Kathy,

You are absolutely right.  A mentor spends a great deal of time with a
student which takes away from the time spent with clients.  At the same time,
LC students need an opportunity to work in a traineeship program in order to
obtain a comfort level with working with clients before being out there on
their own.  I wish everyone's teaching preparation were as good as yours.
 Unfortunately, most elementary and secondary teachers who graduated when I
did (also 20 years ago!) had very little classroom exposure before being put
in their own classroom.

We need to do whatever we can in our profession to give aspiring lactation
consultants ample opportunity to learn from more experienced LCs.  We
encourage our colleagues to make themselves available for mentoring so that
our students can develop and enhance their skills under the wing of an
experienced person.  At the same time, students need to be prepared to
compensate the mentors for this service.  Mentoring should be viewed in much
the same way as is student teaching.  Students pay for their semester of
student teaching just as they do for semesters when they are enrolled in
classroom courses.

I hope all this dialogue results in a comprehensive list of seasoned LC's who
will accept students in a mentoring arrangement.

Judi Lauwers
BSC