Fr. Richard Rohr writes about his own mentors, mentors of today and how difficult it is to find them. About quality mentors he writes:

We have almost no mentors who have been there themselves and who have come back to guide us through. Of course, there are many bosses, ministers, coaches, and teachers who will happily tell younger people how to “fix” their problems, so they can be “normal” again, but a true mentor guides people into their problems and through them. https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?pli=1#inbox/FMfcgzQVzFWkqDfvzpkmKgWMLKrHQjvX

The late Jim Garvin was one of my early mentors in teaching high school English. By his own example, he taught me to be human to my students, sometimes baffling them with anecdotes that seemed irrelevant to his teaching. Our high school actually had a helicopter pad for visiting dignitaries, and Jim would tell his students that he frequently arrived at school by helicopter. A few went outside before or after school to see if they could observe his landing or departing.

He was a traditional Irish bachelor, living at home with his mother.  Jim would describe his multi-course breakfasts in the morning, encouraging students :”to put gas into your tank” to get a good start on the day. About one-third into the class he would launch into the topic for the day.

I used to think he was the anti-teacher before I actually team-taught with him. His students loved him. Once he was hospitalized for a heart condition, and he was not allowed visitors unless they were immediate family. Two boys from his class told the nurses they were Jim’s sons to get in to see him. Jim loved to tell that story.

Cathy Fleischer was a more traditional mentor for me, when I started university teaching.  She won teaching awards at the university, state and national level. She referred me to good professional articles, suggested how to teach small groups, and how to model student-centered teaching for my pre-service teachers. But her advice never descended to the “how-to” level.

She taught by writing. Her Writing Outside your Comfort Zone was ground-breaking for a presentation of research and learning new genres. [https://www.heinemann.com/products/e01247.aspx] It was about learning new genres, more than research, and it was composed from interviews with students who were the experts in most of her research. That method of teaching and research baffled me until I saw how she did it.

The first time I taught a graduate course was the Summer Institute of the National Writing Project. Cathy was the only faculty at our university before me to teach this magical course on the teaching of writing.  I saw her teach it and marveled at how engaged the students were. They were all K-12 teachers, who were often bored by professional development courses.

“Just find what they know about writing, and take it from there,” she assured me. She even gave me a writing prompt that had worked to start the course. I used it. It rocked. And the class did indeed run away with the curriculum. Like Cathy I was teaching by finding out what the students already knew. Who knew?

As Fr. Rohr said, a true mentor guides people into their problems and through them. Mentors actually do what good writers do. They show, not tell. You are in the middle of an experience you want to participate in.  Suddenly you are full of completely relevant questions. You tell the mentor what you know and what you want to know. There are no lectures, no cookbook teaching guides. Just teaching/ learning and asking questions.

Jim Garvin didn’t even know he was teaching me, until I pointed out something I had learned from him.  “That was probably an accident,” he would say. He was embarrassed to be considered a role model. He believed he was a model for defunct methodologies.

He was against all forms of in-service teaching. “They get paid thousands for telling us what we already know.  We should get into that racket,” he would say with a wink. He used to refer to professional conferences as “junkets.”

Often we discover  or appreciate our mentors in retrospect. Occasionally I hear from students who discovered something they had already had “learned” from me. That’s a good feeling: to pay it forward as other mentors have already done for you.