Mentors and mentees

Last year as a freshman, I had a great experience as a mentee. My mentor went way out of his way to make me feel welcome and went above and beyond all my expectations. But now I am a sophomore, and I'm no longer a mentee, or am I a mentor. Sophomore year is a weird one in chorus because some of you are in one chorus and the rest in another, you're too old to have a mentor but too inexperienced to have a mentee, and it seems like 10th grade us that awkward transitional year when you aren't quite sure where you belong. The mentoring system we have now works great and I can see that Brian, Louisa, and Sabrina are working as hard they can to make it even greater. In order to not disrupt the system that is going so well for us now, maybe we could add the fifth grade mentees to the program so that those who want to be a part of the mentoring program still can be. Remember from last year that a lot of student (both high school and fifth graders) became really enthusiastic about the idea of a mentoring bond between them. Since sophomores are more out-of-the-loop as far as the high school mentoring goes, maybe sophomores who want to be a fifth grade mentor can get first dibs and then any other chorus participants who want a fifth grade , after the sophmores have theirs, can get a chance to be assigned one. I think that this could be really good for the chorus because the sophomores will be able to relate to the mentor-mentee bond at chorus parties and at least be able to share things with everyone else about their mentee while everyone else is with theirs. I think it would also be good for the mentoring program because it would give high school mentors-to-be a chance to "practice" having a mentee and guiding someone. From what I have heard, the problem with the mentoring program isn't that it isn't run well, it is that the initiative isn't being made to break down the wall between the mentor and mento and so for a lot of freshman, the mentoring program isn't really much to them until they become an upperclassman and then they are the mentor. I think of it this way (assuming you start as a freshman), you get one year as a mentee and get the receiving end of the deal and are able to observe your mentor, then one year of "practice" as a fifth grade mentor, and then two (maybe less) years of being a mentor for someone at the high school. It's not flawless, but I think it's important to keep all of the years on about the same page if we really want this to work, and another common ground between all of the chorus (that being mentoring) might help the unity and sense of family that we always talk about.

P.s. It's probably not a bad idea to use the sophomores as a way to bond the two choruses because they're split up into both, and have a good sense of who most of the people are whether or not they are in their own because of their position in the school/chorus.