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.

The silence of the woods is full of noise

The woods are many things: peaceful, calming, multi-hued, and (in my memory) often silent. But that mental shorthand is a mistake. That forested silence only addresses the pleasurable absence of the sound-detritus of modern life. There are no car horns, no rumble of heating or cooling systems, no yakety yakety yak yak of too many people in too close proximity, no clacking keys, inspired or otherwise. In other words, the woods create the illusion of silence by taking away irritants.

Truth to tell, the thing my brain likes to encode as “silence” is anything but. There is, in the woods, a continuous burble of a stream. The crickets offer up a track of chirping, that sawing stridulation that calls to mates and forms the backdrop of dreamland.

Other night-noises abound as well. There’s the scream and then hoot of an owl noting its territory; the rustle of a mammalian something-or-other searching for a snack amidst the leaf-litter of the forest floor; the wit wit wit of a first bird at morning light. I listen to these noises, and translate them from the unexpected “what?” into the identified “oh, that.” These sounds bring the satisfaction of discovery, and yet they are quiet, ever so quiet, and in their quiet regularity they soothe.

What we (or at least I) think of as forest silence, then, is the absence of urban noise. It is also bound up in anticipatory listening. Was that the rumbling croak of frogs? The intermittent drops of dew from the treetops? The tap tap tap of water dribbling over an end-of-season waterfall?

Silence here is a coded word, speaking to peace as measured in slowed breathing -- the rise and fall of the backpacker at ease, sleeping perhaps more deeply than home bed and familiar surroundings allow. It is a word reflective of paced regularity, of less-familiar noises often repeated, assessed, and held in the translated understanding of thing-as-sound. By grappling with what a noise represents, we become comfortable with it, often to the point that it no longer registers.

What I recall, in my fecklessness, as silence, is instead the susuration of leaves, the murmers of small animals, the steady quiet systematic vamp-til-ready steady state of forest hum. It is, in other words, a low-level background that caresses and comforts my ears, accustomed as they are to the more penetrating sounds of urban existence.

Silence as golden? Not exactly. But forest as restorative, a living quiet that listens back? Absolutely!

The Silence of Not-Writing – and What To Do About It (10/20/24)

To actively "not write" is an awful thing. Sure, my kitchen has never been cleaner, and my bathtub sparkles, but inside, I’m sinking. Each moment that the words don’t come feels like another part of me shriveling up, reduced to silence.

As this awful feeling and I have become friends over the years, I’ve developed some strategies for what some people call #WritersBlock. Perhaps one or another of these approaches will work for you. In hopes that they’re useful, I present:

STRATEGIES TO START THE WRITING PROCESS

The junk mail trick	"To whom am I talking?"	Go for a walk	Scrub the tub
The bullet point approach	Jump a section	Whiteboard it	Put in the time
Colored inks	Write to Cousin Tim	Poster paper	Move to the slide-deck version
The Pomodoro	Don't finish	The business card approach	Brown noise
Why it's not working	Don't write: dictate	Read more	Small chunky bits

 

The junk mail trick:

A big blank piece of paper is scary. Halloween haunted house levels of scary. This might help:

I used old envelopes from the junk mail pile to write my MA thesis. Turn it at an angle, and you have to write one word, then three words, then 6 words, then the full sentence....

Then after half an hour I'd type it in and it would be a paragraph or two

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The bullet point approach:

Everyone always tells me to outline first. But me? I don't know what I'm going to say until I write it.

So I don't outline; I just take 10 minutes and try to get out 20 bullet points. I'll use about 7 of them. It’s like scribbling on a napkin – low stakes, and the end product can be discarded at will.

Honestly, this often gives me 2-3 paragraphs worth of evidence and thoughts about them – and editing from something is always easier than starting from zero

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Colored inks:

I take 10 different pens -- different textures and colors. I lay them out. I set a timer for 3 minutes, choose a pen, and write a sentence with that color/texture. Then 3 minutes and another color/texture. Then 3 minutes and... my brain has taken over and I'm writing stuff so I stick with that pen for a while. But it gets me over the hurdle. And a ball point and a felt tip pen write different kinds of words, a weird but true fact (for me)

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The Pomodoro:

Sometimes the problem is trying to write too much. Trying to write a paper? Impossible. Trying to write the next paragraph? That’s at least dwelling in the realm of possibilities.

So: set a pomodoro (named after the timer): 5 minutes for planning, 25 minutes for writing on THAT ONE THING. Paragraph 2 of section 7, or whatever.

Don't worry about the whole of it, worry about the next thing to do.

Also, I sometimes do this in sets in a group setting ("writing retreat") -- we all log in and share our plan, then do 3 pomodoros with 10 minutes between. That's some sweet writing, and a celebration at the end

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Why it's not working

I take 30 minutes and list all the reasons it's not working. I don't know enough about X, I hate my topic, the fridge needs cleaning, all those thousands of reasons that the writing isn't coming together. Then I pick a fixable one and work on that for 15 minutes.

I often get farther in those 15 minutes than in the previous day, TBH

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"To whom am I talking?"

Set aside the content of your project and brainstorm the people in your world. With whom are you engaged -- whose work is driving your thinking right now, who do you hope picks up your book/article, who do you want to overwrite so that the TRUTH is seen, and so on.

