Reflections on Losing a Mentor

Susan Gaer, a long time TIMAC mentor, sent me this article about her first mentor, who helped her get technology in her classroom and then find ways to use it. I post it here as a testament to the mentoring process (this one was spontaneous!) but more especially it's an example of using Internet to find just the right kind of professional development at the right time, and back in 1994!

Susan's Article

Most people think of me as super mentor. They believe that the "technology mentor" is a higher-level species who understands the technology they inevitably don't. That is not how I see the word mentor to mean. By dictionary definition it is "a trusted counselor or guide". To me my mentors and mentees always ended up being my good friends and trusted colleagues teaching me more than I could ever hope to teach them.

I found out on Monday, July 7, that my very first mentor, Leni Donlan died last year. I want to tell you about Leni so you can know her as I did. I met her in 1994 online with AOL's educational community. I was teaching a class of literacy lao/hmong and lahu refugees most with no writing system in their own language. Most of the people in the school at the time told me they had been in this class for a long time and expectations were low. It was a rural community in Central California and information and training was hard to come by. I found AOL's educational community and met Leni Donlan who showed me how to work the system to get what I wanted.

After I got what I wanted ( a modem, phone line and 386 computer) she helped me developed projects and chats with this particular group of students. The activities were great but the real learning took place as I watched students who were considered to be the most marginal in society start to make a difference. We participated in a post card project with a class in Ohio who we sent lemon grass to. They had never had lemon grass before so my students sent instructions to use
the lemongrass. Next we read an essay about how a blind and deaf girl( I think I remember her name as Christie)could hear popcorn pop by putting her hand over the corn to feel the vibration of the popping.

We made cookbooks which bought us a industrial level stove and the book was purchased by "Legal Foods' in Boston.This led to Kathleen Ferenz and I doing a project where ESL students tasted condiments and wrote down their thoughts. Mustard was not a winner. I moved on to the post card project and then took a step on the wild side. I had my ESL Laotian tribal groups take a trip on Westward HO. I never thought it would work. There was so much culture to learn that the other students were brought up with, but when we all started baking Indian bread and learning line dancing, I knew it was one of the most amazing projects I had every participated in.

Leni would come and chat with my class on a regular basis and she said they could always hold their own language wise. She moved on, I moved on and that could have been the end of the story. However, the lessons Leni taught me have been the base of everything I have done since that time in 1994. Leni was one of the most important influences in my instructional life and she was also a great friend. That is what a real mentor is. Leni encapsulated all that and more for me. My students and I will miss her influence in the coming years.

Becoming a 21st Century Literate Educator

This post by David Warlick is in answer to the question from a teacher - How do I get started with learning how to use technology? He lists 12 suggestions, including finding the tech support person at your school and making friends with them. Actually, he says bake them some cookies! Other ideas include finding other teachers who are interested in the same thing and working together, reading blogs and sharing information, and creating a wiki to share notes. Seeds of a learning community.

Another interesting post I read today was from Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach at 21st Century Collaborative on reflection as an agent of change. Having that time for reflection is so important, and teachers are "on" so much of the day, it's hard to find that time to think about how things are going, what direction to go from here, what went wrong and how to make it better. Sheryl's point is that collaboration really helps nurture that process. When we are in our own separate classrooms by ourselves, there is no one to reflect with. When we are engaged in collaborative projects, f2f or virtual, we have a posse to talk with, think with, reflect with. That makes life so much richer because we are learning as we go.

And Sheryl linked to a post by Jennifer Jones at Injenuity on Viral Professional Development. I think this is the direction we are going in adult education in California, away from the big workshop and towards supporting teachers at a site to work with each other to learn what they need to learn. Can you make this happen? If you have even one or two excited and enthusiastic early adopters, you can. If not? Maybe you have to wait until those people show up, and they will. Jennifer gives a really nice description of viral PD, and a list of steps to get it going.