Trying to be proactive

It's been an interesting week.

The residence hall opened on Sunday, but for some reason, some of our students showed up on Saturday and - for even less explanable reasons - their ID cards worked and so they got into the buidling and started moving back in. At first I was trying to figure out who was here but there were too many, so eventually I just gave up.

Sunday night was ridiculous in the building. I walked around taking pictures of RA's bulletin boards and name tags and I had to stop by a ton of rooms to ask them to quiet down. Maybe it was the excitement about being back; maybe the fact that we didn't have classes on Monday thanks to MLK Jr. Day - either way, it wasn't the way I wanted to start the semester. The week didn't improve much. Students throwing up in the bathroom, a bulletin board being vandalized, comments being made about RAs (after they tried to remind students of policies in the residence halls), and then last night we had quite a few documentations.

I spent all day today meeting with students; most of those meetings weren't in response to documentation but just focused on students on floors that I'm concerned about - proactive meetings. ;)

I tried to find a balance between "putting my foot down" but also giving them the benefit of the doubt and trying to get them to "want" to respect the policies in the future. I don't believe into scaring students into abiding to policies; I don't think it works and that's now how I would want to be treated - so I won't treat students that way. Instead I tried to explain to them what my concerns were, made it clear that I wasn't accusing them or charging them with anyone but that I wanted their help in addressing these concerns. I guess we'll see if it works...