Then, revisit your outline or bullet point list to see WHERE you're going to talk to them, and explain something for your favorite imagined reader in words they'd understand

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Jump a section

Okay, this part isn't ready to be written. So put in a placeholder and jump to a section that's going to go rip-roaringly fast. That part where you deconstruct someone's argument and explain it from a different perspective. The part where you're describing your data and just have to get that down on page. The part where you justify your methodology

Progress doesn't have to be linear, it just has to be progress

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Write to Cousin Tim

Sometimes it helps to spend a writing session explaining your project to an outsider. This is what I'm doing, this is why I'm doing it, this is how it's frustrating, this is how it's going to be so cool when it's done. I often draft an email to my Cousin Tim. (Sometimes I even send it – with a front-end explanation of getting over the stuck-ness. Groove on your weird, right?)

Then lift whatever sentences are ready, and turn other things into bullet points

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Don't finish

This is one from the "how to write" lit: Leave yourself mid-thought at the end of the day.

I'm terrible at this, but it's a great concept. You end your writing session with the question or thought mid-formulated, so when you sit down tomorrow it's easy to pick up the thread.

My best solution on this is to end the day with an all caps question for the next day: WHY DOES THIS DATA SUGGEST XXXX and then when I log in I just have to answer that question.

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Don't write: dictate

I do this one a TON: I do a really rough outline (half-page at most) for a chapter or a section, playing around with the order until it makes sense.

Then I pick up a voice recorder (Hello, cellphone) and I dictate the "lecture" in 5 minute chunks. Then I type it up and edit it.

I've found that larger (e.g. 45 minute) chunks are harder to work with, but in principle it's just the "talk It out" that's important here.

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Go for a walk

I'm a walker. I pose myself a problem, and go for a 2 mile walk. At the end of the first half-mile, I've usually got a paragraph. At the midpoint, I may need to pull off the trail, sit down and throw a bunch of stuff onto the paper. I almost always make at least one critically important connection or have a significant insight.

(You can combine this with dictation, but I've found that for me walking and writing are a better match for large-scale progress)

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Whiteboard it

There's something uniquely satisfying about standing at a whiteboard with colored markers making it make sense. So do that. And then keep working the details, and then the explanation for those details, until you're looking for the fine-tip marker and a spare bit of space, at which point it's probably time to capture all that writing on the computer.

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Poster-paper brain-dump

Poster paper

Get a giant piece of paper -- butcherblock paper or those poster paper things -- and tape them up in your hallway.

Use those to do a brain dump. I do associative outlining in a kind of spider-web diagrammish sort of way, but I also have random blocks of "this is in there too"

I might layer that with what have I read / what do I need to read

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The business card approach

This is the opposite of butcher paper: go small. One thought per card. I used up most of a box of old business cards on this a couple of articles ago -- each idea goes on a card, and I went as FAST as I could go. I might do 7 on a topic (go fast) and then switch to some other aspect of the content (go fast), and then... I did 3 separate sessions of making cards, and then sorted them out like a sunflower with its petals.

Then I typed it up and wrote transitions. I should do this again; I made such AMAZING progress

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Read more

This one is risky, b/c there's always more to read. But, sometimes I need a better overview of the topic than I've got activated, so I do the spreadsheet reading approach -- what's my literature? What gap was each author trying to fill? what methods did they use? What evidence do they have that I want, what findings did they make that make me feel strongly. What 3 quotes might I use from this.

I highlight what I want to be sure to cite, & write from there

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Scrub the tub

This may be everyone's favorite standby for writer’s block, but hear me out. Sometimes, following up on that urge to avoid gives you time for the ideas to gel. Scrubbing the bathtub or organizing the cabinets IS part of the writing process

But set the bargain in advance, and follow through:

Okay, I'll scrub the tub. But then I'm going to write 5 sentences. Or bullet point. Or stand at my whiteboard for 5 min

It's not a lot, but remember the adage:

Little by little, and sooner or later it all gets done

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Put in the time

Sometimes, you just have to sit with it not coming quickly. A lot of how-to-write advice is about word count, and as a counting type person that speaks to my itch.

But in reality, it's the time with the project that is making the difference. Whether it's a 10-minute session or a half-day, try to USE the time you've got as best you can. Measure important progress: I connected this idea with that one and now I need to explain that = progress

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Move to the slide-deck version

Most of us work in a slide-deck world, where our prose needs a visual accompaniment in some formats, and not in others. If your prose for the narrative version gets stuck, flip to the slide-deck and use visualization to outline the section. Is this section 4 slides or 5? What images will it use? What will you say about them? Oh wait, that’s prose. Now move it back to your narrative and adjust the text with that necessary shift of style

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Brown noise

Is your busy-beaver brain in the way of thinking about this current project? Turn on some brown noise (like white noise, but deeper, and a bit more irregular). It rumbles, and gives visceral me something to do so that prose-generating me can actually tend to task instead of checking in on that other layer of thought (I prefer brown noise to music, since when music is going I invariably wind up listening too actively to it -- bad for generating prose!)

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Small chunky bits

My last thought for today is that it's okay for writing to be in the in-betweens. I have written a paragraph standing in line at the grocery store, dictated the transition to the next section while waiting at the stoplight, run in from weeding the garden to make note of those three examples which are perfect for section 7. All of that is writing, even though it's not that "scholar sitting at the desk" approach that my advisor used. Just write. You'll get there.

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My take-away:

Writing isn’t always about grand revelations or hours of uninterrupted work. Sometimes it’s those small, in-between moments that add up. It’s the thinking that you do when you’re doing other things. (Why is it that the BEST ideas come to us in the shower? When you’re deep in the throes of a project, have a pen and pad EVERYWHERE so you capture the bits that help with the session tomorrow!)

In other words, your goal isn’t to write the whole thing, it’s to build momentum by writing the next thing. Whether you're outlining the chapter or just scribbling notes on the back of a receipt, trust that the process is working.

The words will come, and when they do, the silence will feel like a distant memory.