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Mentoring
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Extra-curricular. The part of the college experience that is not directly related to formal courses. It causes as much if not more learning than the courses themselves. Unfortunately, adult non-resident students do not get that benefit from their tuition.
Almost all of the courses I have taught at Medaille were at night, and almost all of the students were adults with families and full-time jobs. Activities outside the classroom and the courses were rare for these PCP students (parking lot - classroom - parking lot).
Email. The biggest change to increase the amount of contact I had with students was email. I started using it for student contact in 1993, when the few students with access had AOL or Compuserve dial-up accounts. Every year, more students could give me an email address on the first day of class until the late 90's when everyone had one.
In terms of quantity and quality, I have far more contact with students via email than I do face to face. For much of this correspondence, I am wearing my mentor hat rather than my teacher hat, though few students care to make that distinction as long as they get the attention they need.
For the past decade, I have responded to the competition for their time by holding office hours every Saturday morning. The MBA students who needed the attention (or the excuse to extract themselves from household duties) came to do their homework and get tutorial assistance. For many years, it was the norm for six, ten, sometimes fifteen students to show up on Saturday mornings for three or four hours. They were usually the most enjoyable hours I spent on campus, and a lot of mentoring and advising occurred.
Recently, I have begun teaching mostly traditional-age undergraduates for the first time in my two decades at Medaille. While the students are on campus more and I see them on the sidewalks, in the computer lab, and in the cafeteria, I must schedule formal conferences with them to get their sustained attention. Most of them don't seem to want to do that. It's like getting called into the "office". They keep thinking they did something wrong and that I want to take them to task for it.
In general, our undergraduates are driven by fear, mostly fear of low grades. They have internalized the factory model of education and it has done them much damage. They passively wait to be taught and look at the teacher as an omniscient authority who will probably hurt them with his judgments.
By contrast, the adult students I have taught at Medaille, both undergraduate and graduate, are more active, engaged learners. These same adults tell me -- though I have no hard data -- that they were, at age 18 and 19, numb and passive, too, which may be why they are finishing their formal education as adults. I expect that our traditional-age undergraduates will undergo a similar maturing process. Meanwhile, I am finding new strategies for relating to them with a hat other than my teacher hat.
My major strategy is athletics. For one year, I was assistant coach of the women's cross-country team. I enjoyed it immensely and would do it again if asked.
I go to as many games as I can, and I find the College web site a valuable resource for learning about the stats and stars of the ones I miss. I make it a point to engage all of the student athletes in an ongoing conversation about their sport, their team, their season, and their individual performance.
For the non-athletes, I try to find a topic that functions similarly for them. For some of our students, that seems to be a struggle. I assume that this because I have not yet figured out the nuances of relating to some of them.
Unfortunately, I am carrying so many students -- in Spring 2007, almost eighty in five sections, in Fall 2007, a little more than eighty -- that I do not have sufficient time to spread my attention as evenly as I would like to. The students with whom I don't quickly find a way to relate to can get, and perhaps end up feeling, marginalized. Some of them are eloquently saying, Don't come near me, Mr. Professor. I try to respect that and not push too hard.
When I first came to the College, I was assigned the duty of advisor to Prelude, the literary magazine. I did it for several years until a new faculty hire more appropriately took it on. During that time, I ran a Saturday afternoon writing workshop called Writers Bloc. For three years in the late 80's, anywhere from three to ten students came to share their manuscripts in a workshop setting.
I also edited and published one chapbook, Sometimes Entangled by Lisa Brucato
(right).
Looking back, the place at Medaille where I feel most comfortable is alone in a
darkened rehearsal space (and now in the Lecture Hall). I'm watching students do
something on stage and then giving them feedback in order to improve. That
rehearsal is part of a process that will lead to public performance, where the
spotlight will be on them.
In the late 1980's and early 1990's, I helped a group of students (and some staff) put on a series of annual plays. One of them, Serious Points, was written by student and later faculty member Tom Callahan and was given its world premier in a raised stage we constructed within the old White House, where the Admissions reception area is now.
1986 - The Fantasticks
1989 - The Odd Couple
1990 - Serious Points
1991 - Love Letters
1992 - Plaza Suite
This was not a formal club, though we called the troupe Group Therapy and whatever facility we performed in became the Welzschmerz Playhouse. I was the plays' director (and sometimes actor) as well as the group's advisor.
For the two Buffcon mystery writers' conferences discussed in the scholarship section, I involved students as much as possible. (See the group picture of the second Buffcon below.) On the days of the conference, especially, they were the staff workers. One, Sue Smith, got course credit for an independent study to help me do the administrative work for the second Buffcon.
