Category: Resources

National Mentoring Month and I am a Mentor Day are here

In the US, January is National Mentoring Month, and January 11th is “I am a mentor day”. I am excited to write this post for this day!

Starting from when I received a lot of mentoring from cherished and loved ones, including my sixth-grade teacher, the Late “Master Williams”, when I didn’t even know what mentoring is, I have really cherished the activity. I continue to seek out mentors and also try to give back myself. If you are on this page reading this, you also appreciate it as much or more than I do!

If you read about how many industries and areas of endeavor in life, ranging from fundamental skills to cooking and the arts evolved, it was all through the art of mentoring. A lot of it was through the model of apprenticeship but has now expanded to other areas.

An Ever Expanding Landscape

Resplendent

The world of mentoring is ever-expanding, ranging from formal models to informal relationships, short-term to long-term, individual to group sessions, and more! And yet, I would venture, we have only begun to scratch the surface. Clearly, not enough people engage in mentorship, on either end of the relationship and that needs to change. People can lead better lives, enjoy enriched careers and become role models themselves creating an enduring chain that makes society all the better. Very briefly, let us discuss this.

Mutual Benefits

One of the pillars of mentoring is that the exchange happens through the lens of past experiences – the gathering of wisdom. While knowledge itself is forever becoming easier and easier to access through the seemingly endless books, videos, and other forms of absorption and dispersal, wisdom comes through experience. Now, one might accidentally assume this is unidirectional, but this would be a mistake for more than one reason.

  1. Personal Growth: Whatever stage of your career you are in, when yourmentees ask you incisive questions and you dig deep to answer those questions and provide them with solutions, suggestions, roadmaps, or ideas, you grow with them. You may then be able to go back to your own work and alter it for the better, you may be able to mentor your own team or other mentees based on the enrichment you experience. You can write blogs, go on podcasts, and write books, the possibilities are nearly endless.
  2. Reverse Mentoring: As a novel concept, reverse mentoring is taking its place in many places from informal to formal career engagements and the board room. Since the very act of mentoring draws from experiences, when one looks at people who come various ages, races, backgrounds and other factors, those experiences can be exchanged. Suddenly, a Gen X-er is able to absorb the way a Gen Z-er sees things. This helps everyone benefit in the workplace, in the boardroom, do a better job at Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and beyond.
  3. Satisfaction and Enrichment: Helping any number of people advance in life or careers through the lens of mentoring helps us gain immense satisfaction and enrichment. This has been true in my case at least. Many of us want to feel useful. What better way to experience this than by lending your wisdom to help someone solve a problem, or complete a body of work, or just through the free exchange of ideas?
  4. A hiring pipeline: Now this might not always be a pathway, but it would work in some cases. The best hires happen through one’s network. In that sense, if you were mentoring people in the early stages of their career, or in the end stages of formative education, a sense of mutual familiarity develops. This can allow one to easily hire team members, with a sense of confidence in their fit and performance, the former being so much more important! But, don’t forget this also works both ways – the mentor themselves can be a candidate at some point, and the mentees may be able to make the right introductions.

So what is holding you back? 

There are a few things that hold many people from mentoring:

  1. “I don’t think I have anything to contribute”: Imposter syndrome and accompanying emotions and beliefs make several folks think they have nothing to offer. On the one hand, this is rarely true, and on the other hand, mentees would be so thrilled to spend time with you. At a minimum, you can match and try. Most of the time I suspect people would be surprised, at how their experience and knowledge are valued by mentees. So once again, give it a try.
  2. Time – There is never enough time. Yes, it is easy to say make time. But difficult as it might be, thinking about all the advantages that we gain, making time is very important. Mentoring doesn’t take a whole lot of time. Most interactions never last more than a few hours a month, if that.
  3. Guidance and Resources: Of course, we can all use a helping hand. Guidance is available in the form of books, articles, blogs, videos, podcasts, and more from an immense number of sources, such as mentoring.org, alumni groups, libraries, and others. Peruse the resources and get going!  Someone out there is expecting your generosity!

References:

  1. Cover Image: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-men-having-conversation-935949/
  2. Persons shaking hands: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-men-shaking-hands-3182831/
  3. Image of branches: https://www.stockvault.net/photo/165258/green-branch
  4. Young and Old Person: https://www.pexels.com/photo/fashion-man-people-woman-8527069/
  5. Image of Cornucopia: https://pixabay.com/photos/cornucopia-fruit-thanksgiving-3719247/
  6. Thinking Lady: https://pixabay.com/photos/african-black-woman-model-profile-5505598/

Sharpening Language Skills through Fiction

You know how you feel you know something in your gut but have a hard time proving it? Underused as they are, I always thought my reading, writing, and editing skills in English have been good and have improved over time. And though I have dabbled in 9 languages with varying degrees of proficiency, Hindi being the next closest in overall proficiency to English, I felt like my skills in the latter arose from the prolonged and varied interest I have had in reading all manners of fiction. I have even tried to read a couple of romance novels and just could not get into the genre.

Essentially, I have read a variety of fiction, and I have tried to dabble past the genres that generally interest me. I always had this gut feeling that fiction is very good at improving language skills. It turns out there is now some evidence that fiction actually does help you learn and be more proficient at a language.

