Program, it talks about how the Big Brothers Big Sisters program matches vulnerable young people with a trained, supervised adult volunteer as a mentor. The young people are typically seriously disadvantaged, with multiple psychosocial problems. In the resource, there is a table that list of reasons why teenagers seek for a mentor in their life. The reasons in the list are lack of role model, isolation, parental substance abuse, parental psychiatric disability, sibling disability, abuse, lack of peer friendships and others. People can now see that teenagers are desperately seeking for mentors that can lead them to the right track. It is not only about school, but many other factors such as from family, friends, etc. can also affect to the high school dropout rate. Lack of role models is the top reason which shows that they do not have any good potential adult that can motivate or thrive them to be better. The issues can cause teenagers to dropout, because they have so much stress that usually happens in their life. Imagine, if many teenager dropouts at the young age, then the next generation can’t improve or modernize more in our nation.
From my own survey of 13 people, 9 people say mentoring program helps improve the high school dropout rate, a person says it doesn’t help, and 3 people think it is a maybe. Based on their past experiences, 8 people seek for a mentor to guide their plan about academic and daily life. The other 5 say they don’t need a mentor to guide their plans. In the total of 13, 8 think the high school dropout rate does not affect to them, 2 say yes, and the 3 remaining say maybe. For the question whether they think high school should provide mentoring program, 12 people think it should be, only 1 says no. The attendees in the survey come up with many different reasons of why most teens seek for mentoring programs. The reasons are to find inspiration, want to do better with school and life, the lack of experience and knowledge to make important decisions, receive help in organization and planning that they can’t get from home, need help with managing priorities and their life schedules to know their outcomes and their options in life, escape from their lives back at home or to get the resources that they need to succeed, and finally they would be prepared to see someone like them who’ve been through the same thing to reach success through finishing high school. In Generation NXT: Building young engineers with LEGOs mentions about an early approach of engineering program, so in this survey, majority of attendees think an early approach also motivates them somehow to keep them thriving.
Mentoring program can drive the situation into the positive way by letting the mentors relate to mentees and motivate through mentoring. Mentors and mentees should work hard and help others work hard. A good mentor will put effort to get to know the student’s situation, seek available resources to guide the students, give advices to students and be a representative of the students that didn’t dropout. The mentoring program might improve the teenagers’ life, but beside it, teenagers need more than that. They need their parents to understand them more about what they go through in their life. Parents should give their kids different types of opportunities to experience things. Adults can motivate teenagers by inspiring and showing teens that there is more to school than just passing or failing. Parents need to know that they are their kids’ role models, so they should be careful of what they are doing. If they are good role models, their children can be just like their parents. Teens also need to know that there is no one can help them more than themselves. They should seek help when they feel they can’t solve the problem in order to prevent the worst decision which is dropout of school.
Surveying through the google form can both be an advantage or disadvantage. It is convenient that you can send the link via email or text. All the attendees appeared to be anonymous when they take the survey. Regardless of the distance, everyone can submit their responses on google form survey. It is also disadvantage since everyone has different experiences, and that will be different in their responses. The responses are based on each person point of view and what they went through.
Mentoring program can improve or support teenagers’ lives in different ways. Reaching out for help is a good thing to balance out our lives. Dropping out is the worst decision, so in order to prevent that to happen, seeking for mentors is the best way to improve the situation.
References
Karp, T., Gale, R., Lowe, L. A., Medina, V., & Beutlich, E. (2010). Generation NXT: Building Young Engineers with LEGOs. IEEE Transactions on Education, 53(1), 80–87. doi: 10.1109/te.2009.2024410
Moodie, M. L., & Fisher, J. (2009). “Are youth mentoring programs good value-for-money? An evaluation of the Big Brothers Big Sisters Melbourne Program.” BMC Public Health, 9(1), 41–49. https://doi-org.mimas.calstatela.edu/10.1186/1471-2458-9-41
Laabs, J. J. (Mar 1993). “Mentors offer students the tools for job success.” Personnel Journal: 57+. Business Insights: Global. Web. 9 Oct. 2019.
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