Well, it is Sunday, after all, so I cycled extra and did a bit of sporadic house-straightening and listened to two Circe conference audios. First I listened to Vigen Guroian on "Mentor". Brandy at Afterthoughts wrote about it here. Then I listened to the rest of Andrew Kern on "Assessment that Blesses." Brandy unfortunately doesn't seem to have written about that one, but here is her label on Circe Talks so that you can read the rest if you are interested.
Guroian talked about the Mentor relationship (I'm guessing he purposely avoided the verbification "mentoring"). In the first part he defined the term, how it's used in the modern world compared to the traditional meaning of the word. You can read a bit about the original Mentor, Odysseus' friend who advised his son Telemachus, here and here.
In the second part of the talk Guroian used literary examples to bring out the nuances of the mentoring relationship.
First, Charlotte and Wilbur. I will not explain who those two are, because everyone knows. The characteristics of mentoring here are that (1) Charlotte chooses Wilbur, not the other way around (2) Charlotte has way more to offer Wilbur than the other way around, including literal life-saving, but Wilbur reciprocates by loving Charlotte with all his heart (3) the relation lives on even after Charlotte is gone, through Wilbur's care and fondness for her descendants.
Secondly, Guroian spoke of The Jungle Books. Mowgli has three mentors: Baloo, Bagheera and Kaa. Though he loves his foster-parent wolves more than his mentors, he is probably more influenced by his mentors. They spend time with him and when he departs to be with his "pack", humankind, they give him the best they have: ability to give messages to animals, knowledge about the ways of man, and wisdom about the special dangers of the man's estate (the story of the King's Ankhus).
Thirdly, he spoke about one of William Faulkner's books "Go Down Moses", a new one on me, even though I am an English lit major. Specifically he talked about one of the stories -- the Old People. Here the mentor relationship is between an elderly biracial man (half black and half Indian) and a boy. The old man teaches the boy the older ways of when to kill, when not to, and what to do after one has killed. I know Guroian talked about how the story shades off into mystery at the end when they see a stag called Old Grandfather, but I am not sure how it fit into the mentoring theme except possibly that the boy was allowed in this way into an actual participation into the old scheme of things, which has a mystical element.
Finally he discussed Bambi by Felix Salten, NOT the Disney Bambi. I think I would like to read this one with my ten year old who is very interested in animal life. The mentor relationship is between young Bambi and the Stag of the Forest, who is teaching Bambi so he can pass on the leadership of the Forest to Bambi. The key moment that Guroian read out in the talk is here. The Stag shows Bambi the death of a human and leads him to realize that there is Another beyond the human; at that point Bambi has become wise, and is fit to take on the mantle of Prince of the Forest.
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After this talk, I listened to the rest of Assessment that Blesses by Andrew Kern, which I already blogged about a couple of days ago. He talked about the Israelites after leaving Egypt, repining for what they had lost, making the point that we all tend to fear freedom and want to regain slavery as soon as possible unless we have been educated to embrace it. Good point, I thought. He didn't go into it, but I thought of how often I limit my own freedom not out of self-discipline, but because it's easier to "serve somebody" as Bob Dylan says. Freedom is walking in the way of the Lord, of course.
The Israelites feared the giants of the Promised Land and considered themselves grasshoppers in comparison, which is the attitude we often take towards those in authority who want to weigh and measure us and our children. But as with giants, power and size are not of crucial importance in anything that matters.
He said that true assessment should be in terms of:
- Fitting -- things are not fitting because they are practical, but practical because they are fitting. For example, virtue is practical but that is not the essence of virtue. The essence of virtue is doing what is fitting.
In line with this he made a point that we should think about a thing's nature and purpose (and a couple more I don't remember) not its weights and numbers.
- Honor rather than measure. What is honored gets done is better than "what is measured gets done." I like that -- maybe it will help me next time I have to clean the house.
He also asked whose "Well Done!" we want to hear. Whose approval really matters?
In the last part of the talk he got into the practical aspects of assessment, but I think I will save that part of it for another post.
The point is that assessment should be in terms of human nature as it is, not as it appears when reduced to statistics. One kind of objectivity is ordered towards the actuality of things as they are, while in the quantification model, the people become subordinate points aligned with some kind of measurable trait.
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