Do you remember your first year teaching? I can see you sweating over stacks of papers and rereading the textbook for the fifth time. I can also hear you worrying about the quality of your AV materials, learning objectives, quiz questions, and any number of the other minor details involved in enriching young minds. How late did you work? How many weekends did you spend in the office prepping for class? I can imagine it because I lived it. Perhaps we all did but it doesn’t have to be so hard.

I was blessed rookie by attaining a faculty position at Kalamazoo Valley Community College where Marilyn Schlack had established a faculty mentoring program. It was a great help. Each new faculty member was assigned a senior faculty mentor for four years. Our mentors were charged with responsibility for our success at classroom instructors and their continuing success depended on how well we did.

We were instructed to meet weekly to talk about anything on our minds. One rule. This meeting was off the record. Nothing said would ever be used in our annual performance evaluations. In reality most of us met much more often and became fast friends.

Fortunately for me Geoff Crosslin was assigned as my mentor. He was my Division Chair and soon had an office next to mine.

I suffered through the first year of over-prepping and stress despite his coaxing. He’d always look in on me on his way out the door. He’d smile and ask, “What are you working on?” The answer was almost always “prepping for class”. He’d grin and tell me to have more faith in myself as he walked away. Sometimes he’d gave a good talking to, “We hired you because you know your stuff so just go do it!”. It took me a long time to develop that kind of faith in myself but I finally did. He was right. My teaching became much more interesting and spontaneous as I eased off. I always cover the material just not always in the same way.

Most of my class of rookies enjoyed successful careers at Kalamazoo Valley Community College. Me? I took a long sabbatical to pursue an engineering career but I’ll always fondly remember my days and friends there. I’m back in teaching now and its my opinion the mentoring program made us all better in our work.

Why not try a mentoring program on your campus and see what happens? Or if institutionalizing a mentoring program seems a bit artificial you can always serve someone as an informal mentor. You can start simply by buying a rookie a cup of coffee and listening.

ps: What ever happened to my mentor? He became my business partner and best friend and new lives the retired life near Pheonix, AZ.

If this book doesn’t touch your heart it must have stopped beating.

Joe Posnanski records his travels with the legendary Buck O’Neil during the last year of O’Neil’s life. He saw the negro leagues from O’Neil’s optimistic perspective and learned just how big one man’s heart can be. I liked the book so much I immediately passed it along to younger baseball fans to read.

Available from amazon.com for $11.86.