Latin American
Humanities, Valencia College (2003)
One of my very favorite
students from my 30 years of teaching college has asked me to offer her some
advice on mentoring students. She has told me that I had been a mentor to her.
I am quite honored to be asked and humbled that she saw me in this manner. She
has made quite a life for herself since leaving our university. She is now
working with instructors who would mentor college students at Oklahoma State
University where she now works. For this recently retired instructor, all this is
very gratifying.
After thinking about this
for several days, I wrote the following draft and immediately sent it two
recent mentees, both very fine students who are now in graduate school. Their
feedback is incorporated into the following and they are credited as editors at
the end of this essay.
If I were to offer any
advice, I think it would include, but not be limited to, the following:
·
The obvious – listen to your students. Don’t assume you know what they are going to say. You
don’t. You may not even understand what they mean when you hear them. Ask them.
When it comes to their world, they are the experts.
Beyond listening when
the student talks, which is extremely important, it’s also important for a
mentor to be attentive as they are responding to the student. When we talk to
anyone it’s easy to focus solely on what we want to say, and it’s important to
know what we intend to convey. But it’s even more important that we look to
those to whom we are talking and try to determine what they are hearing.
It’s very likely you
will use common terms, whose meaning may be obvious to you, that your student
hasn’t heard before or may mean something very different to them. It is important
to look for any possible confusion flashing across their face. They may well be
translating what you said into something other than your meaning.
If you see that look,
follow up on it. Clarify your meaning, give an example, or ask the student, “Do
you understand what I mean when I say ____?” It’s important that you make all
of those options specific. Simply asking “Do you understand?” will get a “Yes”
90% of the time with the student not truly understanding what you intended to
convey simply because they can’t read your mind and know what you intended to
say.
Don’t listen with a
sense of how quickly and expeditiously you can meet whatever demand they are
raising at that moment. They’re not in your office asking for an administrative
service. You’re not their technocrat. The university will provide plenty of
those if they need their services. They’re there to see a live human being
capable of being fully present with them – you. Listen to what they are
actually saying. They deserve your full attention.
In the process you
may well unexpectedly discover volumes of information that you really need to
know in order to mentor these students well when you do. You may find that some
are working too many hours to succeed in school. That requires immediate
attention. You may find that some have gone a little crazy once out from under
their parents’ roof and the structure that provided them. That requires talking
about balance. You find out that some have unreasonably demanding parents
pushing them. That requires a reality check for the student (remembering that
the parents are not your concern, the student is).
You find that some
have serious maturity gaps and may not be capable of behaving appropriately
just yet but perhaps can learn to do so if that is brought to their attention
in a supportive way. It is a serious failing of the academy to insist that these
students come to us as adults. They rarely do. And in an age of helicopter parents,
many are even further away from the maturity required of an adult than in the
past. In all fairness, many have never had much chance to make decisions for
themselves and be accountable for them. But your students are in the process of
becoming adults and you do have a role to play in that by acting as a sounding
board and, upon occasion, as the accountability officer.
You may find out that
some have serious behavioral issues from addictions to video games or drugs or
alcohol to tendencies toward violence. Most
of these behaviors are adaptive in nature and point toward larger problems.
Encouraging the student to identify and address what may be driving these
behaviors could be life changing for them. But bear in mind, their issues may
also be beyond your ability to help them. It’s important to know your limits
and to be willing to refer a student to those who are trained to deal with such
problems when necessary.
You may well discover
that you have a genius on your hands who is by far smarter than you are. That can
be intimidating but it hardly means you can’t teach them anything or learn from
them in the process. It simply means they may take you up on your statements
and challenge your perspectives. That is almost always a gift that requires you
to do what you ask them to do – think. Receive it as such.
You may also discover
diamonds in the rough, kids who are quite brilliant but have grown up thinking
they aren’t. It is important to tell them the talent that you observe. For some
of them, it will be the first time in their lives they’ve heard that and the
cognitive dissonance they may experience in comparison to the self-image they
have internalized may make it difficult for them to hear that. But be
persistent. The United Negro College Fund is absolutely right – a mind is a terrible thing to waste. These
diamonds in the rough deserve your encouragement, your support and your ongoing
challenge to grow and become all of who they can be. This is one of the many
places mentors actually have the potential to change lives. But remember that in
the end, it is always the student’s decision as to how they will live them.
In every case, never
forget your role. You are not their psychologist, their spiritual advisor,
their grief counselor, their addictions therapist, their drinking buddy, and
certainly not their parent. You are the faculty or staff member this student
has identified as safe, reliable, authentic and capable of offering them advice
they may or may not take and modeling a role they may or may not wish to
follow. And they need you to be just that.
·
Call them on their crap. A good mentor is willing to say to a student that their
last comment is simply unsupportable and indefensible. Ask them why they made
their statement. What does it mean? Why would that be so?
