[ad_1]
Last week I directed a six-day creativity reading and writing a women’s seminar on “Identity and (Dis) Ownership” that I have spent four years in the summer. We usually meet weekly at St. John’s Abbey, a community Benedictine monastery located on the shores of a lake in central Minnesota; this year, everything has happened virtually. Course participants explore close readings and personal essays by cultural writers and delve deeper into individual, family, and shared narrative stories by doing a short creative writing.
It proves to be a week that empties emotionally and physically every year. When we closed on Saturday, someone warned that part of what was so significant about the seminar was an unexpected element of the tutorial: how, with my words and actions, I showed them how to bring their full presence to work, to each other and to challenge themselves. I didn’t consciously know how to do that, but the next few days left me thinking about what makes a good tutor.
In Homer’s epic poem Odyssey, Mentor Odysseus asked his son to take care of Telema when he was an old man when he went to war. But in the story, it is the work of the Greek goddess Athens that gives meaning to how we understand the word “guardian” today. He disguises himself as an old man and goes to Telemako to advise him on what to do for his family.
Today, tutoring takes so many forms – from formal corporate programs established in the U.S. in the 1970s to global training facilities for training and mentoring accreditation. But regardless of one’s tutelage, it seems to be a much-needed and long-standing human relationship, expressed in literature, religious texts, and popular culture.
Life has not always guided me in the line of the exact mentor I needed at every moment. But from the age of 13, she taught me about my mother’s favorite friends and gave me a little book to pass on from childhood to childhood, when she taught me people who have significantly influenced the way I see the world. the rules of life, they nurtured my potential and I believed in myself more than I believed in myself. They are names and faces I could never forget. All tutoring relationships are different, and yet when tutoring is honored and taken seriously, I believe it is a beneficial and enlightening experience.
One of my favorite paintings is the subject “The infancy of Christ“(C1620)” by the Dutch painter Gerrit van Honthorst of the 16th century. Jesus is the scene of the boy, Joseph with his father, a carpenter who taught him the trade. It is a dark night and Jesus, dressed in a bright red robe, is placed on the table and has a candle lit so that the elder Joseph can work. Two whispering angels, who themselves look like children, stand in the background and point to the father-son, the apprentice, and the master. The painting is rich in symbolism and religious implications. But it also sheds light on some minimal aspects of the tutor-tutor relationship.
It creates a candle dark light effect, giving a brilliant shine on the faces of both Joseph and Jesus. It reveals several things: that the young boy is more focused on the old man’s face than on his work, and that he looks at him with admiration and adoration. Skills have more than just transmitting skills or ideas. There is also a look at the tutor’s face, symbolic of their character. The tutors who have had the most impact on my life have been the ones I have tried to respect and imitate in character traits, beyond the advice given.
Joseph, for his part, uses the light of Jesus to continue to concentrate on his crafts. I think it’s part of the mutual gifts between tutors, the fact that having mentoring in our lives makes our work and our presence clear, invites us to look more closely at what we’re doing and how we’re doing. doing that – perhaps overcoming what we imagine is the limit of our growth and development. In that sense, tutoring is a call to each other. Knowing a more complete narrative within the Christian tradition, I know that the two characters in the painting play a role in what they teach and what they teach. But these roles appear at different times in their lives.
The angels in the background remind me of the role the goddess Athena played in the classic tutoring role. If someone has a sacred job of advising, guiding, and teaching in any career in their life. Commanding and inviting into someone’s life is an intimate act that we often take for granted, which is sometimes focused on the situation that enables us to be a tutor, rather than on the transformative power of tutoring for another life.
I look at the oil at the turn of the century the work of the American cartoonist “The Women Life Class” (c1879) Alice Barber Stephens. It was her first published image and, along with other female artists – was created as a result of women’s request to attend life-drawing classes at a time when it was considered an inappropriate activity for respectable women. In this image, the female artists ’classroom is sitting or standing, wrapped around a female model on a stage. The women are piled up in the room, and yet they are at ease with each other, painting or staring at each other’s cloth from behind. They have fought for a space to develop skills. Only by their presence do they encourage each other.
© Alamy Stock Photo
It encourages me to revisit the women’s class I met last week. They ranged in age from the thirties to the sixties, depending on culture, ethnicity, race, and sexual orientation. After six days they quickly connected, how they listened to each other’s stories patiently and attentively and wrote to each other, acknowledging each other’s fears, being brave in their work, and, at the same time, their lives.
I remind you that tutoring can happen in all directions, horizontally or vertically, age gaps and cultures and socioeconomic status, because even though we have “arrived”, we never exceed our ability to learn from each other. I remind you that you don’t know who can make the trip with you, either by offering what you know and not yet seeing. After all, in this life, aren’t we all guests on the way to helping each other?
Enuma Okoro He is a columnist for FT Life & Arts
Discover our latest stories first – follow @FTLifeArts On Twitter
[ad_2]
Source link
