by L.A. Mood Comics and Games

NOTE: Dan Brown’s column will now be appearing twice a week on the website of L.A. Mood Comics & Games; on Tuesdays, he’ll write about graphic novels, and on Thursdays he will cover other pop-culture topics.

By Dan Brown

It’s the movies that made me the mentor I am today.

If it wasn’t for motion pictures like To Sir, With Love, The Empire Strikes Back, and Stand and Deliver, I’m not sure I would be one.

It was the movie mentors – Sir, Yoda, Jaime Escalante – who showed me how I could inspire young people. Those characters also provided proof of how rewarding mentorship could be not just for the young person, but the mentor, too.

Some background: In my day job, I work as the editorial-support manager for the Western Gazette, the student-owned and-run newspaper here in London.

What does that mean, exactly? I like to think of it in these terms: Each new academic year, a recent grad serves as editor-in-chief. I, on the other hand, am the paper’s “mentor-in-chief.”  (I could, and will, write a column another day about how I love the Gazette’s mentoring culture, every student gets in on helping newsroom newbies.)

I’m also a journalism instructor at the same university, so have served as a mentor to students I meet through my classes.

But my interest in mentoring started decades ago, long before I got my current position and long before I began teaching at Ontario universities. I was still a student in grade school.

The original spark might very well have been when I watched Sidney Poitier’s To Sir, With Love for the first time, likely on afternoon TV in the 1970s one summer. It might have been Channel 10 or Global or even TVOntario that aired it.

As you may recall, Poitier plays an engineer who can’t get a role in his own industry, so he turns to teaching as his Plan B, winding up tutoring a bunch of tough kids in 1966 East London.

The unruly group of working-class teens initially gets the better of their teacher. In a fit of desperation he decides to throw out the curriculum so he can impose his own structure on the class, which allows him to school the motley crew about the facts of life they will need to survive.

Gradually, they warm to his brand of tough love, and just as the students start to fall in love with him, he returns the affection.

All that and a heartbreaker of a song by Lulu! It still brings tears to my eyes.

Skip ahead a couple years. When The Empire Strikes Back comes out in 1980, George Lucas replaces acclaimed actor Alec Guinness (who played Ben Kenobi in the original Star Wars) with a green muppet as the new spokesman for the Force in Luke’s training scenes on the swamp planet Dagobah.

To this day, I still ponder Yoda’s lessons. Is there really only a “do or do not” and no “try”? Isn’t that a tad harsh?

When Yoda uttered the word “unlearn” it blew my mind. I knew what learning was, I was doing it at Valleyview Public School, but “unlearning” opened up all kinds of possibilities I had never thought about  before.

My favourite scene in all of Star Wars comes from that sequence, when Yoda describes the nature of the Force to a maturing Luke and tells him people are “luminous beings,” not just crude flesh and blood.

Stirring stuff.

As a teen, I would be riveted by Edwards James Olmos’s turn as real-life calculus teacher Jaime Escalante.

His determination to help a class of young Latinos in L.A. reach their potential was inspiring. I marveled when he told them the Mayas invented the concept of zero, adding “You burros have math in your blood.”

Olmos says he asks only one thing of his students: A desire to learn: “If you don’t have the ganas, I will give it to you because I’m an expert.”

Math was never my thing. But I could see how he lit the fires in the eyes of his students.
And there were others: Ben Kenobi himself, Joe Clark (as played by Morgan Freeman in Lean on Me), Robin Williams in Dead Poet’s Society (it was the book, not the movie, which introduced me to Miss Jean Brodie when I was a student at a British high school for a year).

By the way, it wasn’t apparent to me until years after I became an instructor at Western that what I was doing was mentoring.

One day, after helping a student from one of my classes, I got an email that said, “You’re a great mentor.”

I had never thought of it in that way before.

So that made it official.

Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.