What I learned from my mentor

For starters, this is not a Starbucks Drama post. If you only attend for the musings of the coffee-addicted habituees of the green-apron shop, then leave now.

This is a blogger's roundtable post, courtesy of my former co-worker Holly Hoffman. She's the force behind worklovelife.com and co-owner of Neovia Solutions. I hope she does me the honor of counting me among her friends.

You can read more about the format for this blog happening here ("It's not a rave, it's a happening!"). The subject is mentors.

I have had many mentors in my life. I count myself fortunate enough to have been touched by any number of extraordinary people - but one remains with me more than 25 years later.

I grew up in one of the poorest Delta parishes of Louisiana. Almost 30% of the population of Richland Parish is below the poverty line; there are only 20,000 people in the entire parish. The largest town, Rayville, has a population of 4,000.

I did not grow up in "town." Until 1997, the year I graduated from college, people driving to my parents house - which they'd moved into when I was four - included "Turn off the paved road." My two-hour school bus ride took me to Holly Ridge Elementary, home to 400 K-4 and later K-8 students. The school no longer exists.

I could not read in kindergarten; several other students could - and our teacher made those of us who could not read feel ashamed. I had difficulty learning to read in first grade because the prevailing educational theory at the time taught phonics.

I was - and am - about 30% deaf, so "hukd on fonyks" didn't really "wuryk 4 me." Once I *got* reading though, how letters made up words, how words went together and how words made up sentences, I got it all at once. I went from "Pug" to third-grade level books in a matter of weeks; I even read textbooks for practice.

I still process information this way. I think of it as the "Big Gulp" theory - I have to completely wrap my head around something - and then once I have it, I have it completely, but until then, nothing.

Back to mentoring.

I won't reveal her name - we'll use Mary Smith - but she was my Gifted & Talented (as it was called in Louisiana) teacher from 2nd through 8th grade. Under her tutelage, I didn't just practice critical thinking, I learned what critical thinking was, how and when to apply it and how to actually use it.

Think of an oak tree. I was the acorn that had to first discover what heat, light, water and the soil were - and then how to convert those elements into the building blocks of life. I could never have done it if someone hadn't shown me that I had to grow up, toward the light.

Gifted & Talented was something *SPECIAL* at our school. Through the first half of the second grade, only one person in the entire school got "Gifted" classes. The Gifted teacher commuted in special for that one student and drove a diesel Mercedes that none of the regular teachers at my in-the-sticks school could afford. The girl that had that class was "special," because she was the only one who got Mrs. Smith's attention for an hour a day while the rest of us did social studies.

At the end of the first grade, all students took achievement tests. In somewhat of a surprise, I ran the table and finished far, far ahead of the rest of my class - including the one girl who was in the Gifted program. Of course, this was the first grade.

At the start of the second grade, the school district asked my parents (and the parents of two other students) if we wanted to be tested for the Gifted program. I remember going into a tiny room at the School Board building in town and running through what seemed like hours and hours of tests that made no sense to a second-grader. Of course, they were pretty average - shape and pattern recognition, sequencing and basic logic test. I passed, whatever passing would have been. The two other students "failed" to advance. Maybe this was some sort of proto-Gattaca or something.

It took more months for the paperwork to get processed, during which the girl who was already in the Gifted program was absolutely wretched to me, because she was afraid that she'd lose her "exclusive" place. She lost it.

It has taken me 747 words to find the right words to say that "The Gifted program was the first time in public education that I felt challenged, stretched, pushed and made to think." This continued for the next seven years. Every time I felt complacent, I was pushed farther.

Mary Smith inherited a lump of formless clay. She left a Rodin. How did she do it?

814 words later, we get to the point.

Every single thing we did in class was fun. Every single thing we did in class was educational. Every single thing we did in class we did taught me something.

In the fourth grade, I spent a week sewing and beading a sweater.

In the fifth grade, I wanted to study art, so the entire year was spent finding images in magazines that I could duplicate. I ripped paper to duplicate a mod Marlboro ad. I spent a month trying to recreate a Christmas ad out of wrapping paper and shopping bags.

My December project was a full-size gingerbread house. This was an experiment of grand proportions. I learned geometry (cutting sizes and shapes), budgeting, chemistry (mixing icing) and art, art and more art.

In the third grade, I started a series of what was called T.O.P.S. - Techniques Of Problem Solving. These were a series of cards in a Trivial Pursuit-size box, each with a critical thinking problem or logic puzzle on them. The box had to be done by the end of the year. I remember one of my lesser successes - "Candy Cane Cola," which was the solution to "Design a new soda, including can, slogan and marketing campaign." For some reason, I didn't think that soda had enough sugar.

Geography was my favorite. This was my first introduction to Carmen Sandiego. And to the meticulous approach to life that would serve the rest of my my days.

Mrs. Smith was a dedicated fan of note-taking, remembering details and paying attention. In many, if not most of the lessons in my curriculum, these were always at the heart. I played the computer version of "Carmen Sandiego" religiously, only to one day complain that I'd missed a villain because I'd forgotten a clue. "Why didn't you write it down?" I never missed a villain again - and was soon making connections within the game faster, because I recognized what villains were trying to do.

I was always supposed to be the best at whatever I did. Every game we played, every project I started, every problem I solved - finishing wasn't the goal. I was supposed to finish it *well.* I marvel at how different this philosophy is from today's public education.

Mah jong was another favorite. We played the entire week before Christmas in my eighth grade year, both in the name of culture and to teach me to think beyond the obvious patterns of "remove the first tile you can."

At some point, I learned the alleged longest word in the English language -  "Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis." (Thank you, I typed it out correctly from memory! - just like I can still recite the Greek alphabet from memory!) My test on that word included identifying the largest number of individual words I could make out of it within 30 minutes and trying to come up the single longest *other* word from the component letters.

And so we went. I made bulletin boards; tested myself on speed-reading (398 wpm); spent two weeks on learning Esperanto; read "Call of the Wild;" filled out vocabulary papers on what a "flume ditch" was; drew ghosts, unicorns and bats; spent two weeks exploring M.C. Escher; solved logic puzzles; found out what quahogs were before "Family Guy" made them cool; discovered I was nearly 80% right-brained; painted; sewed; read the entire Chronicles of Narnia and the entire Newberry shelf at the Richland Parish Public Library; milk-fed a pumpkin; read Orwell's "Animal Farm" (yes, in the sixth grade); solved Brain Teasers; created homemade Christmas cards; wrote about everything I found out and learned that I was *supposed* to be smart, well-read and intelligent. Along the way, I discovered that not everyone saw the world with the same pair of eyes that I did.

I left my K-8 school in 1989. I did not enter Gifted classes in high school. It was an elective that required giving up some things in your schedule; in addition, I had met the person who taught Gifted at the high school level and we *did not* get along. I opted for history instead. Which served me better in college anyway.

I saw my Gifted teacher one more time, at my high school graduation. I thanked her for everything she had done, but four years later, she had other students and other proteges to worry about.

To this day, I don't know if she ever knew how much she influenced me. She had many other students in her career - and she drove to three other schools in her circuit - but for me, she was the path to enlightenment. Thank you, Mary Smith.