The Silent Office Hour

Administration wants to encourage faculty-student interaction outside of the classroom, so they require the faculty to spend two hours on drop-in office hours a week.

Bwahaha.

Ask any faculty member, and I’ll bet you’ll find they agree with me. Office hours are the perfect time to submit travel receipts, catch up on paperwork, and take care of email. They’re just a terrible time to expect to see students.

Because students almost never come. Too far. Wrong time. Too nervous. No identified questions.

After all, who has questions before lunchtime? Questions are a nighttime activity. You know, after the faculty have already left campus.

If administration wanted to support genuine interaction between faculty and students, they would require things like:

1) Mandatory concert atttendance – and the wonderful chit-chat afterwards when we’ve all been moved to laughter or chills by the music in all its performative glory

2) Mandatory shared setup time. Before class even starts, when the projector’s misbehaving and I’m untangling cables, students drift in and talk about what they’re listening to, what’s happening in the world of campus and beyond, or whatever else is on their mind. No grade pressure, no formalities – just human contact with a purpose dangling from a HDMI cord.

3) Mandatory packing-up time. There’s nothing like unplugging the laptop from its station to bring on a host of quick one-off questions from students. (Some days I cynically wonder if more productive learning happens when I’m packing up than actually happened during discussion – there’s a lot of “aha” in those quick exchanges)

4) Mandatory text capacity. No, I don’t give out my phone number to students – but I do have students use a walkie-talkie app. They can leave voice or text messages; I can respond asynchronously, again, by voice or by text. This for me takes about 2 or 3 hours a week, since these can become extended conversational exchanges. (Please please please don’t tell me about the messaging app in your LMS. I live on a farm, with all the absent internet that comes with that. The walkie-talkie app takes two pennies; the LMS feed takes two dollars. Let’s stick with ‘Can I receive and respond?’ as our measure of tech success.)

5) Mandatory coffee fetching. When I’m in my office, I can feel lonely. Head out to get a cup of coffee from the lounge, and I inevitably bump into one or more students, and those conversations can be rich, deep, and meaningful. Those usually aren’t about course content – they’re about the discipline, life experiences, and our place in the world. You know, the stuff that carries forward in a forever kind of way.

6) Mandatory “big deadlines.” There’s nothing like a deadline to clarify what could use some support. And the problem with office hours is it is not only the wrong time for interactions, but it’s the wrong space, too. Better solutions come in the library, or in the hallway outside the restrooms (we’re just being honest here), or on the sidewalk between one space and another.

See, the problem with office hours is the office. It’s not that setting aside time for 1:1 with students is a bad idea – in fact, it’s one of the most valuable aspects of a college education. And it’s not that students don’t prize their access and the support it affords. They genuinely do respond to faculty who care.

It’s the whole idea that you can take all the ideals of academia, and put them in a box (the office) and on the clock (at a reasonable time of day). Real learning isn’t like that. Ideating and interaction both happen at their best on the spontaneous edges of other kinds of activities.

And spontaneity can’t be mandated.

But it can be invited to appear.

True Confessions: Here’s my shout-out to the real and impactful student moments—the ones that happen in the dining hall, the hallway after class, or occasionally (miracle of miracles) in my office. They're real. I just wish the last kind happened more often. And I’m not alone.