While music teacher educators regularly mentor individual students, researchers rarely interrogate the benefits and limitations of contrasting mentoring conceptualizations. The purpose of this philosophical inquiry is to explore the nature of mentorship through the frameworks of care, love, and gifts. In caring mentorship, the mentor attentively listens to the mentee and then takes actions likely to assist them in reaching their goals. The mentee responds by acknowledging the mentor’s concern and sharing their aspirations. Alternatively, loving mentorship focuses on affirming a student’s being, regardless of their immediate or potential future achievements. Mentoring as gift-giving instead focuses on how knowledge and skills offered to mentees, but not necessarily desired in advance, might impact future generations. Although mentors may experience positive feelings, particularly joy, since the mentee in neither caring, loving, nor gifting relations fully returns the mentor’s labor, teacher educators might recognize how mentoring can foster burnout, perhaps practicing self-love in response.
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