Mentors will tell
their mentees when their statements are hurtful to others for no good reason
and why this is ultimately harmful to the student themselves. A good mentor will
refuse to buy into transparently bogus excuses for non-performance and hold
them accountable. A good mentor will love his/her students – all of who they
are including the warts. But s/he will not confuse love for sympathy when
sympathy is not due. Holding a student accountable is the most important thing
any mentor can do.
·
Suggest alternatives – A
good mentor will challenge students on unworkable plans and unrealistic dreams.
But an important follow up is usually something along the lines of “have you
thought about…?” It is not the mentor’s job to plan the student’s life. They
don’t need your permission or approval to do anything. But you may well have a
good sense of what alternatives might exist for a student’s current projects
and even their life ambitions. You may also have a good sense of why their
stated ambitions may not be workable.
There’s a fine line
between encouraging them and acquiescing to an unworkable plan. Err on the side
of asking questions, not making judgments. Remember, they may well see you as
the substitute authority figure for the parents, pastors, teachers, or community
authorities they have left behind. Take that role, whether you have asked for
it or not, seriously. They do.
One of the hardest
things to do is to watch a student whose welfare you care about make a decision
which you know they will view as a mistake later. You may well want to protect
them from making a misstep. But while you should give them counsel if they ask
for it, you need to let them make their own choice and not be too forceful in
your opinion. Remember, they often come to you precisely for a clear-minded
viewpoint.
Bear in mind two
things. First, it’s important to remember that you may be wrong about them
regretting it. They are not you and each of us has our own unique path to
follow. Secondly, even if you are correct, mistakes are often the moments in
which we learn the most, painful as such lessons may be. This doesn’t mean you
shouldn’t state what you believe, just make sure it doesn’t come across as a
conversation stopper.
If the mistake is
made and proves to have difficult repercussions, try and be available to talk
when it occurs. If the student is willing, let them talk through the problem
and understand what happened. As someone whose counsel was sought before, your
opinion may have a lot of weight in helping them process the situation and
determining what they take away from it.
·
One size does not fit all – Mentors encounter all sorts and conditions of students.
Some require major encouragement. They come to you already beat down by life
and often prone to engaging in self-defeating behaviors so that the results of
their efforts match their internalized impoverished visions of themselves. It’s
important not to enter into co-dependent patterns with such students, a major
risk for those of us in the helping professions. But many of these students
simply need someone to care. Encourage them to check in with you as they see
fit. And be fully present for them when they come.
The other end of the spectrum is the student who comes
from a privileged background
and is either unable or unwilling to see how meeting their sense of entitlement is not owed them and can be
self-defeating. They may not appreciate your
wakeup call but in the long run, they may well see it as timely and necessary. Theologian
Reinhold Niebuhr was prone to tell his mainstream Protestant seminarians that their job as preachers was to
“Comfort the afflicted and afflict the
comfortable.” Good mentors will probably find their jobs to be similar.
At the same time, be aware
that Millennial students often report feeling very driven and pressured to
succeed. The current phenomenon of multi-tasking is a good example of that. In
all honesty, who is really capable of performing several tasks at once with any
level of competence or quality of performance? And who should ever feel
compelled to do so? While there is no small amount of ego involved in even
attempting such, students often speak of a sense of meeting an unarticulated
but powerful demand for such behaviors. Trying to get your mentee to see their
lives and the expectations placed upon them in realistic terms may be your biggest challenge. Remember,
they don’t have your experience to draw upon.
·
Follow that dream! –The
recent obsession with STEM disciplines and the tendency to approach higher
education in instrumentalist, vocational terms has discouraged many students
from pursuing other educational paths they may desire to follow. While it is
reasonable for parents to want their child to be employable at the end of the
four to six years they will spend in college, there is much to be said for what
Joseph Campbell called following one’s bliss.
Forcing anyone to
engage a course of study for four years that they may or may not be terribly
interested in studying is tantamount to sentencing them to four years of
minimal labor (because studies show that people simply do not engage studies
that they really don’t want to undertake in the first place with any depth).
Worse yet, with the entirety of one’s work life looming at the end of higher
education, that’s an awful long time to do something one may or may not be
interested in doing. There isn’t much joy in living into someone else’s dreams
while foregoing your own.
I have often told my
students that “Smart people can do a lot of things. That doesn’t mean they
should. What they should do is what they are called to do.” The only way to
discover one’s calling is to listen carefully to what their life (gut, spirit,
soul, religious deity) is telling them. That requires trusting themselves and
their own experience, something many of them may not be accustomed to doing
especially if they grew up in authoritarian households. It also requires
committing to the time alone required to reflect and listen.
A good mentor will
always ask a student whose dreams they are pursuing. They will try to get them
to identify the values they hold. The fact a kid is good in science and math
does not mean they necessarily should be an engineer or a doctor. The fact a
kid was always argumentative with their parents as a child doesn’t make them
future lawyers.
