Relationships and Mentoring

This week was a bit tricky in terms of my mentoring process, but nonetheless remained instructive. We often talk about the importance of positive, trusting supportive relationships being formed between students and teachers forming the backbone of the learning process; so too do we often emphasize the necessity of careful planning. In this vein, I have worked hard to cultivate my relationship with the student I am mentoring, and look forward all the more eagerly to working with him through his writing process every Monday because of it. However, this week I arrived to find my regular student missing (sick) and the resources I had prepared for him therefore lost much of their utility. I was instead tasked with meeting, learning, and engaging with a new student, whose writing project was totally different, just as was his style of learning.

Engaging with this student reminded me of what one of my AT's calls the "constancy of interruptions" in the teaching process. Indeed, a teacher who is not ready for wrenches to be thrown into their well-laid plans, who is not in fact anticipating these wrenches and ready to use them to their advantage, is hardly ready to teach. Mentoring this new student through his very different writing process was a huge shift, as his learning style was strikingly different. Whereas my former student produced all his work in singular bursts of typed writing, this student was far more iterative in his approach, not even needing to be guided to the beneficial strategies of writing in pencil with an eraser at the ready, writing multiple drafts, and writing with a mind to growth rather than to finality. Whereas the former student was very much interested in the over-all flow of his writing, this one found motivation in refining the details and seeking improvements in his writing.

Had I stubbornly presented the materials I had brought with me for the former student to the new one, I no doubt would have been met with confusion or even alienation. Instead, I spent a productive work period with this student as he waded through four drafts each (?!) of two different paragraphs summarizing the first two scenes from A Midsummer Night's Dream. As important as preparation is in teaching, I have come to learn that mental preparedness for the unexpected represents an even more important component of successful practice. In this particular scenario, my mental preparedness to adapt my well-laid plans was further augmented by my readiness to create a new, positive, and trusting relationship between student and mentor/teacher.