"If your plan is for 1 year, plant rice; if your plan is for 10 years, plant trees; if your plan is for 100 years, educate children" - Confucius
On my mentor's desk there is a tear off calendar that the pages look like apples. On my first professional development day, she tore off the days to catch up to when school was starting and handed me the page for September 7th, and this quote by Confucius was on it. She told me she loved the quote and to stick the paper in my portfolio(when she did MAC it was not an e-portfolio). I stuck the piece of paper in my planner and didn't think much about it until I was organizing my planner for school to start and it really inspired me for the beginning of the year. With all the classes we have about theories, methods, standards and benchmarks etc., we tend to forget why we all(or at least most of us I hope!) came into teaching in the first place...the kids! So as this year goes on and the stress levels raise, I hope that I never fail to recognize why I am standing in that classroom in the first place.
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Your mentor is wise, Megan. It would seem to me to be very helpful to have vivid reminders handy about the importance of what you're doing, and indeed *why* you're doing it. I suppose that the simple fact that someone like your mentor, who is several years into her career, would see real value in this kind of reminder is probably telling about the nature of the teaching experience. It can be way too easy to lose focus on such important matters, and one of the best things that you can do for yourself is to start collecting a variety of things (wise words, student work, your journal reflections...in time, feedback from your students) that you can use to energize yourself and maintain perspective.
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