new member education

[Atlanta_OPhiA]

Originally posted by angelove
You've got to be kidding me. Yarn trail = scavenger hunt = hazing? Puleeze.

Yeah, I think it's pretty ridiculous too, but that's always what I've been told. Laaaame.

[FSUZeta]

basically, any activity in which the new members are participating but the initiated members are not, COULD be considered hazing. so if only the new members are tracing those yarn trails, then that could be considered hazing. political correctness and fear of law suits strikes again!

[JenMarie]

... see we've had new members set up a scavenger hunt for the active chapter. Or we'll all go together.

Anyway... sorry to hijack the thread.

[AGDee]

Scavenger hunts. I'm sorry, the generations before you ruined them for everybody. They became risk management and/or hazing issues because:

1) Penalties imposed for not finding everything on your list (eg. drinking a shot for each thing not found)

2) The items to be found became more and more embarassing/risque/illegal (used condoms, mushroom print/nipple print in a peanut butter jar, stealing a parking ticket off of a car, etc)

3) Scavenger hunts that required driving or walking/running outdoors became dangerous because, in the excitement of trying to beat another team that was close, etc, people didn't necessarily look both ways, follow traffic laws, etc.

4) Some required taking pictures of you doing all these things.. easy evidence of wrong doings.

5) When scavenger hunts involved new members going to other GLO houses to get items, those other GLOs often made the new members do something to "earn" the items.. be it drinking, kissing, singing, cleaning their house, etc.

So sure, you say "Well we won't do THAT!", but the reality is, it won't start out being like the above, but it grows, changing little by little each year and before you know it, it's gone really bad. Even our alumnae club had to stop having our annual road rally because of risk management/liability issues of racing in cars to each location in the attempt to win.

As a member of a GLO from the 80's, I'm sorry.. some of our members screwed things up for generations to come. All GLOs pay the price for the actions of the stupid minority.

Dee

[wanderersarah]

Originally posted by dznat187
we also did a fun 'newlywed game' thing when I was new member educator. the bigs and little were paired off and then they had a chance to see how much they knew about each other/learn more about each other. it was really fun. we did stupid questions like fav color if they were a candy, which would they be, etc. Then int eh end every team gets some sort of prize (but of course the winners got a better prize)

I love this idea. I am NME this semester, this sounds like a great idea for our Big/Little Bonding Night!

[tunatartare]

Originally posted by FSUZeta
basically, any activity in which the new members are participating but the initiated members are not, COULD be considered hazing. so if only the new members are tracing those yarn trails, then that could be considered hazing. political correctness and fear of law suits strikes again!

See now here is my question with that. What about things like giving new members gifts on bid day or Big/Little or something? Is that technically hazing because it's something that the new members do but not the initiated members. I see this heading down a bad path to say 20-30 years from now when it will be deemed hazing to not let new members wear badges.

[adpiucf]

Giving sorority themed gifts is not considered hazing. It is a good idea to exchange gifts off sorority grounds so one member may not feel like she got shorted because someone else got "more" gifts than she.

Now back to a constructive thread about new member education and ideas.

[*EtaNu*ADPi*]

I just got done being New Member Coordinator for our chapter. One thing I did was to have fake money for the new members to recieve when they did things with the chapter to get involved: for example, when they came to meetings, when they answered questions, when they participated in a philanthropy event (for other chapters as well)...really for anything they did! At the end of the new member period, I had a "store" of gifts for them and they could use all the "money" they received to get some fun items!

At meetings, I would bring about 10-15 t-shirts with me that were handed down from older sisters or left over from things and I would ask questions about things they needed to know. If they got it right, they got a t-shirt.

For our diamond sister revealing, I had each older sister pick a pair of matching items (this could be anything...like milk & cookies, apples & oranges, vase & flowers, etc.) Each older sister was responsible for finding two items to represent their pair. To reveal the diamond sister pairs, the older sisters would be standing in a circle holding one of their items and their new diamond sister was given the other item and hand to find the sister with the pair. It turned out to be a lot of fun!