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."

Last Year #10: Advising, 1988, continued

Today's scheduled advising was cancelled due to a downturn in enrollment.  I spent most of today restructuring my online sections of interpersonal communication (of which more anon).   I have some anecdotes to share from my first year, September 22, 1988 Bendnotes letter.

"A boy sits slumped in the comfy chair in Mary's office.  He seems to have no focus, no interest in what he is about to do.  In the office, standing, are his parents.  It is they who look through the schedule, they who ask about sequences.  His mother suggests a course of student.  They look like blue collar people. . . . I do my speel [sic].  We come to some decisions.  I call in the choices.  They go across the hall to formalize the roughdraft by writing it onto the registration form with the green X.  Then the Mom notices that I have made a mistake.  She calls it to my attention.  I apologize as I redial (getting a busy signal, so continuing to redial) and tell them that I am new.  As they wait, the dad looks at a square of words, printed in crayon and felt tip pen on a paper the size of an album jacket on Mary's wall.  He tells wife and son that it is an interpretation of Sargent Pepper's album cover.  After I get through and fix my mistake, they leave, and the Mom says that she sympathizes with me -- her first week at her job at the hospital she didn't seem to be able to get anything right.

"Sometimes the computers go down.  On Wednesday, somebody went to lunch and turned her's off.  The other machines went nuts trying to talk to it -- creating a 'spurious echo' which resulted in the system going down for two hours with no back-up hard copy system.  There was also trouble, Wednesday and Thursday, with the phones.  By 3 pm Wed. it sometimes took a half hour of dialing and hanging up to get through to the operators.  We would dial in shifts.  When one of us in Deschutes got through, they would enter their student and then holler down the hall for other folks.  Through it all, the operators remained remarkably calm."

Last Year #9: Advising

Of all the duties-as-assigned that full-time faculty are required to perform, the one I've always been worst at is advising.  Fortunately, one of the finest minds on the COCC campus, Vickery Viles, tries to make the process as fool-proof as possible.  She gives us a wonderful workbook with all the info we need about placement tests and managing our new online tool, Gradtracks.  She and her folks have also created an easy-to-read booklet for students to help get them through their first year.

It wasn't always so.  Here, from my Bendnotes letter of September 22, 1988, is my attempt to describe to my colleagues back in Utah the way student advising worked. 

"Advising took three days and was supposedly the stripped down, new, improved version.  Certainly all the old folks said that it was no longer the madhouse it used to be. . . . "

Three other new humanities folks and I were supposed to just observe but because one of the senior English teachers was sick, I needed to take over for her.  

"We had all had a good lecture about the process from Bart [dean of instruction] during our week of orientation.  Nevertheless, I did not enjoy being thrown into it. . . . The process was to go something like this.  My work was first to ascertain that the student who walked into my office (or Mary's office, that first day) had a green X at the top of their registration form.  then I was to ask if they had filled out the form.  Sometimes they had, sometimes they hadn't (the form is three sheets, with name, ethnics, and class time, number spaces).  If they had, I was to call 525, the number of the registration switchboard, and read off the subject numbers . . .  to the operator on line.  She (always of that gender) would punch the numbers into a computer which would report with a beep if the class was closed (in our Tuesday meeting, however, Bart insisted that we say to students, 'the  section is filled' -- thus does discourse analysis enter the organization.)  If not flustered or pressed . . . the operator read back the subject numbers and their classes.  If all went perfectly, there would be no beeps and the student would go away happy as a clam.  At the sound of the beep, however, the student would have to sort through the 'full year schedule' and find another course.  

"(After Wednesday morning, it was also possible to check the list of closed sections before calling in.  A runner would bring them around three times a day -- color coded sheets with the most recently closed classes marked with starts.)

"The student could decide to drop or add classes any time during the day just through the phone registration technique (by having the advisor call in the schedule change).  After being put into the computer, the student needed to register by the end of the day of s/he would be 'invalidated.'

"Now, if the student had no idea in hell what he or she wanted to do, real advising had to take place.  The advisor [sic] had to explain the need for the four sequences required for an AA degree, and why (if the student didn't know)the student would need an AA degree.   . . .

"Advising tools:  the class schedule, the college bulletin, a big blue three ring binder with every teacher's expectations for students for every course clearly articulated and quantified, the student's placement test scores, pre-interpreted for our convenience, and (for us in humanities) a list of the acceptable cross over requirements from the four year institutions."