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.

50 Questions: Adulting as Faculty

So many questions...

1. Have you checked your spam folder?
2. What about your institutional spam folder?
3. What about the invisible-to-you institutional spam folder?
4. Have you released the possibly important messages?
5. What about the ones asking you to do things for the discipline?
6. Or the ones from the listserve you subscribe to?
7. Have you deleted the older messages?
8. No, we can’t let you delete more than 50 messages at a time. Try again.
9. Have you saved the messages you’ll need three months from now? What about the ones that are in the “maybe” category?
10. Did you back up the email chain for your advisee?
11. Have you reviewed their progress toward degree?
12. Did you write the student?
13. Did you copy the dean?
14. Did you send them a reminder about their appointment? Don’t you want them to graduate?
15. Have you backed up your computer recently?
16. Have you enabled the institutional cloud backup?
17. Why not?
18. What do you mean it bricks your computer?
19. Have you written to IT about that?
20. Did you copy the proper Associate Dean?
21. Did you give documentation?
22. Have you checked your phone messages? Yes, your office has been assigned a phone number. No, we haven’t assigned you a telephone.
23. Have you checked your computer file where we put such messages?
24. How do expect to recruit students if you don’t check messages on your nonexistent phone?
25. Have you updated your C.V. recently?
26. Did you remember to include the peer review stint last week?
27. Did you give the journal ISSN?
28. Has that populated through to your online CV?
29. How are we supposed to establish a reputation if you don’t share your work? No, we can’t just let you submit a PDF. You need to retype that information in our form. No, we can’t accommodate umlauts. No, it’s not set up for italics. No, we don’t have a category for that. Put it under “Other.”
30. Have you submitted your mid-semester grades?
31. Have you met with any delinquent student?
32. Why not?
33. No, Zooming the sick ones into class isn’t allowable. Yes, it used to be required. No, we can’t explain our policy. Why do you ask?
34. Have you uploaded your material to the LMS?
35. Is any of that material copyrighted?
36. Not by you, by real copyright holders?
37. Did you pay the fees? Did you charge the students? Of course we understand that you thought that use was covered by the library agreements. Have you always been an optimist?
38. Have you planned next year’s classes?
39. Did you submit the times and rooms?
40. Those rooms aren’t available, now where do you want it?
41. Main campus isn’t available, now where do you want it?
42. What do you mean the students won’t fit in the room? Have you considered a rotating attendance policy?
43. Yes we know that it has passed curricular review. No, it’s not ready to show in the system. Don’t you think the staff have enough to do?
44. Have you filled out your institutional satisfaction survey?
45. What did you say?
46. Privacy is so 1990s. Let us know how we can help you. We see that you haven’t yet responded.
47. Have you published anything this year? Was it a book? Then why are you bothering us about it?
48. Have you responded to the committee meeting-time poll yet? Which committee? What do you mean?
49. Have you backed up your computer yet? This is your second warning.
    We can’t be accountable for any glitches in that process. It worked perfectly for another faculty member on another system altogether.
50. Do you still feel valued?