A mentor's voice, what I learned from the kids I drove

I have been a mentor in the mupla youth program for three years. My job, as I understood it when I signed up, was to drive a teenager to tutoring twice a week. The kid I was assigned to was fifteen, behind in math, and quiet in a way that I read, at first, as not wanting to be there.

I was wrong about that. He did want to be there. He performed not wanting to be there.

The first six months

For the first six months, I drove. I did not push conversation. I asked the occasional question, mostly about school, and he answered, mostly in monosyllables. I figured that was the job: a ride, a quiet adult, a Tuesday and a Thursday.

What I missed, in those early months, is that the ride was the relationship. The trust was being built in the silences, in the fact that I showed up at 3:15, that I did not ask how the tutoring had gone, that I let him pick the music on the way home.

The shift

Sometime around month seven, he started talking. Not in the car, actually, in the parking lot after tutoring. He would lean against the car and not quite face me, and he would tell me about a class, or a friend, or a worry. The topics did not matter. The fact that he was telling me mattered.

By the end of the first year, he was a different kid. Not because of the tutoring. Because someone had been consistent for a year.

What I got wrong

I want to be honest about the things I got wrong, because other mentors will get them wrong too. I got the dress code wrong. I dressed for the role, button-downs and slacks, because I wanted him to take me seriously. He read the dress code as "this adult is not like the adults in my house." I switched to t-shirts and jeans in the second year, and the conversations changed immediately.

I got the praise wrong. I praised the grades when they came up, and the praise made the next grade worse. He stopped telling me about the grades, because the praise felt like a performance review. I stopped praising. He started telling me about the grades again.

I got the questions wrong. I asked "how was school" and got monosyllables. I asked "what was the worst part of today" and got paragraphs. The lesson is that the open-ended question that names the difficulty gets the truth.

What the program asks of mentors

We ask for a year. The year is not a screening mechanism. The year is the work. A kid who sees the same adult twice a week for a year will start to trust that adult. A kid who sees a rotating cast of well-meaning volunteers will start to perform. The first is what we are after. The second is what we are trying to avoid.

We also ask for a fixed time. The Tuesday and Thursday 3:15 pickup is not a window. It is a 3:15 pickup. The driver who is fifteen minutes late is a driver who has taught the kid that adults are not reliable. The driver who is on time, every time, is a driver who has taught the kid that adults are reliable. Both lessons travel. Only one of them is what we want to teach.

We do not ask for a curriculum. The mentoring literature is full of curricula: goal-setting worksheets, growth-mindset language, character strengths inventories. Some of them are useful. Most of them are not. The kid does not need a worksheet. The kid needs an adult who is going to be there.

What I tell new mentors

Three things, in order. The first is to show up. The second is to be quiet. The third is to wait. The order matters. Most new mentors start with "be quiet" and end with "show up," and the kids can tell the difference. Show up first. The quiet and the waiting come later, and they come easier if the showing up is already a habit.

The kids I have driven are now in college, or in trade school, or in their first jobs. A few of them text me on Eid. One of them called me last year to ask if I would write a recommendation for a scholarship. I wrote it. He got the scholarship. The recommendation was not about his grades. It was about the fact that he had been consistent, and that the consistency was visible in his application. That is the work. That is what a year of small commitments looks like, three years later.

If you are considering volunteering, our get involved page has the mentor application. For more on how the mentor program fits with the rest of our youth programs, the programs page has the family education track.