So my holiday is over and I must go back to work. My husband doesn’t go back until the 16th, lucky butt.
Just to give you an idea of the stupid I encounter with my new job, I’ll check my work email. Oh, look! Two students emailed me. One on the first Saturday of break, and the other on the Sunday before Christmas. Seriously?
Student #1 is asking me which classes to take. Again. It’s the third time. Or is it the fourth? I don’t know. He needs a specific core requirement fulfilled, and there are only 7 or 8 courses that will fulfill it. All of them are closed. Because he didn’t come get advising until the week before winter break. They’ve been able to register since, like, late October. So I have no sympathy for him. His email said, “All those courses are full. What do you suggest I do now?” Uh, I suggest picking a different class. If you can’t fulfill the requirement this semester, there’s always next semester. I swear, they just want me to hold their hands through college. I didn’t have an advisor at my college, not a real one. I had a professor that sort of knew the requirements, but it was up to me to pick all of my courses and make sure the requirements were fulfilled. Once I declared my major in my junior year, the registrar did an audit and gave me an official list of what I still needed in order to graduate, but until then I did everything myself, and I graduated on time. These kids have the same sort of access to the degree requirements and course listings as I did (maybe even more so than I had), and they can’t tell their heads from their asses. Seriously. What the fucking fuck?
Second email… I am deciding the fate of a student on academic probation and on the Monday before break I told her to take a few days to decide what her goal would be if we allowed her to return. I emailed her on Thursday trying to see if she needed help, no response. Didn’t hear from her on Friday. She emails me on Sunday and seems to have half-assed her plan for returning. *sigh* I want to be generous, but I’m going to have to discuss her situation with the dean before making a decision.
Bottom line, some of these kids shouldn’t be going to college. They’re there because they are expected to be, or because they don’t know what else they should do. But a lot of these kids won’t ever graduate. They’re wasting their time and money. I looked at myself today and thought, “How much better could I have done in school if I had waited a year or two before starting college?” The answer, I believe, is “much, much better.” I wasn’t mature enough to do what I needed to do in college until my junior and senior year. I dicked around in my first two years and my GPA suffered greatly because of it. And now I have a degree that I won’t pursue further, because I am no longer interested in that field. And I graduated with a 2.8 GPA. It’s a shame. Had I waited a little bit, grown as a person outside of my parents’ influence, and matured before beginning college, I feel as though I would have had a better idea in mind for my future.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m happy with where I am right now. I plan to pursue a Master’s in Sociology when I have the opportunity (hopefully in the next two years) and I would have never met my husband had I not done what I did. But I do wonder what kind of person I would be, had I not gone to college immediately just because I was expected to.
I guess my point is, it makes me sad to see so many students who are clearly not mature enough to really make the most of their college education. They don’t know enough about themselves to know what they want to do with it, and they spend the first three years figuring out that they can’t or don’t want to do what they started college for. Then they waste more time and money taking other classes when they change their majors. I see so much desperation in so many faces. “I just want to graduate already,” they say. I know, kids. I know.
There are many gems in my student base, but most of them are frantically scrambling to slap together a degree so their parents won’t think they’re failures. Or so their parents won’t remove funding. Or a variety of other reasons, which revolve around other people and not themselves. Continuing education should be about doing something YOU want to do, not what other people expect you to do. I wish I had known that when I entered college. And I wish it wasn’t such an idealistic thing to say. Relationships with others do matter, so on some level you can’t just do whatever you want without consequences.
Meh, I’m just talking in circles. I do like my job. I really do. I just see myself in so many of my students, and I wish there was something I could do for them.
And the exciting thing about the job is that next year you will be getting the same emails, from a different group of students but ones with the same problems.
How is the time with the group at your place? Everyone still alive?
I’m always learning something new at my job. And they’ll pay for me to take one class a semester to continue education, which means I can stay in school. I think I’ll take them up on their offer soon.
What you’re doing is really important though. Not every kid has a parent to help them or support (emotionally) them through the college process and he/she may not have the skills to make the choices on his/her own. That’s why they need some pushing or “advising”.
And that’s why I hold their hand (within reason) and guide them. It makes me feel good to hear them say they were helped.
I had one student who asked if the prof would change the grading scale of the class for him because he was two percent off of an A. Not give him two percent, mind you, but CHANGE THE GRADING SCALE. He was like “but I got an 84″ and I said “yes…that’s a B+” and he said “that’s not an A”. To which I replied “right, it’s a B+” and he said “but it’s not an A”. He ended up pursuing an authorized withdrawal, which he would not have received because my school won’t give withdrawals for stupid reasons like that. I have also had a student question me on why some answers were what they are (i.e. a but not b, c but not d) until I told him “look, you can argue about this as much as you want, but the answers aren’t going to change, and I can guarantee that.” He decided he was done asking questions shortly after that.
He wanted to change the grading scale? Jesus, some people don’t understand the point of college. You’re there to LEARN. Grades are not everything, as long as you learned the information. Also, what a pretentious prick.
I also had one student who, after being GIVEN CREDIT for participating in a psychological study (intro psych kids have to participate in a certain number of studies for credit at my school, so for this particular study, we signed students up for random time slots and then granted them credit immediately), emailed and said how ridiculous it was that he had been signed up for a study, and he hadn’t known about the time slot and so he better not get penalized, and he was going to go directly to the dean (lol at that one, as if the dean has time for that), yadda yadda yadda. I sent him an email explaining the situation and advised him that next time he should take the time to read the study description that stated in all caps that YOU HAVE ALREADY COMPLETED THIS STUDY IN CLASS. THIS STUDY HAS NO OTHER REQUIREMENTS before he decided to be an asshole to researchers who are responsible for granting him credit for studies (just kidding. I didn’t actually use the word asshole. The rest is pretty much a quote).
I wrote a degree plan for a student and he signed and returned it to me. Two days later I get an email: “So, are you ever going to write me a degree plan?” He was thinking of an audit.
Another student? He happens to be a distance student, located at a campus of my university but across the state. “Why don’t you have an office in [his town] like [other advisor]? It would have made things MUCH more convenient for me.” My response? “I’m so sorry that you were inconvenienced by having to fax me your signed forms. I happen to be located in [town about 400 miles away] so I’m glad you don’t have to come visit me in my office and we were able to do things electronically!”
Good luck with your “problem” students. You’re right that some of them aren’t mature enough for college. Some that are mature enough are mature enough harbour such a sense of entitlement that they just expect everything to be done for them. Just remember that at the end of the day when you can’t stop thinking about that one student who is almost too stupid to dress themselves and won’t stop bugging you that they are ADULTS and are responsible for figuring things out for themselves. It is not your job to do everything for them; you can only help them find “the path” and then they have to walk it themselves.
You wouldn’t believe a few of the problem students that cropped up this week, right before Spring classes start. Oy. I’ll just leave you with this gem. “How was I supposed to know the class was outdoors?” The class was called “Creative Writing in the Outdoors.”