Mentor or Friend?

If you really treat your mentee as a mentee, will the relationship continue to be of a mentor – mentee kind even at the end of the mentoring journey? Are we really a mentor to them? Or are they a burden to us?

If you do have a friend that is not responsive to you, most probably, that friend will just come and go and not touching our hearts. But for the case of our mentees, even if they are not receptive of us, we will still go out of the way for them sometimes. So are we treating them as mentees or friends? Perhaps many of us are bound by the word “duty”, no doubt. But is a relationship that is bound by “duty” going to be fruitful? If it is, why would there be so little people who are willing to take on the challenge of being a mentor again? Somehow I am puzzled. Yaocheng did again and again brought up the point and meaning of being a mentor. Are we supposed to befriend them and at the same time help them? Once again, do we start neglecting them at the end of the journey or will we start treating them as friends once the mentoring journey ends. For some perhaps the notion of friendship might also come to an end at the same juncture where our mentoring journey comes to a close.

Perhaps in the very first place the notion and the direction of a mentor is wrong entirely. Perhaps we should be known as “Friends of Clementi Student Care Service” In that way, perhaps even at the end of our “duty”, we will still be known as friends, to the teachers and our secondary school friends alike...