Mentors and models – Touch The Future

What disturbs me most today about the mentors and models that children have is that too often they are people that they don’t know, having pictures of famous basketball players and movie stars or even animated characters, those are the mentors and models that our kids look up to today. They’re not in their world. The mentors and models kids need to have are their parents, the people next door, maybe the mailman. I think that every teacher at the beginning of the year should have a picture taken of herself, give it to each child in a frame and have them take it home so that when they’re feeling lonely they can turn their head and look, there’s a person who supports you. There’s a person who cares about you.

Things to think about

Who are the mentors and models in your life? Who were they growing up? Are they people you know?
How can you be a mentor or model for the children in your school?
How can you create a community of mentors in your program?
Who besides the teachers in your program can serve as mentors to the children?

Highlights from Playful Wisdom
by Michael Mendizza featuring Bev Bos and Joseph Chilton Pearce

Years ago I imagined that we are like moving fountains or flowing rivers. The form, river or fountain, appear to remain the same but the moving water that creates the form is never the same. We are like that, always moving, changing, just like the children we care for. The difference is, young children have no mental images, fixed patterns to cling to. We do. It is these images, these phantom memories that we compare, that cause us embarrassment and cause us to become envious—judging, insisting on correctness. These fixed memories or images create our jealousy, our humiliation, sadness, very often what we are depressed about, and our wars. But our children, if they are lucky haven’t created these feeling-images yet. Perhaps, if we are lucky or very skillful, the images they identify with will be more attuned to the ever-changing water than the static fountain.

Imagine if all the children in the world, identified with the creative ever-changing moment by moment movement that they are instead of fixed forms—German, Protestant, Republican, or even white or black, native or billionaire. That simple change, a slight twist of imagined identity, would change the world, and profoundly. This self-image business is a little tricky, inseparable from semantic language, woven deep in our emotional-relational brain centers, abstracted by our symbols, naming and language. We can’t avoid the temptation to identify. But what if? What if we identified with the movement, the ever-changing waters that we actually are and not the fixed forms our memory clings to? Shame would never scar us. Hate would not exist. Embarrassment and humiliation would be laughed at. Racism, bigotry, and the violence these spawn would hold no currency. None of these would exist and all the energy and attention that goes into justifying and defending these images would be invested in enhancing the moment and its movement. Is it possible? We will see. But now, it is time to play.

Mentors and models and those people that are in our lives, what disturbs me most today about the mentors and models that children have is that too often they are people that they don’t know, having pictures of famous basketball players and movie stars or even animated characters, those are the mentors and models that our kids look up to today. They’re not in their world. They very often disappoint them because there’s stories about them cheating or doing illegal things or falling out of grace. I mean they’re human beings. The mentors and models kids need to have are their parents, the people next door, maybe the mailman. I think that every teacher at the beginning of the year should have a picture taken of herself, give it to each child in a frame and have them take it home so that when they’re feeling lonely they can turn their head and look, there’s a person who supports you. There’s a person who cares about you. The mentors and models that we have in our life. And I think that sometimes it’s a very distinct thing that they model for us. Tom Hunter is one of the most gifted children’s musicians that there is. Both Michael and I have always been able to look to him for good songs, for understanding how they work with children, although we both know a lot about that too, but those mentors and models often it’s in the details of what they do. I learned to do this because of my father. I can garden because of my father. That’s one of the details I got from him. I learned to cook from nothing like my mother. So those mentors and models that we have in our lives and what kind of a mentor and model are we? But it is frightening to me today because I don’t know that kids know their neighbors. They don’t have people to look up to. They don’t have people to help them do those things, to know those things. Neither one of my boys are very mechanical. My husband is a wonderful mechanic. He can fix anything. He can invent anything and he can fix anything. But they learn to do those things by hanging around him and the girls did too, those things that they need to do. So who are our mentors and who are our models and how do we do that? I think about organized sports for kids and people just screaming and screaming and screaming at children. And even the coaches not having any sense about how to encourage and not just scream and yell. What kind of mentors and models are those for our children? I always think about my kids, Manny Usef is dead now but he lived across the street and the kids used to play ball all the time out in the street and they’d kick a ball and it would go over the fence and gosh he was so ugly about it. He was so mean. Well when he died my husband was really sad and he’s going to go to the funeral and Andrew said, my son said, “You know he’s such a mean bastard! He was so mean to us. Yeah, you’re maybe sad about that but he never had a kind word for us kids.” Kids don’t forget things like that. They don’t forget that. You can wish it all away but it doesn’t wish away. It’s how you treat kids and how you treat people.