KGirl con't

[KGirl]

Hmm... Bug, I'll have to think on your post on the driving thing some more. I thought about it the whole way home and all I could come up with was: sometimes that's the case, and sometimes it's not, and maybe the key is knowing when it is the case vs. isn't. For example, I work at a university with college students, and a lot of what I do philosophically is about the educational experience, learning life lessons, and holding people accountable for their actions. A student emailed me last week about how she needed 4 very specific classes to graduate but three of them were closed, and wanted to know what I could do to get her into them. I looked at her history and she waited 3 weeks to enroll in classes from when she could have. Had she enrolled 3 weeks ago she would have gotten into all of them. This student has a pretty lengthy history of not doing things until the last minute, asking someone to fix it for her, someone will fix it, but then note "I told the student that in the future people wouldn't be so accommodating when she does not plan ahead." But, every time people accommodated her anyway. We talk a lot about setting students up for adult life after this, and this is in no way being helpful - you can't walk into your primary doctor's office and say "I would like to see the doctor today for my regular exam." Could I have tried to push to get this girl into some of those classes? Possibly. Am I going to? No, this is not something I should be spending my time on. Her failure to plan shouldn't constitute my emergency. But now she's furious and complaining to anyone who will listen that I won't help her. I don't know if that made sense, to summarize: isn't it sometimes appropriate and necessary to enforce consequences? One of my past supervisors said it very well: "In our job, we have the power to take away consequences for people... that doesn't mean we should do it often or regularly." If a student plagiarized and violated the rules, we can't say "oh, I understand how hard it must be to write that paper... you can stay here." They will get kicked out. Maybe it's a matter of separating that from my personal life, I don't know, but I also think when people don't treat you well, there are some consequences (like not maintaining relationships with them and setting some boundaries).

Maybe I just need more time to get there.