At most MBA student social events over the years, I was the only
faculty present. At many of them, I took photos and posted them soon thereafter
on Ricci Street. Here are a few:
Fall Orientation, August
22, 2002
MBA 504 Night Out, October
22, 2002
Let's Talk Focus Group
Dinners, Fall 2002
Networking Job Fair,
November 19, 2002
Strategic Plan Development,
January 14, 2003
Spring Orientation,
January 21, 2003
Spring Open House, March
26, 2003
Capstone Night
Out, June 11, 2003
Cookout, June 9,
2006
For years, the graduate programs had few student services, little involvement in
Student Affairs, and no recognition from Academic Affairs. Taking matters into
our own hands, I spearheaded the faculty effort to produce two showcase events.
Graduate Symposium & Honors Convocation 2003
MBA Expo 2004 and Business Student Symposium
They met with enough success (see picture below right of an award winner) and cost little enough to make them worth continuing, but in 2005 the administration was already trying to shut down the on-campus MBA program by starving it of such resources. The only ones to suffer were the students.
For its seven years of existence, I was the faculty advisor for the MBA Student Organization,
founded by Chris Gengo (left). It
was driven by its leaders, not me, so its activities varied greatly from year to year.
Any attempts by the students in the early years to have a meaningful say in the
program were rebuffed by the faculty and administration, so the organization
became mainly a social organization, organizing happy hours on- and off-campus.
I documented them with my camera and posted the photos on Ricci Street (see above under MBA events).
While I was in the Humanities Department, I always advised Business students.
When I went on loan to Business, I advised only graduate students. While these
students have always had official faculty advisors, there was a lot of switching
due to personality conflicts. Unofficially, the students got advice from several
or all of the five or six MBA faculty regardless of their official advisor.
I don't know where else to bring this up, so I'll do it in this section on
mentoring and advising. For a couple of years, I was the de facto advisor for every MBA
student. In June 2001, the program experienced what I refer to as the train wreck, and I was
the sole faculty continuity. I'm trying to phrase this delicately, but the
reality is that I spent hundreds of hours talking to the MBA students one-on-one
and in small groups solely about the messy nature of the train wreck. Not about
the curriculum or their lives. But about the fact that four faculty were leaving
and one was absent/ineffective. I wasn't acting as an administrator, so the hat
that seems to fit best is my mentoring hat.
Managing that crisis was the greatest mentoring challenge of my career, and I believe I met it successfully.
To have 5/6 of a department effectively wiped out yet hanging around more or
less teaching classes and constantly saying negative things about the courses,
the department, the administration, the College, etc. puts a tremendous burden
on the one faculty who remains and isn't even officially in that department. I
was not privy to any of the decision making that led to the train wreck. It
caught me totally by surprise.
The acting chair was a huge help, and the program may not have survived without
her. But I am certain that it would not have survived without my ministrations
from June 2001 until around March of 2003 when Walt Kolt, Stephanie Argentine,
and Jim O'Donnell began to share the burden and the crisis stage passed. 
If I
had returned to Humanities in Summer 2001 or if I had joined the others in
denigrating the College so constantly and completely, I believe that the
students would have dropped out in greater numbers than they did.
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Instead, I made it a point to speak to each of them individually and privately for as long and as often as it took to retain them. I sent and received hundreds of emails on the situation, which most students realized was part of a College-wide situation. Everything else in the MBA program went on hold because the Business Department was not functioning as a department. Everything else in my professional life went on hold because this crisis demanded so much of my time in a volatile administrative environment. In my judgment, the MBA program, which peaked in enrollment then, suffered an administration-inflicted wound that it survived. Even when the College stopped recruiting for it and stopped listing it in the catalog and on the web site in 2004, it managed to get two dozen new students in Fall 2005 from word of mouth alone. The students were our best recruiters.
It took a direct violation in Summer 2005 by the academic administrators of the shared-governance provisions of the faculty handbook in order to finally kill off the MBA program. They handled it very poorly, especially by failing to communicate with the five dozen current students who were having their curriculum and their future alumni network taken away from them so that the administrators could run the College more like a factory. The students learned a great but bitter lesson about the folly and human cost of managing an institution for the public good as though it were a private good.
This web, offered in fulfillment
of
the requirement in the handbooks of
Medaille College, Buffalo, NY,
Volume IV: Faculty Handbook,
section 4.5.4.3 Faculty Portfolio,
is © 2007 and licensed under a
Creative Commons License.
web established: February 2007
page last modified: October 2007
by Douglas Anderson
http://toLearn.net/portfolio/mentoring/index.html