distinctions

There are many different types of teaching. The ones i've done the most of, are classroom teaching, and mentoring. (Warning: Blatant over-generalising ahead.)
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The best classroom teachers are control freaks. i've seen this, over and over again. It's got to do with having to organise big groups of people towards a single specific objective -- you've got to think of how to move all of them from Point A to Point Z, and every step of the process has to be carefully staged in your mind. You have to anticipate their reactions, and think of how to respond to glitches in the process. Everything has to be planned out before the lesson takes place.
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On the other hand, the best mentors are the ones who know how to let go. They hand autonomy over to their students, and know the fine art of guiding without imposing. This takes flexibility and responsiveness, and is far more difficult than it sounds. It's about trusting your students, seeing what they want to achieve, and helping them get there without forcing your own vision on them.

i've known quite a few excellent classroom teachers, but none of them make good mentors. They're just not very good at letting go. This can be particularly crippling for the student if the mentor has a very strong personality which the student has not yet learned to resist: it can throw the student way off-track and destroy his/her faith in his/her own vision.
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Interestingly, the good mentors i know, are both from overseas. (i know, 'both' as opposed to the 'all' implied by 'none of them'.) i wonder if the numbers are representative. If they are, i wonder if it's simply because there's a greater demand for classroom teachers than mentors, both here in Singapore and arguably everywhere, leading to there simply being more classroom teachers than mentors overall; or if there is some sort of larger cultural factor going on that makes 'letting go' particularly hard for educators in Singapore.
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