Mentoring Students—and Myself
The past few months I’ve been working as a mentor with college students who are working to get themselves back on track in their college career. We talk about life, their fears, their hopes, their dreams, the classes they want to take, the learning they want to do, how they want to do it, and how they seem to find more frustration than success in their lives.
We have great conversations, a wonderful back and forth, and also, it serves as a great opportunity for me to do self-reflection on my own high school, college and adolescent period of my life.
Faking Skills
When I was in grade school, I pretended I understood how to do long division, I could make the house, I knew which number went inside, which one went outside, and could guess at what the remainder should be when it was needed. I could guess it, but I never really learned how to know for sure. I’d sneak out my calculator to ‘check’ my work, or just use a calculator to find the right answer then fill in the work behind it.
I was learning how to pretend to get the right answer, but I was too scared, ashamed, embarrassed and fearful to admit that this concept, however simple it seemed for my classmates, was difficult for me to master. I made do. I compensated, was resourceful, but never really did the hard work to learn the skill of long division.
Luckily we moved quickly to fractions, and I could once again coast and rely on my intellect instead of learning how to learn a difficult concept. I thought I was in the clear, and I was until long division came back with a vengeance in 7th grade.
Fear gripped me and the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end as I sat in class and Mr. Fischer introduced the next iteration of long division- dividing with decimals, fractions, and large numbers. My worst fears were realized. The crummy foundation of division I had cobbled together in elementary school was being tested and exposed for its cracks, imperfections, and incompleteness.
I felt more than exposed, I felt ashamed. My cheeks flushed red. I had always told myself I was smart. And here was a shining example of when my brains and ability to just ‘get it’ fell short. It became clear to me though that this was going to be an opportunity to learn, not really out of choice, but out of necessity.
Skills Left to Learn
I think life skills work much the same way. There are certain skills that we all naturally just master or are good at. Some people are great at making small talk, engaging with others, caring for others, or enthusiastically thinking outside the box. For others of us, those skills are learned and practiced. And still, for some those skills are so far outside of our normal comfort zone that we either choose to ignore or compensate for their absence with other skills.
What I’ve noticed with my students as well as with myself, is that there are many life lessons and life skills that I have yet to learn. Some of them were taught to me and I picked up, others were too difficult to grasp so I faked my way through it. And as I continue to grow and my life demands more of me and I seek to take on and accomplish more with my life, it is becoming clear that instead of being afraid and ashamed of what I don’t know or didn’t learn, its high time I get to eagerly being a student of life and learn what it is that I don’t know.