Editor's note: The second in a three-part series on the Laura W. Bush Institute for Women's Health groundbreaking freshmen seminar, "Avoiding Rookie Mistakes."
"Avoiding Rookie Mistakes" is a life skills course. No one understands the realities of modern college life better than students, so instructors asked each class member to help lecture. Topics included partying, drinking, drugs, hooking up, unplanned pregnancy, violence, virginity, emotional intimacy, cheating, roommate drama, campus cliques, anxiety/depression and suicide, faith's role in stress management, character and morality.
Instructors required each student to write a "flight plan" that would allow them to navigate situations with potential for a crash landing.
As an example, a student filed a plan for safely negotiating "partying." Weight and balance considerations were what she already knew about handling herself socially, based upon values incorporated from family and role models. Next, she identified predictable flight hazards such as the ramifications of underage drinking and driving; brain damage from excessive alcohol consumption/vehicular accidents; hangovers and academic costs of missing classes; drunken hooking up complications such as unplanned pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.
The student, using the Internet, electronically posted her recommendations for safe partying on the self-contained class blog. Her strategies included setting a limit on the number of drinks she would have before going to the party; designating her group's non-drinking driver for the evening and implementing a buddy system where the group agreed in advance to never leave one of its members drunk and undefended at the party. All other class members critiqued the flight plan offered on the blog site and offered additional suggestions relevant to the topic.
Students brought to class their filled out class manuals, which were scanned every meeting for course credit. Their text encouraged weekly graphing of their grade trajectory in order to identify academic hot spots in time to correct them. Students tracked weight and their consistency with regard to exercise, healthful eating, studying and sleeping.
Students completed with checklists recording when they had protected themselves and their futures by applying social intelligence in 14 critical areas. These included protecting their brains, managing stress, effectively communicating, resisting cheating in any of its forms, being responsible with regard to dating and alcohol and increasing involvement with the campus and city communities. They also recorded maturity indicators with respect to developing character and nurturing relationships.
A menu of stress management techniques appeared in daily reading assignments so students could check off those found to be most helpful each day. They interpreted Quotes of the Day highlighting statistics pertaining to campus life such as 1,500, the number of college students killed annually in alcohol-related accidents. They recorded their "Most Treasured College Experience of the Week" along with the name of at least one new acquaintance they were to make. They cited which current event of the week had most impressed them.
By involving the students inside and outside the classroom, "Avoiding Rookie Mistakes" became much more than a seminar. It became a true life skills class, where the students could live the lessons.
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