{"id":25663,"date":"2024-12-13T07:02:45","date_gmt":"2024-12-13T07:02:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.eyeweb.in\/newmind\/?p=25663"},"modified":"2024-12-13T07:05:33","modified_gmt":"2024-12-13T07:05:33","slug":"feeling-the-love-on-valentines-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newmind.org\/feeling-the-love-on-valentines-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Feeling the Love on Valentine’s Day"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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By WILSON WOOTEN\u00a0and ERIN HOLLOWAY<\/p>

Editor: MICHELLE DANNER<\/p>

Valentine\u2019s Day has slowly become a global, commercial holiday. Despite the widespread appeal of heart-shaped candies, flowers, and romance associated with this holiday, many of our students were still unsure of the value this holiday could have for them personally, especially since many are single or in long-distance relationships. Nevertheless, New Mind Education hosted an event for students to celebrate their friendships, enjoy some activities, and learn about both toxic and healthy relationships in general. The event began with a presentation by Dr. Stephanie Francis, a representative from InterAct.\u00a0 Her presentation was then followed by several fun classic Valentine\u2019s day games and activities.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Interns and staff decorated the location, Poe Hall on NCSU\u2019s main campus, in an explosion of reds, pinks, and purples. Hearts adorned the walls and activity stations, balloons framed the entryway, and glittery garlands enveloped the podium where Dr. Francis spoke. The speech focused on the components of a healthy relationship, good relationship practices, signs of an unhealthy relationship, and how to support those who are in an abusive relationship. InterAct is a private, non-profit, United Way agency that provides safety, support, and awareness to victims and survivors of domestic violence and rape\/sexual assault. InterAct fulfills this mission through the support of its volunteers and community, and through reaching out to the community via presentations like this one. Students discussed how there are many signs of an abusive relationship, and how they can sometimes be subtle or sometimes very obvious. These signs include some of the following: emotional abuse, threats, intimidation, isolation, sexual abuse, and economic abuse. We also talked about signs that signify a healthy, thriving relationship. Some of these signs include communication, trust, and not taking advantage of one\u2019s partner. Students got involved in the seminar by asking and responding to questions.<\/p>

\u201cIt\u2019s interesting and helpful, \u201d Wenting Li, a student of UPP, said about the presentation. \u201cDuring the lecture, I learned how to avoid conflicts, like don\u2019t intend to change another person, don\u2019t pressure him and learn to keep personal space for each other,\u201d Esther Li, another student, said. Overall, it was a helpful presentation that the students learned a lot from.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Directly following the presentation were several Valentine\u2019s Day themed activity stations and games that the students cycled through as a group.\u00a0 These activities included pinning the arrow on the heart, guessing how many candy hearts were in a jar, playing Valentine\u2019s charades, Valentine\u2019s day card making, and positive note giving. Pin the arrow on the heart is a game derived from the popular American\u2019s birthday game, \u201cPin the tail on the donkey,\u201d in which the player is blindfolded, spun in a circle, and then attempts to put the tail in the correct location on a poster of a donkey on the wall. This was a very difficult task and it took some of the students a few tries to do well. Our variation of this game gave students an arrow to pin on a big poster of a heart on the wall with a heart-shaped bullseye. In the end, Lingchao Mao\u2019s arrow was the closest to the bullseye, so she won a Valentine Heart pillow.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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The next activity involved a jar full of candy hearts, 1220 candies to be exact.\u00a0 The students all had a chance to guess how many were actually in the jar. Yuquan Cui won with a spectacular guess that was only 50 candies off, and she received a plush Valentine\u2019s Day doughnut pillow as a prize. The last station, which was most of the students\u2019 favorite, was the classic American game \u201cCharades,\u201d where participations must silently act out prompts on cards. For our Valentine\u2019s Day themed deck, the cards were separated into 5 categories: What Men Like, What Women Like, Relationship Advice, What Couples Do and Share, and Nicknames. For many students, this was an interesting challenge to their presentation and acting skills and was a great exercise for the shyer students. The students enjoyed this game so much that students played until the event ran out of time.\u00a0 \u201cLove is to go straight forward, following your heart, and pointing to the right place with eyes closed,\u201d Lingchao Mao said.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Valentine\u2019s Day is most often thought of as a couples-only holiday. However, there are other forms of love that ought to be celebrated, such as that between friends and colleagues. And although many of the students sulked about not having a date for Valentine\u2019s Day, the night provided relationship advice for the future, fun games, and a lot of candy! On the way out, everyone was given a goodie bag full of typical American Valentine\u2019s sweets, giving students the little pick me up they needed to finish February strong.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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By WILSON WOOTEN\u00a0and ERIN HOLLOWAY Editor: MICHELLE DANNER Valentine\u2019s Day has slowly become a global, commercial holiday. Despite the widespread…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25669,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-activities"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newmind.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newmind.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newmind.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newmind.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newmind.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25663"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/newmind.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25663\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25673,"href":"https:\/\/newmind.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25663\/revisions\/25673"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newmind.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newmind.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newmind.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newmind.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}