Mentoring

Experience

I tutored elementary school students for 2 years during high school through Interact, a community service club sponsored by the Rotary Club.

The program during my first year was traditional tutoring. We volunteers were shuttled to a community library on the poor side of town. We helped kids with their homework, mainly. It was a good program but not a great program.

The program was relaunched the second year around the idea of mentoring. We focused on the children, not their homework. We conversed with the kids. We organized games. We even helped with homework now and then. I felt almost passive. I went where the kids wanted to go, bringing some structure along with me. With the softest touch, grades improved and parents reported positive changes.

I love knowledge. I love the feeling when the proverbial light bulb turns on in my head. I love seeing the light bulb turn on in my student's head. I get to relive the feeling when I first learned. When I teach, time flows.

Mentoring

I distinguish between tutoring and mentoring. To tutor is to focus on a subject, such as to tutor mathematics. The irony of tutoring is that anyone mentally and emotionally ready to receive tutoring does not need it. They are perfectly capable of teaching themselves from YouTube, Google, textbooks, etc. Tutoring is desirable for speed and balance, to give yourself or your child the best resources available, but it is not necessary.

To mentor is to focus on a person, perhaps in the context of a particular subject, but perhaps not. A mentor helps the student to examine, challenge and improve their beliefs. Explaining the quadratic formula is tutoring. Challenging the student to identify when and why they despaired of being able to understand math is mentoring.

Learning is personal. Books and blogs, toys and tutors, schools and all the rest are merely resources. Whether to pursue knowledge is ultimately a choice. My humility is that wisdom can't be forced onto someone.

Fortunately, wisdom does not need to be forced. People naturally hunger for it. Literally, without practical skills, one will go hungry and homeless. Metaphorically, wisdom is the mastery of chaos. Having knowledge is the difference between living in the wilderness and living in a garden. Wisdom is the wellspring of serenity.

Why then, if knowledge is so universally desirable, do so many fools exist? Knowledge is a fearsome prey. It can only be found out in the wilderness, beyond the safety of what you already know. Chasing it runs the risk of discovering inconvenient truths. You may discover that the walls you believed kept you safe are built upon sand. Asking someone to learn is rather like asking them to march towards the sound of gunfire. Fools exist because learning requires courage and courage is hard.

Let me give you an example. In the third grade, I passed the GATE aptitude test and was accepted into the GATE program. GATE stands for Gifted And Talented Education. From more than 100 third-graders, only 4 of us were accepted. We so-called "GATE students" were bussed from schools around the district to collect enough of us to fill up a room. It was an exclusive little club.

The GATE program ended after the eighth-grade yet the same faces could be found together in high school populating the Honors and Advanced Placement classes. We GATE students spent several hours per day with each other for 9 years. I got to know these people, these best and brightest, very well.

Over the years, we acquired an identity of "being smart," whatever that means. Externally, we gained social standing. Internally, we gained self-esteem. These are valuable things, valuable enough to fear losing. Some of my peers became like a boxing champions who won't accept a challenge for fear of losing their titles. For these students, the challenge was learning something new and the title was being smart. Some washed out of school, some faced crisis upon graduation and a few have found continued shelter in academia. Such is the irony of the Ivory Tower: a place where the learned can protect themselves from new information.

The moral of the story is that good thinking is born more of virtue than chance. Learning something new is a tacit admission that you were wrong in the past, or at least ignorant. Wise people tend to be humble because they have discovered so many of their deficits, and seeing the pattern, expect to find many more.

Mathematics

The standard math curriculum as taught in public schools is not truly math. The 3 components of math are logic, computation and notation but schools neglect logic, without which computation and notation are meaningless. To anyone concerned about math education in America, I recommend reading Paul Lockhart's critique. He asks the reader to imagine music being taught the way math is taught. Students would be denied musical instruments, stereos and iPods. Instead, they would read and write sheet music, day after day, year after dreary year, without ever hearing. Naturally, children would loathe music class, avoid their assignments and become depressed. So it is with math: students are forced to memorize how to manipulate meaningless symbols without ever being challenged to think.

