Last Year #11: Advising, continued continued

Today, advising was . . . weird and very, very easy.  On my way down to Pioneer Hall, still the computer building, I saw my colleague Matt Novak who said that the morning advising had "Five students and thirty teachers."  He suggested the students might have been a bit frightened by all those folks focusing on them.

And so it was during my shift.  There were about 12 profs and in the first round (12:55) 5 students and in the second round (2:10) about 7 students.  The only person I spoke with was a middle aged man who's wife was the one who wanted to be a student.   Unfortunately she wasn't there because their child had a health emergency.  I didn't know if FERPA even allowed me to talk with him as a representative for her.  And I had no proof he was who he said he was.   It was a complex situation and I didn't know how to handle it so I towed him to another room and another person. 

So, having all those profs without students felt like a waste of resources.  There was a time when students came to our offices.  My friend Lilli Ann asked if I could remember when it was they took us out of our offices and put us into bulk advising.  She liked it better when we saw students in our offices because we could get actual work done between advising appointments.  I actually enjoy the bulk advising because I usually only see a couple of students rather than five or six.  Today I saw only the guy with questions for his wife.

Then I went home home where my dumb phone got a text from the school that OSU Corvallis and Cascades had received an unspecified threat.


Back in 1988 (from Bendnotes September 22), after surviving the day when I had to take over for my sick colleague, I wanted to see the rest of the registration process.

"On Thursday morning I wandered over to Pioneer Hall (the math/computer building) to see what registration looked like.  As I walked past the tables, I overheard a student complaining about me.  "I went to see Miss Monaghan, but this other lady talked to me instead and . . .' the whine signified some fatal error on my part.  Well, and it was only fair because I had spent some time complaining about her to [the other new teachers] the night before.  She had taken almost an hour of my time.  She had wanted a photography class which had a 2 hour lab the middle of Tuesday afternoon.  Well, she could only take classes Tuesday and Thursday.  She would not take classes before 9 (10 if she could help it) in the morning, nor would she take classes in the evening.  And then she complained about the way the college scheduled the classes.  My favorite of her questions was, 'What can I take for one credit on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons at 1 pm'  [at this point the writer shared thoughts of being very mean to the student].  Her tone told me that it was the school's fault or my fault that she couldn't make a pleasing choice.  I finally started using phrases like, 'Well, you've limited your choices,' and 'you've certainly given yourself some tough rules.'  If she hadn't whined, and sat in my office and stared at the schedule for minutes at a time, I wouldn't have been so aggrieved.  Another individual, a young fellow, had come to my office with similar problems in scheduling, but he owned his choices, so it didn't bother me."