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Some of these issues extend beyond such narrow groups. Office hours as a concept are easily one of the weirdest and most confusing things ever because they simu

Some of these issues extend beyond such narrow groups. Office hours as a concept are easily one of the weirdest and most confusing things ever because they simultaneously encompass at least two entirely different disharmonious concepts. Are they (a) time set aside so those who need significant help can get it without disrupting class, or (b) time aside so students can chat and schmooze with their professors? The reality is that they're portrayed as (a) while really being significantly (b). And this can be very confusing, unless you come from a self-centered elite worldview where (a) and (b) aren't highly differentiated. "Why does everyone both tell me to go to office hours like it's it club, but then make it sound like it's for people who don't understand the assignment? If I go and understand the assignment won't it just be awkward?" You definitely don't have to come from a poor or disadvantaged background to find the whole thing difficult to figure out. The whole concept of "discussing your grade" is another overlap. People from a certain strata do this constantly and it's a perfect example of something bluring (a) and (b).

shantly 7y ago
> And this can be very confusing, unless you come from a self-centered elite worldview where (a) and (b) aren't highly differentiated. I'm a white dude from a family that was totally fine financially (though more due to good money management than sky-high income) so I can't and wouldn't claim any disadvantage on those fronts, obviously, but socially there's just so much my upbringing didn't prepare me for in the world, or didn't expose me to. We 100% did not run in privileged social circles, even a bit. Rural poor, mostly, in my extended family and such. It's been wild learning how differently those with other social backgrounds see the world, and what's considered acceptable behavior. It would never, ever have occurred to me to attend office hours just to get to know my professors. Woulda seemed pretty dickish, actually. But it's normal and expected and confers all kinds of advantages. Go figure.
- secabeen 7y ago
  >It would never, ever have occurred to me to attend office hours just to get to know my professors. Woulda seemed pretty dickish, actually. But it's normal and expected and confers all kinds of advantages. Go figure. I wouldn't necessarily say that people go to office hours just to get to know their professors, that would be presumptuous. What people do do is go when they are temporarily stuck on a concept, or want to work through a problem in the exercises, or when developing an idea for a paper. All temporary, normal steps in the process, that most students could get by on their own, or by working in a group with other students or the TA. Privileged students feel comfortable going all the way to the professor for help (even just a little help), in a way that less privileged students don't seem to.
  - Izkata 7y ago
    > I wouldn't necessarily say that people go to office hours just to get to know their professors, that would be presumptuous. This. I was a teacher's assistant in college for 3 years for the introductory programming courses, and most years there were only a handful of students who bothered coming to my office hours. One semester in particular stands out, one student came in every single week, not directly for help, but because class was during her part-time job and as a single mother she had no free time at home. It was the only chance she had to get an overview of the lesson (she had a good mind for the topic and didn't need much instruction from me) and complete the assignments each week. Just being in the same room like that for extended periods, conversations tend to wander - or outside life intrudes through phone calls - hence how I know what her situation was.
friendlybus 7y ago
>The whole concept of "discussing your grade" is another overlap. People from a certain strata do this constantly and it's a perfect example of something bluring (a) and (b). I've seen this happen with working class people in high universities. It's not a class issue, you can learn it from others.
- ACow_Adonis 7y ago
  Except it is a class issue: just like you CAN learn dining etiquette from others, unless you have been presented with the idea that dining etiquette is something that you should/need to learn, there is no obvious way to pick up it's even a thing that you should be focusing on, because everything in the culture places euphamisms and misdirection between the phenomenon and what's really going on, and you've never even been to a formal dinner party (might not even know what one is). I am in no way lower class, but I was brought up with a distinctly meritorious mindset (and one that I'm generally thankful for on the whole). But it places one at a huge disadvantage in our education system. Office hours were for people who didn't understand the assignment or the material. To go otherwise would be borderline offensive and waste important people's time. What else could they possibly be for? Similarly, what is there to discuss about a grade? It makes as much sense as 'I'm going to talk to my lecturer about the number 7'. The idea of running drafts or queries about assignments past a lecturer or tutor beforehand still strikes me emotionally as, well, cheating. It's not fair, people wouldn't give individual students unique insights into the assessment. How absurd! They'd have the integrity to resign from such a clearly corrupt system before something like that took hold! No one would stand for it! Kissing arse? Getting your face known? But assessment is objective so it would be pointless at best, unethical towards both self and society at worst... Of course now, older and wiser, I know better. But at the time, every message most children receive is to explicitly hide how the social system actually works and reinforce the divisions that are actually there and pretend that systems are objective measurements of ranking ability.
