Posts Tagged “mentor”

Mentors
In my district, as in most now, we have a mentoring program.  It was just in the beginnings when I was hired, so in the 3 years of mentoring that I and all new hires are required to complete, each year was unique.  Although I didn’t always find the information or assignments helpful, my actual mentors were, well, quite honestly, priceless.
  
My first mentor was Mrs. B.  She had been teaching for well over 30 years.  She had been a special education teacher, classroom teacher and reading teacher.  She was the only Title I teacher in the building where I began my teaching career as a “guided reading teacher”.   (It was a part time, 9/10ths, position – you know where they get you full time really but don’t have to give you full time benefits)  Mrs. B. was a soft spoken, low key, small, gray haired grandma type lady.  She was kind and extremely patient with the students, and with me!  I have since lived on some pearls of wisdom she gave me my first year.  “You can’t save them you know, you can give them strategies, tools, and encouragement, but you can’t save them.  They have to do that themselves.”   I have recited that quote to myself numerous times, as I struggle to “save” one.  “Some are just hardwired different, dear.  You have to figure that out, that’s your job.”  Man, if that isn’t the truth.  Funny thing about that though, the ones that are hardwired differently are the ones that I end up enjoying the most!!  Imagine then, that after you are so impressed by this dignified, upstanding, master teacher who never raises her voice, you are walking by her room one day and hear, “Well, shit, shit, SHIT!”  My head spun ‘round, and I peeked in and said, “Mrs. B.  are you OK????!!!”  Her answer, “Sure, why do you ask?”  I sputtered to explain why I’d asked and she laughed…..laughed long and loud.  She said, “Yeah, I’m a teacher, but that’s just my day job, the rest of the time…..I’m human!”  Probably the most important pearl of wisdom she ever gave me.  As I continued that year, I learned she was very human, smoked like a chimney, drank like a fish and told the dirtiest, funniest jokes you ever heard.
 
My second mentor was also a Mrs. B.  She was different from the first but just as good.  She told me, “Administrators come and go, and you get to jump through new hoops each time.  But, kid, the students stay the same, so just shut your door and teach.”  She gave me OLD stuff.  Old basals, old games, old lesson plans…..and you know what I figured out, for my strugglers, they often WORKED!  That slow building repetition, it was just what they needed.  She LOVED the students and they knew it.  They worked so hard for her.  She most often got those with the biggest behavior issues.  It didn’t matter how quirky they were, they were just another student in the class, expected to follow the rules.  You know, it took some of them the first semester to figure that out, but once they did, she rarely had behavior problems.  She had over 30 years in the district, taught in 4 different buildings, taught reading, classroom, and special education, and survived half a dozen superintendents, and more principals.   Her best piece of advice, “You gotta start where they are and find something about them that you truly like.  They don’t care until you do.”  That was true for academics and behavior, and I remind myself of that almost every day.
 
Both of my mentors have since retired and I miss them both, immensely, if for no other reason than they reminded me to “keep it about the students”.  There is so much other, well, crap that you deal with as you sit on committees and go to professional development and get new administrators that it can be easy to forget why you are really there.  So on those days, I find myself asking not “What would Jesus do?” but rather “What would Mrs. B. do?!” (Either one of them).   After I ponder that for a minute, and pull up one of their pearls of wisdom, I just shut my door and teach.