What can a teacher teach us about mentorship?
The gentle leadership of a teaching mentor reminds me what mentorship could mean.
I’ve always hesitated to build close relationships with people who I sense have more power or authority than I do. This resistance doesn’t mean that I fear such figures, only that it feels presumptuous to assume that we’d share friendship. My parents have a lot to do with this instincts: they raised me to attend to and respect hierarchies (though, to their distress, the respect part has probably diminished), but they also equipped me the tools to interact with those above me with confidence and competence. The schools I attended reflected and affirmed these cultural values, which is unsurprising, since the undergirding Protestant vein of these values is also woven into systems of education in the United States.
In this way, structures of work are again a continuation of structures of education. As an adult, I still feel a sense of separation from people with whom I work who are older than me. A familiar catch-22 for younger professionals comes with knowing that you do parallel work to a coworker and being told by that coworker to treat them as a peer while knowing that comments about comparative age or inexperience wait just around the corner. The zeitgeist would say that millennial workers don’t recognize or value age and experience, but the way I think about it is that we want to know how to solve that tension, rather than simply live with it or accept it.
One traditional answer to this tension has been the idea of mentorship -- a side dish of the work world that doesn’t actually solve this tension but, I think, works to manage it by formalizing the authority that wizened workers expect and (sometimes) have earned and allowing younger colleagues to at least pretend to need their elders, even if they only really bring superficial questions they already know the answer to into that “mentorship” relationship. This is a cynical view of mentorship, but it’s also a reflection of the cumulative experiences of friends across industries, many of whom have, across the last decade been funneled into professional mentorship programs within their workplaces that follow these contours (in some cases, “mentorship” has looked much worse, taking a form of sexual harassment veiled by professional sanction). “Mentorship” attempts to ease the tensions of age and experience. As questioning authorities and hierarchies of government, scientific training, and literacy becomes fully and dangerously mainstream, those tensions are only heightened, and to my mind mentorship looks like a generally tepid non-solution rather than an effective response.
And yet. In the past few years, I’ve found myself surrounded, almost intentionally, by women who I consider natural mentors. It’s been one of the defining gifts of recent years.
The first was a formally-assigned mentor, Heather, whose presence in my teaching life is profound and resonant. I was profoundly intimidated by Heather for several months when we first met. She is a talented teacher, brilliantly worldly and fiercely kind; she cared for me and trusted me in equal measure, endorsing my confidence as often as she interrupted my panic. Our pairing was one of those rare ones that matched people interested in and motivated by the same things. Still, I had so much to learn from her. To this day, when my classes edge closer to difficult issues and I’m tempted to run away and redirect the conversation, I remind myself of Heather, who, no matter how exhausted by the demands of her truly relentless boarding school work, never let herself or her students walk away from tension before they’d entered into it.
Since Heather, I’ve kept meeting people who occupy a role like hers in my life. I think of them as mentors too, though often they call me “friend.” Most often, we learn from one another equally, and I know that calling someone a mentor seems to reify that age hierarchy that’s so well-trained in me; I’m certain that this is often the reason these mentors reject the title, since many of them reject the idea of age and experience hierarchy among equally-qualified colleagues or thinkers. But I don’t think that’s what I’m thinking of when I think of a mentor. Maybe I’m co-opting the term or recapturing it from its corporatized connotations. To me, a mentor is a person whose wisdom - whether earned through experience, learning, or perspective - fills me and fosters within me both a deeper sense of harmony with the world around me and a more urgent conviction of my role in pursuing healing in it.
Years after I left the school where I worked with Heather, I encountered another woman, Jenny, who reminded me a lot of Heather. Ironically, I was employed as her “Mentor,” a title that I held at for a few years at the Athena Project. I have, oddly, filled multiple paid “Mentor” positions, including in my work with the University of Pennsylvania’s Independent School Teaching Residency program, despite my (probably flawed) conviction that, at 29, I’m hardly qualified with the wisdom to earn the title. Though I’ll hold firm to my belief that “Mentor” is a misnomer for the kind of “manager-lite” role that it’s been used for -- remember, a mentor is a side dish, not an appetizer; a non-solution, not a solution for the missing link in a hierarchical chain -- I’ve always really enjoyed these roles, because, through them, I’ve met and built a kind of relationship with teachers from around the world.
