FreshMAN Frustration

I am part of a group of faculty (the advising cadre) who work in Counseling and Advising during the summer and winter to help with registration.  And for the most part, it's a great experience--I get to help students plan their studies, and  more often than not, they thank me.

Yesterday, however, I worked with a student who frustrated me just as much I seemed to be frustrating her.  She wanted to know if she had to take a placement test to take a writing course.  Which course?  She wouldn't tell me.  Was she working on a degree?  That's what I should have known.  Was she new to college?  No, but she didn't want to talk about that now.  Okay, did she have a transcript? Well, she'd just turned it in, so it hadn't been posted and we couldn't see it.  Could she bring in an unofficial transcript? No.

I tried to explain that I wanted to see if she'd taken freshman comp somewhere else and that it was a pretty generic course. She assured me that not every college or university used the terminology of"freshman comp." True, I said,  pointing out the example of Georgetown's English offerings, but that I still wanted to ascertain  whether or not she would have to take a placement test.  Well, it wouldn't have been a course called "freshMAN comp" that she'd taken--she was a Women's Studies major.

And then  she said that I wasn't listening to her and that she felt very frustrated.  I looked at her and said that I felt the same way because she kept interrupting me when I tried to explain things to her.

I'll admit that I felt frustrated, and when she left in angry tears, I felt too wound up to talk to the next student before I spoke with another advisor.    But I felt good, too, for being honest with her and not being overly empathic.  There's a boundary there that needs tending.

Comments

[Michael Faris]

It seems like this student wasn't being very helpful to herself (and of course, to you) by not knowing a lot about her own academic journey.

I do think she's right, though, in refusing to use the word "freshman." A lot of places are eschewing that term in favor of first-year student, a term that's non-gendered and also more friendly to older than average first-year students.

[timna]

this came in via my Google Alerts this morning -- fun to see a familiar face. (I get everything that mentions Women's Studies. lots of stuff I'd never come across otherwise).
btw, our women's studies certificate is writing intensive (so that our students can transfer with less problems), but we don't require comp as a prereq. leads to a lot of folks being in way over their heads.

[joanna]

Michael, your point on the terminology of the course is well taken, and I need to update what I call it--I'm not even certain that our college calls the course "Freshman Comp."

I think the issue was a red herring in this case, or, perhaps an example of miscommunication brought on by the urgency of needing to help a packed room full of students and not having time to engage in any kind of theoretical- semantical exploration of the word. I'm not saying that in another venue I wouldn't be more receptive to a discussion of the student's views and needs. In the end, my frustration came from her not giving me any information from which I could base my answer to her question about whether or not she had to take an assessment test to take the course. And I will admit that her tone, which communicated that I was an idiot for not being able to intuit what she wanted, did not help.

Hello Timna! Yes, I've divided the blog into several sub-blogs, and this is my teaching blog. Holly Pappas has taken over CCE, and I know she'll do a great job.

Regarding the no-comp certificate--sigh. . . .seems like that's the wrong direction to take. Though it also sounds like the Women's Studies courses pick up the slack and teach writing within the frame of their own courses, which is very WID!