Yes.
According to the forums over at the Chronicle of Higher Ed., there are some schools switching the terminology from “Office Hours” to “Student Hours,” as it seems like many students view office hours as a professor’s time to get professor stuff done, and a student coming in would interrupt.
I (mostly) enjoy it when students take the time to come to my office hours. I had a student a couple of years ago who was ESL (I teach English) and basically would have me run off grammar worksheets so that she could practice. She’d do them and we’d go over them together. She was in my office at least twice a week, and I didn’t mind it at all–she was legitimately trying to get better.
Now, there are some students who come to office hours quite a bit and are a hassle–either they want to discuss inane topics over and over, or they want to quibble over an extra point or two on an assignment, and those students are not my favorites. But as a general rule, yes, the reason I’m sitting in my office with the door open is to consult with students. No, I’m not going to teach an entire lesson you missed, but if I can help with specific, answerable questions, I’m more than happy to.
Having said that, the vast majority of my office hours are basically just me sitting around grading papers. Because of the reluctance of students to come, I’m usually able to get all of my stuff graded at work rather than at home. I dig that.
As to whether we actually read those end-of-term papers–I do, and I don’t personally know anyone who doesn’t. But when you, like me, grade upwards of a quarter-million student words per semester, you develop the ability to read and evaluate pretty fast. In fact, it’s not the reading/grading that is a time sink–it’s the commenting. That’s why I think lots of profs assign the paper for the last day; since you won’ t see the students again, you don’t have to write comments.
I tried it that way, but for a freshman composition class, it didn’t work so well. My job is to help students improve their writing, and the only real way to do that is to have them practice and then see how they’ve done. So now I take up the term paper 2 weeks before finals, so I can have them graded, commented, and back by the time class ends.
Thanks! Here’s another one-what’s the deal with page requirements? If I can cover the topic in 6 pages, but the requirement is 8 or 10, I’m just going to write it in 6 and then add a lot of fluff.
What’s the point? I guess I could see a worry that the lazy students would write it in 2, but it’s going to be a lazy 2 page paper anyway so the grade would reflect that rather than the length…right?
Well, in my case, my department requires a certain minimum number of student-generated words per semester (3,500 for freshman comp. courses.) So I spread that out into about 4 smaller essays.
For term papers, I’m pretty generous in the word count–I normally give about a thousand words of leeway, for exactly the reason you describe. If a student can do it in 1,500 words, why require them to fluff it up to 2,500? The reason for a minimum count is, in the words of our college president, “students don’t do optional.” If I just said “write whatever gets the point across,” there would be some 2 page essays.
I’m relatively young, though (30) and my students tell me I seem to be more progressive than other instructors. I allow them to begin sentences with conjunctions, or split infinitives, etc., for style purposes. I have a feeling there are other instructors who pick an arbitrary page count for the same reason some doctors prescribe antibiotics for the common cold: to justify the class or themselves.
I did. I taught a course on history of math that got a lot of arts types (also education for whom it was compulsory) and I gave them the choice of taking a mathematical final or doing a term paper on math historical subject. I really enjoyed reading them, which were often well done (I retired 11 years ago and nowadays I would worry they were just copied off the web). I absolutely hated marking finals.
As for office hours, I rarely had students come. I virtually begged them to, but I must have intimidated them. I enjoyed talking one on one to students. Unlike most of my colleagues I also enjoyed advising students. I also begged them to ask questions in class, but, aside from trying to discern what was going to be on tests or finals, they hardly ever did. Not that they didn’t have misconceptions; I never understood why they were so reluctant.
This is not what you asked but it’s similar.
If a Prof/TA asks you to show your work (calculations), show your damn work!
YES - we really DO go through each step to see where you went wrong. That way we can see why you didn’t get the problem correct and we can help. Putting down “12” makes me think you either guessed or cheated and it assures me you don’t give a shit about the class.
Yes, as much as it’s sometimes tempting not to.
The length requirement, as I see it, is really a guideline for the student’s benefit. If I assign, say, a 6 to 8-page paper, it’s usually because I know that the assignment CANNOT be done well in less than five pages, and the average student can’t do it well in less than six (because the average student writes a lot of fluff – the first paragraph is nearly always full of throat-clearing, and there are invariably sentences that are much longer than they need to be to get the point across). The truly brilliant student who writes an excellent five-page paper with no fat on it gets a pass, but I don’t advertise this fact because most students who think they are truly brilliant aren’t. More often, students who feel like they’re tapped out after four or five pages are getting an early warning that there’s something wrong with the quality of the paper; it’s normally a sign that the thesis is too obvious and insufficiently complex, or they don’t have enough evidence to support their argument, or the ideas aren’t developed enough. Similarly, if the paper is ten pages long, this should let the student know right away that the topic is too broad or the writing too wordy.
Of course the page limit doesn’t always work; there are plenty of students who have a two-page idea, and then rather than rethinking or complicating the idea, they decide to pad the paper out with four pages of plot summary. But it is meant to give the student a sense of the appropriate length range for the assignment.
