ABSTRACT
Mentors are those significant strangers. The mentor essentially throws the pebble into the pond, and perhaps what begins is a first circle of many ripples. This chapter reflects waiting and listening. It shares some best practices in bringing the relational arc to a gentle close or shift, and highlight what several students, among the six hundred-plus that the author have mentored, are doing years after our classroom encounters. The mentoring relationship is unique, it can be difficult to transition. The point is that, as a mentor, reconnecting with mentees through an established framework makes continuing any relationship quite easy and appropriate. The chapter gives hands-on guidance for building mentor–mentee relationship. It lays out a chronology of interactions from entering school and learning the rules of engagement to meeting the teacher to meeting the class to working one on one with individual students to collaborating on a student project and defending it.
