The following is a post that my mother made last night on Itchy Feet and then deleted, I guess because she didn’t like my response (included below) or maybe she realized she was wrong (heaven forbid!).
And Another Thing
College Advisors:
Oh please… don’t even. Poor little orphan. One would think he was hatched and left to fend for himself all his life.
Mother’s statements:
On graduating High School at 16: “I am glad you are graduating high school early, then you can get at least 2 years of college under your belt before you run off to find life.
On planning for College: You should make an appointment with an advisor to make sure you are taking the right classes. In fact you should get an ASU catalog and see if you can see an advisor out there.
On moving beyond community college: You need to make an appointment with an advisor. What will he do? He will help you figure out how your classes transfer and what you should do next.
Then… I went with you to your meeting with the advisor and suggested that you meet with him again to be sure that you understood how it would work out.
Then you changed your major and I imagine you saw an advisor at that time. But by then you had moved to Tempe and lo and behold, you couldn’t/wouldn’t pass your classes. Presumabley because you were trying to find yourself and trying to get the teachers to see that you were too unique to do the assignments as assigned.
Now you say that after all these years you finally know what advisors are for as if you had not been told by not only me but your father too.
Don’t get me wrong, I am glad that you finally decided to stop being pig headed about your education and go back and finish it. And alot sooner than your dad did, who took 20 years between starting and finishing his degree.
I do think it is rude to act as if you were on your own about it all. The only thing I did was to insist that you make the appointments yourself, because a college student must learn to make phone calls by himself for important things.
Poor little boy raised by wolves and no wonder he is so confused… and here I thought I was accused of being an over protective mother the other half of the time. sheesh..
Posted by Fluff at June 10, 2002 11:42 PM
Clearly you are ignorant of the full role of the advisor, because their job is supposed to encompass a lot more than was done in the meeting you were present for in the Physics department. That little meeting, I have learned was like a little pre-meeting for full advisement that never took place. When I switched majors to English, I actually managed to get an advisor who did less advising than that head of the Physics department. He was over-booked, sure, and did the bare minimum, which was the same as the one-minute meeting I had a couple of weeks ago; make sure I’ve got the right sort of classes written down and put his electronic signature on my account. No guidance, no actual advisement, just wham-bam-out-the-door.
As far as whatever bullshit you’ve decided to believe about why I didn’t pass my classes, I’ve said it many times to many people, and admit that it will probably continue to be a problem for the rest of my life; I have no interest in politics and brown-nosing. I also have no interest in any corporate ladder, and I’m not actually going back to school because I want a degree. I want to paint, and I’d like to be ‘classicly trained’ and ASU offers that to me. I’ll jump through a few hoops to get to the training I’m looking for, but I’m likely to not get far in the Fine Arts program because I refuse to Politic and brown-nose. Just like I’m not kissing your ass right now. Your parenting style was to let me figure things out and make mistakes on my own, and if you so much as begin to claim that you did anything else, you’re exaggerating. So, I did my best to figure things out, and you’re right after 2.5 years of college I decided that the brown-nosing wasn’t for me. I also realized that I couldn’t possibly work full time and devote myself to a full load of classes. That’s for the brown-nosers, I think. The ones who do things other than work to get ahead. I’ll admit that I’m lazy, but I’ve earned everything I’ve got from my job and my ability to live on my own to my debt. I didn’t kiss anyone’s ass or play the game of politics to get what I’ve got.
What you failed to do, what perhaps you are incapable of doing, what left me “raised by wolves”, was that neither you nor anyone else impressed upon me the importance of ass-kissing and politics and the right and expected way of going through life from early on. I don’t want to blame you; I don’t consider myself bad off, just different. I didn’t learn what I was supposed to be doing in high school until years later, and it wasn’t from you. I didn’t find a good reason to go to college until I learned what I wanted to do with my life, but maybe I’d have finished college anyway if I’d been set on the right track a little sooner. It wasn’t community college and then ASU, by the way. If I had started working towards it sooner, if I had known how early I needed to start, I could have gone to any school in the country. I could be doing work at MIT’s Media Lab right now.
But instead I’m running some increasingly popular websites (which makes me happy) and writing novels and poetry in my spare time (which makes me happier) and painting beautiful and captivating works when I can (which makes me even happier and more fulfilled). I may decide to work towards that job at the Media Lab someday, but I’m fine with the way things are going.
I also happen to know another good way they could have gone with better leadership and guidance at a young age.
(Note: I wrote this and tried to post it originally at 00:30, but Cox decided I didn’t need internet access, and I went to bed. Then when I tried to post it in the morning, I found that the entry I was trying to comment on had disappeared.)