Not only do we want students to come, but because so few actually do come, those who do get the equivalent of “small college” treatment–as this example above demonstrates. (I don’t know what school this was, but there’s no reason why it couldn’t have been a large one.)
When choosing a school, you shouldn’t rule out large universities simply because you expect it to be impersonal. You can get personal attention if you go to office hours with legitimate questions and concerns. You’ll be in the minority.
As a quick follow up, do professors and TA’s like getting emails from students with questions about the material being covered?
I think that could get very annoying from students who are struggling to learn material and get frustrated.
For some math and science classes though, I can think it would be great. I can remember a couple of times when I spent hours working on a problem that had a typo in the solution! I would have loved to been able to send an email with my work and ask if I had made a mistake or did the answer section have a mistake.
Yes, of course.
Yes! We like talking about the subject to which we’ve devoted our careers.
No, I always hated it as a TA. They couldn’t write very well, and often would get pissed off if you didn’t respond within a few days (even though I always stipulated on my syllabus that I checked my e-mail a few times per week).
It depends. When they schedule their office hours at 7AM, you kind of wonder…
My college teachers absolutely did (the school has an “open doors” policy, where there’s no such thing as “office hours”: if the teacher’s door is open, you can walk in - in turn, students usually try to set up appointments beforehand and, if they don’t have one, begin by asking whether it’s a good time); as a TA, I was thrilled with any student who actually bothered come to ask for help.
- I had to be there whether there were students with me or not. I couldn’t do research during “office hours” (in theory I could have read, but I didn’t want to, in order to look approachable - I frown when I’m concentrating) and homework for my own classes took half an hour at most. Doo-do-do, de doo-do do-do… c’mon guys give me something to do, I bore easily!
- My “office hours” were open for any student with any kind of science questions. I got to interact with my students and with students not my own, to help people with math, biology, physics as well as chemistry; it forced me out of the one-track-mind research can drag you into.
- When I got some of my own students, I got additional insights into what kind of things they had problems with, thus I was able to help them better in class as well.
- Since my American students blew goats at helping each other, seeing them go to someone who actually could and would help was always nice! Between the ones who didn’t want to help anybody “because if they get better, my grades get curved down” and the ones who thought that asking for help was somehow forbidden… aaargh, it’s been 15 years and I can still feel my blood pressure go up! (Damnit, this morning I couldn’t donate blood due to slightly-low BP, where was this thread when I needed it :p)
Realted query: is there a ratio of classtime/office hours? i.e. if you teach 6hrs/wk, you have say 3hrs. office hours?
I never heard of such a ratio; when I was TAing I was usually required to teach a certain amount of hours/week and be available for tutoring another fixed amount, but if I didn’t happen to be teaching for a term I was still required to tutor the same amount (until my fellowship’s conditions forbade it - the uni figured that considering me a “research assistant” was better than having me teach and thus lose the fellowship). None of my teachers had any kind of ratios: both the undergrads ones in Spain with the open-door policy and the ones in the US with limited office hours had them whether they were teaching or not.
I was a TA for a while. Great years. I enjoyed office hours, my hours were by appointment only, so I was answering a lot of questions by e-mail. It’s ALWAYS better to get clarification on something than to guess or gloss over it on an assignment.
I never begrudged anyone for coming for help, no matter how mundane their questions. Every TA, every prof, we were all 1st year undergrads once upon a time.
I’m not mad for office hours, just to sound a contrary note. I have no problem at all with students coming to see me and actually operate an open door policy, but my experience of them (office hours) has been disappointing - I’ve largely taught final year courses were the die is cast as far as learning goes. They’re into the final stretch and office hours seem to attract students at either end of the spectrum - the very strong who are just there because they like approval, and the very weak who are miles behind and looking to make it up in 2 months.
If someone’s 4 years 10 months into their chemistry degree and can’t draw an enolate, I’ll usually just change the subject and speak about the football because there’s simply nothing to be done. Earlier years seem more interactive, there’s opportunity to change the course of the oil tanker.
Emailed queries usually look pretty bad from my pov. I’ll answer something serious but anything like ‘Hey just doing last year’s past paper question and no idea on the mechanism yeah? What’s going on? Kthksbye’ just gets deleted.
I’m not disappointed, per se, if no one shows, but I go into my office hours fully expecting students to show up and am certainly not perturbed if they do. Often, unless the student is there to grade grub, office hour visits can be a lot of fun and good one on one time.
Per our contract, full time faculty must have 3 hours a week.
Our contract minimums, per week:
15 contact hours (classroom teaching)
10 office hours
5 on campus hours
Minimum 30 hrs. per week
I teach at a community college, so our load of 5 classes per semester will be higher than those at a research-focused university.
I work a bit of a strange schedule, mostly because I teach on-site at an area high school (and broadcast through interactive television to 3 more,) teach a night class as an overload, and live an hour away from work. I’ll post my average week as a response, since I accidentally hit submit and only have a minute to edit…