I said to my TA a while back that I am a better mentor than a teacher. I have thought a lot about that pearl of wisdom since then and it occurs to me that there are two kinds of teaching – externally structured classroom teaching and internally structured mentoring.
Teaching that is externally structured revolves around the idea that what can or needs to be taught on a given day is a known. Thus, syllabi can be planned, rubrics can be developed, due dates can be set and both teacher and students know exactly what they will be doing, when and where, for the next 16 or so weeks. Many students like this teaching style because work can be planned, grades can be calculated and expectations are known. Students can check items off a list and the focus is mostly on the grade earned, not the lessons learned.
On the other hand, mentoring, which has no external structure other than work to be completed for a client, assumes that the teaching moment will occur in some fashion every time the mentor and the student interact – though what will be taught or when the lesson will be given are not known in advance. Learning happens in fits and starts as the project progresses, challenges are met and confusion is slowly replaced by clarity. There are no rubrics, only results. There are no timelines other than the delivery date we have promised the client and that is a constantly shifting landscape. Anything can and does happen over the course of 16 weeks and both student and mentor must be flexible and adaptable to respond to the challenges – there is no box, no structure other than the minimal framework I provide to guide the project and no guarantee of success for the student. Ambiguity abounds and many students find this an extraordinarily uncomfortable place to be because they have never been here before. Our test-oriented system of education boils down knowledge to four choices on a scantron sheet and many students just don’t know how to react when confronted with the fact that – as my mother likes to say – life is essay, not multiple choice.
What I realize about myself today is that I am an unstructured person on the whole. I like to get in my car and go on agenda-free road trips. I drive in the general direction of where I am going and see what happens. I like to go to strange cities and walk around without my GPS, stumbling onto things that might have otherwise escaped my attention. I don’t plan outfits or meals or weekends. I like to work in odd chunks of time - as mood and inspiration hit me, not by the ticking of the clock and the recording of hours in spreadsheets. I get a lot done when left to my own devices because I work best when I follow my internal sense of how to structure my time and energy for that particular day. Some days, I feel really strong and inspired and do the work of three days in one. Other days, I feel worn down and can barely do a half-day’s work in a full day. It all works out in the end though because the three days I put in on a good day more than compensate for the half-day I put in on a bad day and when left to myself, I have a lot of good days and not too many bad ones. I am not only comfortable with ambiguity, my soul seems to demand it in every area of my life. Why then, has it taken me so long to realize that I am simply not wired for teaching - my comment to my TA was a life-changing insight. I am a mentor, plain and simple and that is not the same as being a teacher. I am not placing a value judgement on one over the other – mentoring is neither better nor worse than teaching, it is just a different way of going at the process of imparting learning to learners. At the end of the day, both teachers and mentors ask themselves “Has learning occurred?” – we both want the same end result, we simply approach it from different directions.
I am fascinated by the mystery of life as it unfolds – every day is like opening a gift-wrapped box and being surprised and (mostly!) delighted by what is inside. That is the essence of my experience mentoring students – I put them out there and see what happens next – often the outcome surprises everyone, including me! I can never tell which way it is going to go. Sometimes students whom I think are going to soar fall flat and sometimes, students whom I am pretty sure can’t tie their own shoes astound me with their brilliance when turned loose to follow their own internal structure. Mentoring is such a crap shoot and that is what I love about it.
To those who teach, I salute you. Yours is a hard job and I admire your well-planned syllabi, your rubrics, your learning outcomes, your grading scales. I have often wished over the years that I could be more like you because I feel like such a failure as a teacher – though I feel quite successful as a mentor. My comment to my TA jolted me into the realization that I can never be like you because I have to be more like me – unstructured and in the moment – which is the opposite of what is needed to teach in the classroom but exactly what is needed to be the great mentor that I am and am meant to be. To the young people who have suffered through my ill-advised attempts to teach according to external structure, I apologize. You did not see me at my best. To the young people whom I have had the good fortune to take under my wing as mentees – you have received some of the best hours and days of my life and it has been and will continue to be a joy to take a journey into the unknown with you.