If a mere income
sufficient to live in a style the student presumes to be normative, desirable
or demanded of them is all they want, the quickest route to the best paying
career may be all they are willing to seek. Bear in mind that we all have the
right to live as minimal a life as we choose. The question we should always ask
ourselves is why we’d choose that. A good mentor will always pose that question
but remember that it is the student who must answer it.
Good mentoring will
always require discussion of quality of life as well as quantity of income. And
it is important for the mentor to know up front that s/he is often swimming
upstream in such discussions in a consumerist culture that is marked largely by
its pervasive superficiality.
·
Going home – Perhaps
the toughest thing I ever did as a mentor was to pose the question to a student
as to whether they are ready to be in college at this point in their life. Fair
disclosure requires that I reveal that I left my own undergraduate education
between my junior and senior year at the University of Florida to deal with
some personal issues that had come to dominate my life and made full attentiveness
to my studies impossible. A six month furlough working at Disney World was
sufficient for me to get my head cleared and to come to the conclusion that my
future did not lie in being a ride operator in a theme park. If I wanted to do
what I felt called to do (teach), I would have to return to college and
complete my
But there is an important post-scriptum to this story.
After I decided I was going to leave the
university, I for some reason mentioned to a teaching assistant in one of my classes that I was leaving. She
didn’t ask a lot of questions. And she made
no judgments. She did reassure me that I had to find my own way and that she understood. But then she added these words
that changed my life: “It’s apparent
to me that you are really very bright. And while I understand that you can’t be here right now, you really are
going to want to finish your education at
some point. You don’t have to promise me
anything. But promise yourself that you
will do that. And let me know when you get back.”
I did look her up when I returned to the University of
Florida that next fall. I thanked
her for sage advice to me and told her I was back. She just smiled. What I didn’t realize is that I would give that
same advice to a handful of students in my own
career as teacher and mentor. For the gift of that wisdom, I am in her debt.
It’s important to measure your words when you have this
talk with a student. I am always very intentional about the words
“right now.” I reassure the student that it is
not their intellectual abilities that are in question. They are plenty capable
of succeeding in higher
education. But whether it is life circumstances or emotional state, it seems clear that it can’t happen
right now.
I always phrase the next point as a question: Are you sure you really need to be here right now? Their responses may well
be no. I always offer the obvious observation
in such cases: The university is not
going anywhere. It will be here when
you are ready to come back.
But remember the drivenness factor. Some are working
under timelines from parental
budgets with all the conditions often attached to such “gifts.” Some fear they may not come back to school if they
leave. And in some cases that is true though
in many of those cases that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Despite the truisms articulated by everyone from the
president of the country to the president of
IBM, college simply is not the right path for everyone.
Working with a student who has come to this conclusion
requires putting our own sense of
importance and value of a college education aside to be fully attentive to the needs of the mentee in front of us.
It’s their life we’re talking about,
not our own. Our life is
normative for no one but ourselves. One size does not fit all, even in universities that more resemble
mass production factories than the sacred
groves of Plato’s Academy.
Be aware – Students
are often looking for mentors even when they are not able to verbalize that.
Moreover, you may well be functioning as a mentor without realizing you are
doing so. Mentors don’t necessarily do anything differently than a good
instructor would do. Taking interest in your students, trying to connect your
subject material to their life experiences and their future interests, making
time for them (and being on time for your appointments with them) all convey to
the student that you are trustworthy and that they are important to you. That
signals to them that they can take a chance on the vulnerability with the
mentor required for a good mentor relationship to work.
- Be genuine in your dealings with them. Know you will upon occasion screw up.
- Be OK with that. It’s human and that’s part of the behavior you are modeling for them. Admit when you’re wrong. It gives them permission to make mistakes without fearing being shamed
- Offer examples from your own life experiences. It makes you more human and thus approachable. It also offers living proof that it is possible to survive even the darkest nights of one’s college years. But don’t forget that your experience is normative for exactly one person – you.
- Don’t try to be BFF with your mentees. You can’t do that and they have all the BFFs they need and a horde of “friends” a mere flick of a touchpad away. Just be yourself. That is what the student is seeking. And bear in mind that the student you mentor today could well be your colleague in the future or at the very least your life-long friend.
One of the great joys of being a mentor is watching your
students take the world by storm upon
graduation and become the great successes you always knew they would be. And in a profession often
marked by substandard professional pay,
unreasonable work conditions and increasing levels of public deprecation, helping students find their way to
successful lives is one of the few remaining moral
rewards left to college instructors. You
should take this very seriously. The students
whose lives you touch certainly do.
©
Harry S. Coverston, Ph.D., J.D., M.Div., eds. Sierra Skye Gysler, Christopher
Clukay (August 2015).
Harry Scott Coverston
Orlando, Florida
If the unexamined life is not worth
living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is
not worth holding.
For what does G-d require of you but
to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah
6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)
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