Leading by Example, Showing Up & Giving Me Space to Grow

A meditation on three mentors who shaped me as an educator

This month, one of my mentors died. At the visitation a few days before Christmas, amid colleagues and alumni reminiscing about Pat Taylor as we stood in a circle near her open casket, I realized I’d never told her about her influence on me.

Sure, I thanked her at her retirement reception and wrote lines in a card, sentiments that merged into the tide of gratitude that rose around her then from students, colleagues, parents, and education leaders. When I walked up to the coffin to pay my respects, I thanked her too. But what I wish I’d done sometime in the three years we worked together after she hired me was to sit down in her office, release a rainbow of M&M’s into my palm from her M&M dispenser, and tell her how much her guidance and support meant until I’d run out of words and chocolate.

I sat in that chair many times to bat around library ideas with Pat, usually with M&M’s as fuel. In this missed conversation, I would have told her how much the way she showed up, fully present, time after time mattered, and how the delight in her eyes when she saw students aglow with curiosity offered sparkling proof that the joy of teaching need not dim, even after decades.

Pat’s commitment to fostering a school environment that lit and stoked those fires of curiosity was unwavering, as was her expectation that every classroom, including the library, bubble with questions and wonder. Even if we didn’t discuss it, striving to live up to Pat’s expectations made me a better teacher and librarian.

I’ve been lucky. On my journey as an educator, three mentors have shaped me.

I met the first, someone I have talked with about the difference she’s made, in my sophomore year of high school. In Jeanne Hildebrand’s creative writing class, words streamed from my pen, pages returned to me later with notes in her careful script about what was working and what I might improve. The class was a motley crew: goths and geeks, jocks, and one couple already becoming parents. She valued each of us and our stories, our lived and invented ones, giving us broad freedom in what to write about while refusing to let us nestle into our comfort genre and fold our wings.

My chosen genre, before and since meeting Jeanne, is poetry. The playfulness it invites with sound and image, metaphor, and line mesmerizes me as much or more than it did when I was a kid. Yet stretching into other genres bolstered my competence in writing, and doing so in that eclectic, inclusive community instilled a sense of intellectual humility as classmates impressed me with their creativity, skill, and courage—in writing and living.

Being Jeanne’s student inspired me to be a teacher. In my junior year, I enrolled in Creative Writing 2, and as a senior, in Creative Writing 3 and AP English. That third year, she began teaching me to teach, encouraging me to develop and facilitate poetry lessons for her English classes, giving me space to problem-solve, and introducing me to the nuances of grading.

Teaching pulled me toward it in the way I imagine inborn maps beckon birds toward migration sites they’ve never seen. No one in my family had been to college, so when my father questioned whether a teaching career was worth the expense of a degree, Jeanne helped convince my parents that it was—and that I’d be a good English teacher. In what seemed like fitting symmetry, years later I started my education career as an English and Creative Writing teacher in a department still led by her.

Jeanne Hildebrand (left) posing with Juanita Long, another dynamite teacher, at a graduation ceremony in the mid-late 1990’s. Jeanne chaired the English department where I worked as one of her and Juanita’s colleagues.

When I shifted from teaching to librarianship, I met my next mentor: Bev Lammay. In a screening interview, I described my desire to be a librarian who focused on teaching, on students’ freedom to read, research, and create, and on collaboration with teachers. Before I’d finished my library endorsement, she greenlighted me to meet with a high school principal looking for a librarian. He hired me.

As my co-librarian and I designed activities like Cocoa Café, a celebration of students’ poetry where we listened, cheered, snapped, and served hot chocolate and tea in fancy teacups, Bev showed up. Two years later, she retired—and encouraged me to apply for her position. I’d been a manager in the financial sector while earning my teaching degree, and she believed I had the right skills for the moment, a moment when our district was set to launch one of the nation’s first 1:1 laptop initiatives.

I wasn’t so sure.

The role involved overseeing all school libraries, K-12, as well as the district’s library budget and contracts, library management system, and cataloging and processing operations. More than anything else, I doubted if I could be an effective advocate for elementary libraries. She trusted I could learn. She also knew that I wasn’t afraid to disagree, respectfully, with those in higher positions. A willingness to champion libraries, something she did masterfully, would be essential, particularly when some might deem them irrelevant once every student had a laptop.

When I checked with elementary, middle, and high school librarians I hoped would apply, they had no plans to do so.

Bev and I met again. In the corporate setting, middle management frustrated me. I expected central office administration would too and that I’d miss the rewards of working directly with students and teachers. She listened—and noted that a panel which did not include her was conducting the search. If they decided I was the best candidate, she asserted, then maybe I was. If I didn’t like what I learned during the process, and the superintendent extended an offer, I could say no.

Bev pushed me when I doubted myself, anticipating that rising to the challenge of central office administration, even if I didn’t stay in it for the long haul (which I didn’t), would prepare me for future roles I did not yet imagine. She was right.

I’m 19 years into a position that demands skills I learned in central office. If I’d nested into high school librarianship without seeing where else my wings could take me, strengthening my skills, learning to navigate different currents and weather, making new mental maps, I would not have landed here. I’ve shared that with Bev. I’d also like the opportunity to sit down over coffee or wine and do so again, drawing fresh inspiration from whatever ideas or reflections she might share.

The small circle that formed beside Pat’s coffin included a former colleague who’s a friend of Bev’s. Perhaps this was the Universe’s way of nudging me to get back in touch with her. That’s the interpretation I’m acting on, anyway.

Mentors don’t necessarily tell you or give you what you want. They see something in you that you don’t yet understand, or know something you haven’t yet learned about the long arc on which you’re embarking—and they act on those insights. They might pull or push or simply be present. Over time, they may do all three. They may also humbly suggest that you would have achieved just as much without their influence, as Jeanne did in a card that arrived last week. I don’t believe that’s true.

When Pat and I envisioned the future for the library I serve now, she encouraged me to nest here, expanding the library with lessons, programs, and resources that could serve as both launching pad and favorable winds for students and teachers flying toward what beckons them, and equip them to reach places they may not yet imagine. Little by little, I’ve worked to bring that vision into being and am still doing so. It’s a librarian role that continuously rekindles the glow of my own curiosity.

Thank you, Pat. Thank you, Bev. Thank you, Jeanne. Thank you for helping me reach, build, and expand this nest and for inspiring me to keep testing my wings.

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Here’s a poem for your pocket until the next post: To Be of Use by Marge Piercy, one of my poetry mentors. Jeanne’s, Bev’s, and Pat’s education careers exemplify the purpose of which this poem speaks. Likewise, being a teacher-librarian is one of the ways I have found a sense of purpose.

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For further inspiration in writing about mentors, explore some or all of the posts in the micro-memoir series Accidental Mentors: Inspirational Stories of Women Who Shaped My Life by Just Being Themselves by Annette Marquis.

Who has mentored or shaped you? Consider sharing a reflection in a comment below.

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