Alignment of the instructor to students for teaching is crucial. Students will always have different frames of reference from the instructor. It is critical for an instructor to seek alignment with students' background, and view; this provides a feedback mechanism for the instructor's own view and knowledge on a given topic.

My mentors have helped me understand not only the subject material, but how important, crucial, and vital a positive mentor-mentee relationship is to ensure the success of a student. Their success was in taking the time to explain, challenge and discuss ideas  not just from their own perspective, but their students.

As my mentors have illustrated to me, student mentor alignment requires engaging students and individually  acknowledging different frames of reference and points of view. While others may consider learning disabilities or a variety of student educational backgrounds as a hindrance, it has been shown that adding ‘noise’ during a machine learning training session can actually be beneficial in machines. In various disciplines it has been shown that added noise during the training has been shown to increase model performance in unfamiliar settings, while lowering performance in testing [1][2]. Thus increasing the generality of the model enabling better adaptability.

[1] Brunton, Steven L., and J. Nathan Kutz. Data-driven science and engineering: Machine learning, dynamical systems, and control. Cambridge University Press, 2022.

[2] Hinton, Geoffrey E. "Boltzmann machine." Scholarpedia 2, no. 5 (2007): 1668.

*Gemini has been used to review this post for typos and alignment and formatting. Actual prompt discussion is available upon request.