Jenny was -- is -- a favorite of the Athena community. For years now, she’s been an active contributor to the website, encouraging and building connections on a young internet platform while also teaching and guiding an English Department at a school in Vermont. When I ran Athena’s summer fellowship one year, I asked Jenny to serve in the Mentor role, because to me, she was a natural fit. Reflecting upon and revisiting our interview for In REAL Time reminded me that despite only knowing Jenny via the internet and the phone -- we’ve never been physically in the same space -- I recognized her, too, as a person in my life who I think of as a mentor.
As I reread Jenny’s thoughts on her favorite moment in class discussion, for example, I thought: yes, this is exactly what I’ve been thinking these days, except with so many more layers involved. In these first weeks of my school year, with all of my students in my classroom in person for the first time since March 2019, I’ve appreciated the ways in which silence -- what educators call “Wait Time” -- is once again part of my class, not a sign of failed technology but an indicator of reflection or individual processing. But Jenny talked about a specific kind of silence, the one “when we’re all together in a moment when someone’s said something that really lands.” She called it “an ineffable presence,” a thing that the group can hold together. These moments -- the kind she said she teaches for -- are ones that I teach for too; they’re also ones that I, in my anxiety to make sure students understand or move forward or accomplish everything we need to during a class period, sometimes trample on. Maybe it’s my youth, or my less-than-a-decade teaching. It’s certainly also the mark of an efficiency-minded culture. These moments are a bonus or a luxury to me, but they’re the center of Jenny’s work, more precious to her than the pleasures of achievement that often drive me (and my adolescent students). And when I read that value system, it reminds me to shift mine to align.
Another piece of wisdom, a way of saying what I might feel in my heart but with a newer valence I could never access: the idea that “the possibility of change” means “letting go of prior definitions of ourselves.” I, like many of my peers, obsess over what we can create and where we can go. Jenny’s idea of change focuses on the release, rather than the acquisition. As she hopes that “people, [her] students, are willing and trusting enough to hold [her] to a high standard and be critical when [she doesn’t] reach that standard, especially with race and equity,” I consider the acquisitive model I tend to take to the same predicament. I want to read, to try new things, to reframe, to build; Jenny thinks about dismantling, creating space in herself. She asks the same of schools, thinking about the way that they can make space “for students to feel greater ownership over their education.”
It’s not radical thinking that Jenny brings into my life, but rather a counternarrative to the mind (mine) that meets it. A good mentor doesn’t view her mentee as fundamentally lacking or inferior; she’s more like the master guitarist who’ll pick up the chords the band’s already playing and then lead the jam session somewhere new, somewhere more complex and compelling.
“Mentor” is a tenuous term. It matters, though, that it’s the first one in my mind when I think of women like Jenny (they’re almost always women for me, even though I think of myself as a person who generally bonds more quickly with men than women). I think it’s easy for teachers to slip into the role of mentor with other people who are not their students, likely because they’re so used to explaining concepts, to patiently wading through another person’s efforts to articulate themself. A mentor, to me, has been a person in my field whose wisdom and experience weaves a new thread into the texture I’ve woven for myself; she helps me mend a snag in the fabric, helps me see the shape I’m reaching for when I’ve lost sight of it. I didn’t know that I needed mentors until they appeared in my life.
Given the cultural rise of cynicism toward both perceived and formalized hierarchies, these teaching mentorships ground me in a belief that that the tension over who could or should hold wisdom or direction could be productive, a source of strength within a professional community (even a somewhat tenuous and/or virtual community, like the one through which I met Jenny). Of course, it’s my first mentor, Heather, who founded in me the belief that tension is not where our learning stops, but where it should begin. It is not a weakness to be led, as it turns out, and it’s okay to call our leaders what they are; still, and also, the hearts and minds of those who we let lead us matter.