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Mentoring relationships take many forms, but the key element of an older person working with a younger person reaps benefits on both sides.

Orange tongues of fire shot upward. The high school boy fed the kiln through its opened door. The small child's eyes bulged with excitement. "Have to reach Cone 8 today," the high school boy said. His gloved hand lifted another piece of wood from the stack the class had prepared.

Ceramics students at Dr. Phillips HS in Orlando, FL, and teacher Mike Lalone had sold their wares and earned money to bus the younger children from Boys and Girls Clubs to the high school. The older students demonstrated techniques to the younger children and then guided them to create their own treasures.

Later in the year, world famous ceramist Paul Soldner would come to the studio to reverse the roles of the high school students. This time they would watch Soldner and ask questions.

Today an entire movement has grown from the idea presented in Homer's tale of Odysseus. As he prepared to go fight the Trojan War, Odysseus asked his friend, Mentor, to look after young Telemachus. Thus came the term "mentoring," which now describes many kinds of relationships. Sometimes the one-on-one aid comes from another student in the same class, or in the same school. Sometimes the partnership extends from one school to another, as a high school with an elementary school. Sometimes, however, the partnership forms from community to school.

Same School

* Lisa Morris promotes mentoring in her classroom at Connersville (IN) HS. She says the current editors of the student publications build friendships with aspiring editors and mentor them. When the 2002-03 editor placed second in National Young Journalist of the Year last spring, Morris knew her mentoring plan had worked.

At another school that used the same plan, the graduating editor wrote to the adviser, "Thank you for putting me under Jamie. I learned from her everything I did not learn from you, and she made every day fun."

Between Schools

* Teacher Denise Miller says that at Lake Hamilton HS in Pearcy, AR, the high school student council members go to the primary school once a week. Each student council member meets a preassigned at-risk child to tutor, talk with, or just listen to. In addition, the upper level foreign language students go to an elementary school and teach their languages once a week.

Tammye Allen has developed a college certified class at Lake Hamilton that allows students to earn college credit that leads to a degree in child care management.

In Valparaiso, IN, teacher and student council adviser Diane Warren says the middle school student council matches troubled students with students from Valparaiso University for mentoring. The mentors meet with students during lunch in a room equipped with board games.

Back at Dr. Phillips HS, dance teacher Kathy Follensbee took her students to Windy Ridge Elementary School. First the older students taught dance techniques and then each mentor sat with her mentee and listened as the younger student read.

Between Community and School

* Each semester in Davenport, IA, teacher Deb Malcolm, through her International Journalism Academy, brings a Brazilian student on campus and sends one of her students to Brazil. These students study journalism and help produce a bilingual newspaper. Besides the current English/Portuguese version, Malcolm's students have also produced an English/Spanish paper and an English/German version.

Then, every three years she takes up to 20 students to Brazil for home stays and up to 20 Brazilian students travel to Iowa. Each host family mentors a student.

Malcolm started the program as an exchange between her school and one other. The program has expanded to include three schools in Brazil.

Raiders' Digest (student newspaper) staffers from J.E.B. Stuart HS in Falls Church, VA, exchanged e-mails with professional journalists from Hungary, South Africa, Thailand, and Colombia. On March 28, these international journalists came to their high school and talked one-on-one with the newspaper students and their adviser Pam Bumstead.

Justification for Mentoring

* Clearly, schools approach mentoring in different ways. Teachers start a program for different reasons, but the mentoring movement has inched itself into the culture for a good reason. It works.

Protege's benefit. Even small amounts of dedicated time help a young person. A high school student who lives in a government foster care home talked with excitement as she told her Upward Bound teacher about one special lady who had come to the government home and visited the student. "Sometimes she comes once a week," the 15-year-old said. "She talks with me, and at Christmas she brought me a gift.

Nobody else has ever done that."

"What did she bring?" the teacher asked.

"A comb."

A gift as small as a comb endeared itself to the teen because it came wrapped in the gift of time.

Bumstead believes the sessions with the international journalists helped her program. All 12 students who participated want to return for next year. Several students told her this experience was the turning point in their decision to return to the journalism program.

Malcolm says the international mentoring has helped her students and her program. Adam Zelsdorf was the first student Malcolm sent to spend six months in Brazil. He now studies international journalism at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. In addition, two of the Brazilian students have won national awards at the Journalism Education Association Write-Off competitions at the JEA/National Scholastic Press Association conventions. Neither of these students had studied journalism before coming to Malcolm's program.

One-on-one instruction that comes from a mentoring relationship offers opportunity for immediate feedback. Nobody can slip through the cracks. The entire instructional process adapts to the learner's stage, pace, and learning style.

What's more, the information is delivered within an entertaining, warm relationship.

Mentors benefit. Mentoring appears to benefit the mentor even more than the protege. Many teachers say that they learn more each year than their students because the act of studying and organizing the most important teaching material so that students will understand allows the teacher to develop a broader understanding of the material. For this same reason, mentors benefit intellectually.

Further, the mentor gains a new perspective. For example, prior to visiting Stuart HS, the international journalists had not witnessed journalism as a high school subject.

Mentors also benefit emotionally. Even as the dedicated time fills voids in young people's lives, the process of seeing someone grow intellectually and emotionally boosts the self esteem of the mentor.

Where We Go From Here

* Government has discovered the value of mentoring and appears to be stepping up to the occasion. Once a week, every week, Burgess Brown, a middle school student in Tallahassee, FL, meets with his mentor, Governor Jeb Bush.

Governor Bush aims to get 200,000 mentors into Florida's public schools and has launched a $1.1 million program to encourage school mentoring. Lt. Governor Frank Brogan already has followed Bush's example and has mentored a middle school student.

Ideally, every child should have his or her own supply of peers and adults at home who spend time allowing the child to express ideas, who help the child explore the world, who make the child feel as if he or she deserves a place in that world, and who offer immediate and personal guidance. Increasingly, these teaching moments are not available at home. For the sake of the children-and for the contribution they can make to the entire culture-mentors must make a difference.

Anne Whitt (awhitt1013@aol.com) advises newspaper and yearbook at Dr. Phillips HS in Orlando, FL She is a former Florida Journalism Teacher of the Year and a member of the JEA Certification Commission.