Tommy Sotomayor On the Problems with Mentors and Mentoring

Tommy Sotomayor speaks on the problems with the modern day paradigm of mentoring. Originally uploaded to YouTube in January 2018.

The original news story link:

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/dallas/2017/12/14/dallas-needs-nearly-600-men-answer-call-mentor-south-dallas-students

Tommy Sotomayor's Rumble:

https://rumble.com/user/tjsotomayor

And AllMyLinks:

https://allmylinks.com/tjsotomayorkoc

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My added editorial commentary:

Of course I agree with almost all of the op/ed content.

Aside from that, I think the concept of mentoring in terms of common rhetorical parlance is being watered down and dumbed down, harmfully so. What he has in this video, a bunch of men showing up to one middle school for one day and talking to some middle school boys in the collective, is NOT true mentoring. I’m so old that I remember when the proper appellation for a bunch of men coming into a school and talking to the students about what they do for a living was called “career day,” not “mentoring.” Most of the short term activities that are laughably passed off “mentoring” these days, aren’t really.

True mentoring, I think, requires: (1) A steadfast and long term and personal one-to-one relationship, a mentor only having one protege and a protege having only one mentor, (2) Based off of the fact that the mentor and protege share some sort of common interest or otherwise sync up well in terms of personality or temperament or outlook or something, (3) The protege is socially understood to be at least a young man, not some middle school boy, because I don’t think middle school boys are of proper mental maturity to take on the proper role of protege to a real mentor, and can’t really understand the purpose of mentorship, and (4) As long as it’s understood that mentor is mentor and father is father, one is not a suitable substitute for the other, and ne’er the twain shall meet. Of course I think that if the protege is a minor, that fathers and mentors should literally meet so that father can size up and sound out mentor to preclude any funny business.

In this video, he makes passing and implicit reference to Jerry Sandusky. Sandusky made the deliberate and specific calculation to prey on the 8-9-10-11 year old sons of single mothers, according to the Grand Jury report.

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My AllMyLinks:

https://allmylinks.com/countenanceblog