My Approach as a Teacher & Mentor

Without standard tutelage in public school pedagogy, my manner of teaching was and has remained trying to emulate my experiences in graduate school where students drive the courses forward with instructor guidance. My favorite professors were those who were excited and flexible while demanding our best in a competitive atmosphere. Equally important to me was the fact that our professors treated us like peers while taking on the role as mentor which all people need at any stage in their lives.

Many teachers treat their students like kindergarteners and arrange their classes and rooms tailored to that sort of thinking. This view of students can not only result in condescension and patronizing (and it does) but it also represses learning possibilities because of incredible underestimations of student capabilities but also the reality of their actual maturity levels. My favorite professors treated us like peers and themselves as guides who knew a great deal more. So too, I engage with my students in the same manner which goes a long way in developing mutual respect which yes, must be earned from the students.

I have witnessed colleagues say things like “because I’m an adult” or “because you’re a child” which I find warps many of the interactions and creates an unnecessary binary opposition of oppressor/oppressed. Learning, in my opinion, should be a collaborative and student focused endeavor where teachers guide the way toward a student’s autonomous capability. In this vein, students come to know and trust me because they can tell that I not only care about them but that they are safe to open up, are empowered to fail, and very importantly, push themselves. I am so thankful for my mother instilling this in me: growing up, she treated me like a human being, took me and my thoughts seriously at every age, and taught me to look at things from every viewpoint. It is my hope to do the same for my students.

Life itself is challenging at any age, but being a teenager is an especially turbulent and confusing time. I remember very well having heroes I knew personally at different stages of my adolescence and then in my teenage years it was my teachers. My father was an important man in the Navy and then even more so for a defense business that kept him traveling to various places internationally, often away for weeks and sometimes months at a time. In a word, he wasn’t around and that was okay in the grand scheme of things because I always had my coaches. Thankfully many of those coaches were also my teachers in class too. With so much time with these men, it was only natural that they would know more about my life, interests, and struggles and they helped me through those times and issues for which I’ll be forever grateful.

It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to figure out why I became a teacher and it suffices at the very least to say that I understand the importance of playing these roles for those who are less experienced in life. I ached so much to be like my mentors and I now relish that I am in that position now for my students and the girls I coach in basketball. I also loved the idea from the book Walden Two that the entire community is responsible for raising kids. In reality it isn’t much different if we are to be frank given the fact that both parental units in a household are working, aren’t present, and kids these days could not be more busy with extracurricular endeavors; kids these days spend more time with us than they do their own folks. With that comes an incredible responsibility on our part: to be a teacher is to also raise and mold children.