Mentoring

Today I went over to the school, and I had a wierd experience.

I was waiting for the mento, and listening to two other mentors talking about their kids.  One said that she was concerned because the kid had a 45 in one course, and it was very hard to get up from there. Yeah, I know that feeling, I thought.  The other said my kid had Ds in five of six subjects.  We finally got him to the point where he only has two. At which point I thought again about what a lousy mentor I am, because I never push the kid to show me homework, anything like that.

Then, when he arrived, he said he had to go to a 'checkout' room where a teacher would confirm that he had his required work in his 'agenda book'.  Only, it turned out that not only did he not have it, he'd been erasing it so that his mother would not know that he had things due. He had his usual morass of papers, and had trouble finding stuff in there.  The teacher told him that he needed to work on that, and the teacher wrote his deliverables in ink so that they couldn't be erased. And I thought jeez, I never do that stuff.

Then we went to the library, where I mentioned how I found that very interesting and more than a little disturbing - whereupon he said that there was a math problem he didn't understand, so we looked at it.  I asked if he had an example of how to do it, and he showed me one he had written.  It was wrong.  It took me 30 minutes to figure out how to do it, and I didn't explain it very well.

So I think:  I suck at being a mentor.  I really do.