I can't believe I forgot to mention

The absolute best part of yesterday was the mentoring appointment with a student from the later 101 class. I may have mentioned him before, but I don't think I've given him a moniker--and I can't think of one right now. He's extremely smart, but his work has been sporadically submitted and not always done to the best of his ability. In his first mentoring appointment, he wanted to talk about time management--so we did. I suggested he make a schedule for himself, so he has specific times "budgeted" for specific tasks. When we met yesterday, we did talk about his essay--for which he missed the first version and all the in-between steps--but he also showed me his beautifully color-coded schedule, which he is not following. I said that he then needs to rework his schedule, as he's learned something about how much time he needs for various tasks, or how he works, or what he needs to set up for himself.

But the conversation continued: he's a "parentified child," so I heard a lot about how he and his sister are trying to manage things for their parents. Earlier in the semester, he told me he'd had to be out of town to help settle his mom into a new apartment; apparently over the past few weeks, he's been away helping his mother more than he's been home. And he's exhibiting signs of depression (says the pop psychologist), in that he finds it very difficult to motivate himself to get off his bed to actually do anything. I had suggested he might want to withdraw from the class, but right now, he's using school as a reason to get up and get out of the house--plus his sister paid his tuition, and he doesn't want to waste that. I talked to him some about self-forgiveness, about why we do things we know are not in our best interest sometimes, about having realistic goals, about self-awareness. We agreed that his goal would be to complete this semester--not worrying about grades, just doing his best to gut it out to the end. (Interestingly enough, I had a similar conversation with another student from the same class today, though the one I spoke to today is nowhere near as sharp.)

Whatever I said, at the end of our talk, he said, "Can I give you a hug?" Of course. My sense is that--as a young man who is parenting his own mother--he needs some mothering, and yesterday, I filled that particular role for him. It was lovely. And I hope it helped. He does have an appointment with one of the campus counselors later this month, which I am very glad to hear--despite what I think I know about psychology (from having been "on the couch" myself), I am not at all trained to offer counseling of that nature, and I want him to get the kind of help he really needs.

As for today, I got in to Advisement late: I very nearly bailed entirely, as I let myself sleep until I woke up on my own, not to an alarm, but I realized I'd only be about an hour late, and given how hammered we are at this point, I thought it would be beneficial for me to be there, even if only for a while. Classes went OK, too. It's pretty amusing to be talking about the effect of "our" attachment to our devices and social technology to a class full of students who can barely stand to go three minutes without checking their phones. The irony was not lost on any of us.

The only concern I have now is that I really want to get everything marked to return to the students in the SF class--and I'm not sure I'll have time to do that tomorrow. Plus I really need to look at the promotion folders we didn't discuss in P&B so I'm not quite so functionally useless next week. I reassure myself that, since there is an important event on campus on Friday, I will be here anyway and can spend time working on the promo folders then.

Meanwhile, my sleeping "late" seems primarily to have reinforced how deeply sleep deprived I am (me and virtually everyone else in America), so despite the number of assignments I need to mark for tomorrow's class, I am going to have a hard time setting that alarm for tomorrow. But, well, that's another day, isn't it. I'm going to draw a line under the work portion of today and leave it at that.