I was fortunate to have an engineer for a father. The nature and value of logic were present at home. I understood how the computations taught at school connected to meaning. Otherwise, I might very well have been senselessly buried under worksheets and flashcards. I also thank my math teachers in the fourth, eighth and tenth grades. Some children never have the benefit of even 1 excellent math teacher and I had 3. In a just world, all math teachers would be excellent, but that is a matter for another conversation. The point is that I'm sympathetic to children (and former children) who are frustrated by school math. I think their frustration is a sign of their good sense, not the opposite.

Mathematical ideas are built one atop the other. A misunderstanding in the present usually has its roots in the past, sometimes years in the past. I tend to get called during a math crisis, i.e. several days before an important test, in the hopes I can work math miracles. Yes, I will perform math triage. No, it probably won't do much good. After the crisis has passed, please consider studying on a normal time scale.

Frustrated Teenagers

I have been both darling of the faculty and a pariah. It would have been nice to have the perspective then that I do now. Up in the closet in my old bedroom, I have 3 trinkets from middle school:

1. a plaque signifying that I had a 4.0 GPA every quarter for 3 years
2. a trophy for winning sixth-grade student of the year
3. a medal for winning the eighth-grade science olympiad at my school

From pre-school through the eighth-grade, I was Superman. I was trotted out whenever the local newspaper came around to write a puff piece. I was ASB Secretary and, at one point, no fewer than 8 girls had a crush on me, including 2 who didn't know who I was, but had picked up the idea from the other 6.

Then, upon entering high school in the ninth-grade, I turned into Kryptonite. At various times, my parents had the pleasure of meeting the principal, the career center advisor, my counselor and 2 English teachers. These meetings were not the good kind.

I was removed from my duly elected vice-presidency of the Interact Club and the vote electing me president for the coming year was nullified. I bear the unique distinction of having been deposed by Rotary Club members, including a pastor.

The friction between the establishment and me was constant. Eventually, I just shut down. I crawled into my bed and checked out from the world for a couple of weeks. I slept 12 hours a day, laid in bed for another 4 and somehow took the remaining 8 to shower and eat dinner. My parents took me to see the doctor. He tested my blood for mononucleosis. The test came back negative. My parents offered to take me in for psychotherapy. I said, "OK," but now I was more depressed than ever because I thought that meant I was broken. I was terrified that I was going to be drugged.

My point is that I've been there. I've been caught in the gears of the indifferent institution known as public school. My bad personal experience is not uncommon. The core ethic of public school is discipline. It's demeaning. You can't go to the bathroom without asking permission and when you do ask, you had better remember to say "may" not "can" or else the smug response will be, "I don't know, can you?" School is about showing up on time, wearing your gym uniform, holding your bladder, jumping when bells ring and always remembering to address your illiterate English teacher "Mr." or "Mrs."

There are deep and troubling cultural reasons why public school is so broken. It's a delicate issue. There are a lot of inconvenient truths. As a short illustration, I'll point out that the last great school reform occurred at the turn of the 20^th century, when the typical job was located in a steam powered factory. A central steam engine would drive all the machines for an entire factory. Factories were built tall to accommodate a massive vertical drive shaft coming up from the boiler room. The machines on each floor would take power off that drive shaft. In some crude cases, the machines could not be disengaged. The entire factory literally had one ON/OFF switch. To work in such a factory, it was critically important that you show up on time, stay at your workstation and jump when the bells or your boss tell you to. Sound familiar? It's the type of environment that schools mimic. Back then, it had a purpose. It prepared students for the jobs of the day. It has no place in the modern world but due to politics schooling has not been forced to modernize.

Quite a few children and teenagers are frustrated for very good reasons. Compound that with youthful ignorance and undeveloped coping skills and you've got a cocktail for some serious frustration, depression and anger. Some empathy and mentoring can go a long way.

I also recommend seriously considering family therapy from a professional psychologist. I was scared to try when I was younger and did not go. Had I the chance to do it over, I think that I would go. Psychologists don't even prescribe drugs (psychiatrists do)! Self-help, parental guidance, mentoring and professional therapy can complement each other.