by I’ve been thinking recently about what the term “mentoring” means for professional sysadmins.
I’ve usually said that I’m “self-taught” in system administration. Most sysadmins I know say the same thing. I say this because I didn’t take any classes on sysadmin, and in the technical aspects, at least, I was self-directed in my first few system administration jobs. My supervisors and coworkers may have given me hints or things to look at, but I didn’t have the opportunity to watch them work directly.
But I’m not really “self-taught”, certainly not in the way that a musician might be “self-taught” or a cook might be “self-taught”. You can imagine someone teaching themselves to play the piano, for instance, by sitting down at the keyboard and pressing different keys in various ways and observing how the piano sounds, or someone trying cooking ingredients in different ways and tasting the results. But can you imagine someone sitting down at a Unix prompt and typing random keystrokes until they learned how to administer a machine?
I think when most of us say we’re “self-taught”, what we really mean is that we learned from documentation, web sites, and books, and not from individuals helping us one-on-one or in class settings. (Isn’t that a slap in the face of the people in our community who write? We learn what they have to teach us, and then take the credit for ourselves and say we’re “self-taught”? But I digress.)
I had the opportunity to learn the difference between learning from texts, from classes, and from mentorship firsthand when I made friends with Damian Conway. I “taught myself” advanced object-oriented Perl programming through his book Object Oriented Perl (still a great book, though a little out of date, especially since it doesn’t discuss inside-out objects, which he developed after the book’s publication). About a year after reading the book, I had the chance to spend an entire week taking classes from Damian. The experience gave me a new layer of understanding—obviously because I could ask questions, but also because when you take a class, you get something out of the tone, demeanor, and other things linguists call “prosody” that you can’t get from flat text laid out on a page.
Later still, I got help from Damian on a project for CPAN I was working on, and I learned about the sort of one-on-one advice and discussion that comes from mentoring. You can learn information from reading, you can gain understanding from a class, but I think the mentoring relationship helps convey wisdom. Damian didn’t critique my code (not much, anyway), he didn’t teach me new techniques, but in his suggestions for how to name things and how to look at my problem from a fresh perspective, he changed the way I approached future problems.
That’s my attitude towards mentoring: the mentor shouldn’t be teaching the student, at least not information the student should be able to gain from texts and from classes. Rather, the mentor should be advising the student (is “student” the right word? “Mentee” isn’t in any dictionaries I have on hand) on the actual problems the student faces, with an eye towards developing the student’s abilities to tackle future problems wisely on his or her own.
I’ve often heard people draw distinctions between learning styles—they say some people are “visual” learners, others are “auditory” learners, others learn by doing. I’m sure this distinction is true for many people. I have a friend who’s pursuing a master’s degree. The only way he’s found to reliably prepare for exams is by reading out loud his texts or notes, recording MP3’s he listens to on his iPod. He says it works for him, and I believe him. He’s clearly an “auditory learner”.
On the other hand, I’m a devoted podcast and public radio listener. Whenever I’m on the subway or walking around town or doing shopping or housework or cooking or anything else that doesn’t require my undivided attention, I’m listening to a podcast or radio program. But if my attention wanders for even a moment—I read a price tag or a billboard or anything that draws my attention away from the verbal stream entering my ears—I lose track and have to rewind and listen again. Basically, I listen to these things only because I can’t read (safely) when walking around. I’d never choose an audiobook over the written form if I had a choice. When I need to find something I recall from a reference book, I “see” the page in my mind, and I know that I’ll find the information two-thirds of the way down the left-hand page. (Ah, if only I could remember which page!)
So does that make me a “visual learner”? I’m not so sure. In school I used to dutifully get a notebook for every subject. After awhile, though, I noticed that a semester would go by and only the first two or three pages of a notebook would be filled. My first response to this observation was to try to “get serious about note-taking”. I taught myself the Cornell note-taking system. I spent several classes assiduously note-taking. But then something struck me: I always asked questions in classes. But in these classes in which I had been so careful with my note-taking, I hadn’t asked a single question. Was it because my comprehension was so much better, I could answer the questions myself? No; it was because I had converted class time from learning time into note-taking time. Better comprehension? Quite to the contrary, I was so busy taking notes, getting the words being spoken by the teacher into written form, that I wasn’t absorbing anything at all, so no questions occurred to me. Going over the notes later helped, but in the end I found it better to just go back to what I had been doing naturally before—listening intently, asking questions, and occasionally jotting something down for further research. (My only real change from this experience was that I stopped buying a new notebook for every class—a single notebook, with a new page for each class, worked just fine. So I saved some money at least.)
I told this story to someone recently, and their response was a slightly shocked, “but how did you study?” The truth is, I never did, much. Things I had to memorize (especially in math and foreign-language classes) usually were in written form somewhere, and I would go over the text until I knew it. But I always treated class as the time to gain understanding, not facts. I had one teacher, in historical linguistics, who only assigned a few primary documents to read. There was no textbook. Everything she tested on was in her lectures. This was the class I came closest to failing. So, if “learning” is to be confined merely to “the acquisition of facts”, maybe I am a visual learner. But I gain understanding by doing, or by discussing, not through reading. Maybe I’m an aberration, but it makes me think the true story is a lot more complicated than “visual learning” vs. “auditory learning”.
What does that have to do with mentoring? Just that, in the hierarchy of learning, facts come first, understanding relations and connections between those facts comes next, insight into generalizations outside of the facts you’ve learned comes after that, and finally comes the structures and reasoning and frameworks and rationales I’ve been calling “wisdom”. Aside from simple life experience, getting thrown in to the deep end and being told to learn to swim (and spending a lot of time learning from your mistakes), I think mentoring is the only way you can make progress towards that wisdom.
Maybe we’d have more success with a mentoring program if we called it “accelerated life experience” or “wisdom acquisition”? (Then again, maybe not.)