Give + Take
Teaching a skill as a path to understanding.
Jim + Matt
When I was about 17, I found an old camera in a closet. I got a roll of high-quality film, took the camera to the park, and spent an afternoon taking pictures. This ignited an interest in photography, but that first contact sheet showed me I that I had no real skill or understanding of how to take good pictures.
Jim was a history teacher at my high school. He also oversaw the yearbook and the school’s darkroom. In those days, pictures were developed by dropping sheets of photo paper exposed to the images into a series of chemicals and then hung to dry. Jim was a presence at seemingly every ballgame, award ceremony, and band concert at my high schools, usually with two cameras around his neck. Most mornings, he was in the darkroom, brewing coffee and developing pictures for the yearbook.
When I approached Jim and told him I was interested in photography, he welcomed me to come by the dark room a few days a week before school. So I started dropping by a couple of mornings a week, and Jim walked me through the process of processing and developing images, including some I had taken.
One day, he handed me a new digital camera with a telephoto lens, and told me over the course of that week to get some shots of some of the intramural sports that went on during lunch. My task was to take pictures of students playing touch football or softball in small grade-level tournaments for the yearbook. When I brought back a card full of digital images, he offered some modest feedback, but mostly modest appreciation for my help. He provided some basic guiding principles, like where to stand relative to light or shadow, and simple rules for orienting the camera based on the sport or activity you were shooting.
This practice of my stopping by the dark room before school and his making chit chat while he worked continued for the better part of my senior year. We talked about my experience in the school play, and how to navigate certain classes, teachers, or situations. We talked about his decades at the school, and before that his time in the Marine Corps. Like any other person, Jim had much more to him than just teaching social studies or art history and taking pictures. But like any other high school student, learning such things about your teachers always seems to come as a surprise.
In May of that year, he gave me my biggest photography assignment yet: I was to take photos at the senior prom—my prom. This would document the prom for the yearbook and save him a trip out the night of the event. I packed up my old camera for the pre-prom dinner at a friend’s house.
When we got to the prom, I realized I had forgotten the camera.
In an age before texting and mobile phones, I found a house phone at the reception hall hosting the prom and called Jim at home. It must have been nearly 10 pm. Crestfallen, I admitted to him that I had forgotten my camera at a friend’s house. That I had let him down.
Jim never hesitated. He told me to relax, to forget about it, to enjoy the prom. He had some ideas on where he might get photos for the yearbook. But the main thing was for me to forget it and enjoy myself.
A few minutes later, my friend’s dad who had hosted the pre-prom party showed up with the camera. I asked my date if she could excuse me for a few minutes and shot a quick roll of film of my classmates—all shots that wound up in the yearbook.
In a meta-analysis of more than 170 mentoring studies, Eby, Allen, and colleagues1 found several factors correlated with impactful mentoring relationships.
The researchers found strong, but independent, effects of two kinds of support: instrumental support and psychosocial support. Instrumental support is technical; the mentor teaches a skill and gives you assignments to practice that skill. Psychosocial is personal and emotional; the mentor provides you emotional support, counseling, acceptance, and friendship. Mediating all of these is the quality of the connection between the two people. Among their most powerful antecedents—more than race and gender—was similarity of interest and disposition between the two.
The authors wrote: “proteges2 who perceived greater instrumental support, psychosocial support, and higher relationship quality also reported higher situational satisfaction” with their mentorships.
In other words, if the mentorship is a good match, and the mentor supports the mentee with a skill or trade—like photography—and affirmation—like confidence in you to do an important job, and reassurance if you don’t get it right—that has a powerful impact on mentees.
Looking back on my time knowing Jim, I can see some of these elements clearly:
Frequent contact: It was important for us to see each other in the hallway, but just as important for me to take the opportunity to stop by the darkroom when I could.
Technical skills: The instrumental support—learning photography—was partly about the skill and partly about building general confidence that I could learn something and be trusted to do it. It also likely helped that, as two men, our regular communication was around an activity.
Psychosocial support: Getting more confident with the skill of photography was helpful, but would have been less impactful if Jim didn’t also convey important lessons, like that a person is more than their mistakes.
Over the course of my senior year, I learned something new, mostly, that I could learn something new. I learned that I had a role to play in this learning, in part by reaching out and maintaining contact with an adult who was willing to teach and trust me with important jobs or a fancy camera. But I also learned that part of that growth was making mistakes, and not being initially good at something. And a good mentor let me know it was ok not to be good right away, and that I was first and foremost a human being who was learning—and someone worth teaching.
Eby, L. T. D. T., Allen, T. D., Hoffman, B. J., Baranik, L. E., Sauer, J. B., Baldwin, S., ... & Evans, S. C. (2013). An interdisciplinary meta-analysis of the potential antecedents, correlates, and consequences of protégé perceptions of mentoring. Psychological bulletin, 139(2), 441.
Some researchers use the term protege to refer to mentees, or the more junior partner in the mentorship.