What a day....

Today has just not been my day. I was really really tired when my alarm went off (and it won't be any different tomorrow since it's 12:30 am now but I need some good venting/reflecting/blogging or I won't be able to go to sleep anyway). The morning was spent buying ice cream for a program, which led to me losing my parking spot. I wasn't able to find one in the parking lot behind my building (there's ALWAYS one there); so suddenly I found myself driving around campus going, "Where is the nearest employee parking lot?" and realizing that I had no idea. I finally found a spot about a 10-minute walk from my building. Not the end of the world, but definitely a bit annoying.
The rest of the morning/early afternoon was fine, but then I had a meeting that left me feeling a bit disappointed and frustrated. I think I just want too much too quickly. I hate that there's so much politics in our field; shouldn't it all be about what's best for our students?
And after that, it just kept going downhill - running around like crazy trying to catch up on work and things; a program getting out of hands, disgruntled residents, duty issues and and and. I didn't leave the office until 11 pm and then had to go back to do some more work - that's just not cool.

But back to that meeting - because that's what I've been thinking about the most.

I think the first school I worked at after graduating from my master's program has spoiled me; not that working there was perfect because, as those of you who have followed this blog for a while will know; I was often stressed and frustrated and struggled with building relationships with colleagues. But - and I didn't realize that at the time - that school really fit my values and believes - especially the way things were being run toward the end of my time there. There we WERE educators - no questions asked. I thought of myself that way; my supervisors thought of me that way; the department thought of us that way. We were in the thick of student learning.

Here I sometimes get the feeling that not everyone thinks of us Hall Directors that way. It's like I have to justify that I want to be an educator; that I should be an educator. Like working with my learning community here - yes, there's faculty involvement (a lot more than what I'm used to) but that doesn't mean that my role isn't that of an educator as well - in a different way maybe but I shouldn't just be the "fun" person who does some social programs and is just there. I mean, I didn't get a Master's degree for nothing now, did I? Or when RAs do programs - it shouldn't just be about what students "want" - it's about what they need, what's best for them! Could you imagine a faculty member coming in on the first day of class and doing an interest survey asking students what they want to learn in class; and say in a history class nobody says they want to learn about world war II, the professors leaves out that chapter and just focuses on world war I because students seem more interested in that? And yes, I know that's class and this is ResLife; we have to convince students to come to our programs, so we have to gear them a little more toward their interests - but we shouldn't forget over that that in the end, it's about what students are LEARNING. And how do we know what they're learning - or even what we want them to learn - unless we have well defined learning outcomes and strategies and some assessment to see if what we're actually doing what we say we do.

You know what my problem is - there's so much I want to change and make better. And I have this awesome picture in mind of how things should be and I'm so excited and eager to get there, that I forget it's all about baby steps and getting everyone to buy into this.

So step 1) I'll have to really think about our programming model. What's working? What's not working?

And this leads me to a favor - for anyone out there reading this, if you're an RA or a hall director or have ever been an RA or Hall Director - what are your thoughts on what I like to call "traditional programming models"? Pillars, categories; something were RAs are asked to do programs around certain topics, in certain categories.
What do you like about that? What don't you like about that? What made the implementation challenging? And most of all, what do you think students learned in those situations? How consistent was that learning - meaning did student in that one hall that one year learn a lot because they had an awesome RA who just really got diversity programming or did students across campus in all residence halls learn a lot because the model worked for all staff members? What did RAs struggle with when it came to implementing that program? Any thoughts, stories, comments are greatly appreciated!!!