First, the motivations

Most people get to language skills improvement only when it comes time to take standardized tests or write college/graduate school application essays. Even then, people rely rather heavily on study materials, cramming, mnemonics, and such. Some get away with great scores, some with average scores, and some struggle quite a bit. Clearly, it is the wrong time to get started.

Some, like me, spend their childhood consuming fiction voraciously. Mine included Enid Blyton, Dickens, Agatha Christie, Erle Stanley Gardner, Dick Francis, and later P.G. Wodehouse, among several others. Wodehouse is among the best in taking English and bending it into poetic pretzels, which he then stuck into prose. If I started quoting my favorites here, we’d run into a few thousand words, so let’s move on.

So, when it came time to take the GRE and write not just my essays but review those of several others, first my classmates and later several dozens through a non-profit I informally ran, the language just flowed. And I had this nagging feeling that it is a consequence of reading fiction, not non-fiction. I just never dug into doing research of any depth into this particular aspect of erudition and expression.

Non-fiction Vs Fiction

Now, don’t get me wrong. I have co-authored non-fiction books and papers. It is just that, we can all admit, fiction is a LOT more interesting. And it turns out this is true (Research summary article attached below). Even when there is a deep-seated intent to read non-fiction, reading non-fiction will not help improve language skills much.

We also saw this with the Harry Potter series, before J.K. Rowling revealed herself to possess unforgivable biases towards transgender members of society. Children who could not wait to get their hands on the novels were sharpening their language skills at a pace rarely seen around that time.

If you then go back to motivations, to do well in standardized testing, and even in critical non-fiction exercises such as college and graduate school essays, research publications, class work, and beyond, you actually need a healthy dose of both fiction and non-fiction. You especially need to practice the latter.

Going beyond the research

I am writing this more purposefully for people with one or both objectives:

  1. Folks who will clearly depend on study materials, such as SAT and GRE word lists and other such study/test materials.
  2. Folks who need to improve their language skills for reasons that go beyond just tests and study exercises.

Sandwiching Language Study Methods

For the first case, it helps to do a sandwich technique. It is okay to read non-fiction, study word lists, make and peruse flashcards and other study aids.

Then, and this is the critical step. Read fiction. Get into it as much as you can. It is never too late, and nothing is too little. Remember, listening and reading are different in their effects, including with retention. You are better off reading more than listening, though a mix of activities might not be bad. It is also good practice to have a dictionary at hand and understand how authors use words, their sentence structures, and so on. Don’t be shy to note examples, make flashcards and create other study aids that will help you.

Closing the sandwich

Following this, if you revisit your study aids from before, the last portion of your sandwich act, that is, you will have a much better handle on the English language. This can also be especially true with exams such as SAT and GRE, which also have a reading comprehension component to them.  You should also take quizzes and engage in word games, such as those found in Reader’s Digest, Hangman, and any others that you find educational, informative, reinforcing, and, more importantly, entertaining.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

If you mix your habit of reading non-fiction and going through your study materials with reading fiction, you will have an excellent chance at improving your language skills. Also, mix in listening, watching, and reading, as well, to get the best results. Years ago, when I was preparing for the SAT, the listening section was seen as a bugaboo among test takers. Even though I used to spend a lot of time reading back then, I didn’t spend much time watching or listening to shows, talks, news, etc., in English. I started listening and watching things – mostly movies, haha. In a very short while, I was able to improve my proficiency farther than just reading had taken me. Anecdotal? No. There’s research on that as well, and a general write-up is referenced below.

What about tools such as Grammarly?

Given my penchant for getting things right, I have been heavily using Grammarly, the premium version. There is, of course, a free version you can use as well. That said, I don’t agree with the tool quite a bit, as it is still very poor at understanding context, especially in informal and semi-formal writing such as blog posts. For example, it doesn’t really understand the differences in writing using “chance at” and “chance of”. So, you should screen every single recommendation such a tool makes before implementing the recommendations. Otherwise, you could end up with poor quality writing as a consequence. This principle extends to any and all software tools used for language improvement.

There are many other sources of evidence to support all this. You are more than welcome to dig deep. Pragmatically speaking or writing, and maybe in your case reading, the evidence should be enough to get you going on the path to enhanced language skills.

References:

  1. Reading Fiction to improve language skills: https://theconversation.com/reading-to-improve-language-skills-focus-on-fiction-rather-than-non-fiction-179552
  2. Listening Vs. Reading Fiction: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/friendly-interest/201812/why-listening-book-is-not-the-same-reading-it
  3. Watching: https://theconversation.com/watching-foreign-language-tv-during-the-coronavirus-pandemic-can-help-you-learn-a-new-language-141170
  4. Grammarly: https://app.grammarly.com/
  5. Cover image: https://pixabay.com/photos/typewriter-vintage-old-1248088/
  6. Image of  Bruschetta Sandwich: https://www.pexels.com/photo/appetizing-bruschettas-with-fresh-vegetable-slices-on-plate-4969892/
  7. Dream Big Image: https://unsplash.com/photos/U2eUlPEKIgU
  8. Image of a person washing dishes: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-person-washing-a-white-bowl-in-the-sink-4440618/