Mentoring toward personal development and achievement
A new article talks about how a young woman is moving beyond her toxic history, through her commitment to her own growth and the help of a mentor.
In “Milena’s mentor stays on the case” [Los Angeles Times, Feb 2, 2007], Rachel Abramowitz writes:
“Considering that her mother tried to throw her out a third-story window when she was 3, and that she spent five years in an orphanage in the destitute former Soviet republic of Georgia and five years in American foster homes, a psychiatric hospital and a lockdown facility for troubled kids, Milena Slatten, 20, is faring incredibly well.
“Two years ago, she was homeless, but now she’s earned her GED and works full time as a clerk in the Los Angeles County courthouse. She has no criminal record. She doesn’t drink. She doesn’t smoke or do drugs, even prescription medications. When she was a child, the social workers had filled her with a cocktail of mood stabilizers that left her days blurry. Now she’d rather be depressed than zonked out.”
She has a mentor in Thomas Higgins, 65, a career prosecutor for the city of Los Angeles. “She calls him Tommy… He has been spending 50 to 60 hours a month for the last 11 months essentially trying to rescue Milena.
“For all her progress, there are continual pitfalls. For Higgins, it is a test of faith and fortitude; for Milena, it is a struggle to learn to trust. ‘I am the type of person to usually obliterate or basically ruin a relationship because I feel someone is getting close to me,’ she says.”
Mentoring can help gifted and talented young women explore and realize their abilities more completely. But an article in the Duke Gifted Letter: Harnessing Gifted Girls’ Emotional Strengths warns, “Mentoring implies an unusual degree of intimacy between teacher and student. This kind of relationship has unique potential for stimulating growth in skills, content knowledge, professional experience, and psychosocial development.
“Yet intimacy in any unbalanced power relationship can be scary, and girls need to understand the nature of such relationships to avoid losing their identity, assertiveness, or power of choice in them.”
The photo caption implies she is keeping her balance and identity: “Milena jokes with Higgins on the way to lunch, which they often share.” (Photo by Brian Vander Brug / LAT.)
The book Genius Denied : How to Stop Wasting Our Brightest Young Minds provides another example. Chapter 5 on “Patrons, Teachers, and Mentors” includes the story of Wenyi who “found a mentor to teach her science and math skills that went far beyond her high school’s offerings.
“She used [her] mathematical skills to model gasoline sprays for fuel injection technology using computer programming to transform thousands of lines of code into 3-D images… Her research has now found Department of Energy funding and interest from automobile companies in Detroit.”
In her article Mentoring Relationships And Gifted Learners, Sandra L. Berger notes how profound mentoring can be: “It’s a dynamic shared relationship in which values, attitudes, passions, and traditions are passed from one person to another and internalized. Its purpose is to transform lives.”
Director Caroline Thompson, in our interview, recalled a person who helped encourage her to pursue a life as an artist, a “great teacher, my Latin teacher. She let me know that life could be sparkly and fun and self invented. This was junior high school. She was an old lady then, and she just kicked our butts, and she brought out the best of me and I adored her,” Thompson says.
~~
Related Articles
More Sections
