Oh, I am not talking about the movie.  I love a good tearjerker, but I actually have not seen it.  I am talking about ordinary spiral notebooks and how they have helped me with administrative tasks.

In the first year of my doctoral program, I was invited to join the writing program as one of three graduate assistants.  On the first day of the semester, we met with the director and the associate director.  They gave us each a medium-sized spiral notebook.  They told us to keep these on our desks and to write down every interaction we had with students or faculty.  Since we held fewer than ten office hours per week, the goal was to lessen the feeling of giving people the runaround.  If someone had been in before, she or he could just point to the desk of the person with whom he or she talked, and we could look in the notebook for what that administrator had told the…

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