  - anon9001 7y ago
    It also took me a while to realize that things don't run on a merit system. My theory is this: If you're smart enough to think that merit should matter, it's easy to fall into the trap of meritocracy. If you look around and realize, obviously, that this is not a meritocracy, then value must be derived from something that isn't merit. Spoiler: It's relationships that matter, not merit.
catalogia 7y ago
Somehow I made it through four years of university without learning until today that "office hours" were ever anything other than (a)...
amalcon 7y ago
I remember one friend back in college who constantly asked for -- and received -- deadline extensions on assignments. Usually, there was not what I would consider a good reason for this (illness, family emergency, etc) but rather something under that student's control (social obligations, just not being happy with the work so far, things like that). For a while, I felt like that student had a superpower: if I asked for any kind of special treatment for such a reason, I would surely just be lectured about personal responsibility. Our other friends were split on this question: either agreeing with me entirely, or not even understanding why one might think that. Until one day, when a professor invited me to his office. It turned out, he wanted to discuss an uncharacteristically poor grade on a particular exam. I was honest, that I simply wasn't feeling myself that day, and I'd been up late for a social engagement the night before. I expected it to just end there. He offered to let me take the exam again, right then in an unoccupied room, and advised me that next time I should just say something. In some ways, that was the most valuable thing I learned in college: that authority figures are just people, and while some are jerks, some legitimately just want to be helpful.
- ACow_Adonis 7y ago
  I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic in characterizing those actions as 'just wanting to be helpful', but until I was a bit more world weary, i would have expected what your professor did in that story to be grounds for instant firing and utterly unacceptable (and would have expected everyone else to share my opinion), as it strikes at the very core of the integrity of an education system.
  - jlev1 7y ago
    The vehemence of this response surprises me. First, from the anecdote, there's no particular reason to think this student was the only one who was given a chance to take a make-up test. Second, re: the 'integrity of an education system', there are already all kinds of problems with using tests and exams to evaluate student skill, and one serious flaw is how sensitive they are to random fluctuations -- like being tired or sick the day of the test. Many educators hold this view, and professors often have a lot of flexibility in how they structure their tests (and classes more generally), compared to say, high school teachers. I am curious about the circumstances of the parent post. In a 600-person Psych 101 class, I would agree it would be inappropriate to offer makeup tests (unless they were available to all students). But in a 15-person upper-level class? There's no grading curve, the whole process is basically individualized.
jlev1 7y ago
This is just... not accurate. The closest I can agree with your description is that (a) getting help on specific questions about the class, is not highly differentiated from (b') having conversations about the class (or about your studies) with the professor. But (b') talking about school and (b) schmoozing are two different things. Speaking from personal experience (I'm an academic in my late 20s / early 30s, and I know a lot of fellow academics, and we talk about things like teaching and office hours), office hours are for helping students. They're not some kind of country club -- I spend my office hours working on math problems with students, giving study advice, and sometimes talking about my students' academic plans (e.g. recommending other classes for them to take, or telling them about resources they can access on campus). The injustice in this situation isn't that "rich students are getting unfair help", it's that poor students aren't accessing this appropriate help. Going to office hours, asking professors for help, asking for the occasional (well-justified) extension -- these are not "entitled", they are all perfectly appropriate things to do. (To add, I see a weird vibe of resentment running through this and a handful of other posts. For what it's worth, I will say that academics basically universally loathe students who suck up to them and complain about their grades. So we're agreed in that...)
- Glyptodon 7y ago
  > "Working on math problems with students, giving study advice, and sometimes talking about my students' academic plans (e.g. recommending other classes for them to take, or telling them about resources they can access on campus)" By your own words basically it's potentially kind of a social group where a subset of students get extra instruction, advice, and help, while maybe making a personal connection with their professor. I'm not saying that's evil. But it's definitely a resource that some are better able to leverage than others for numerous reasons. (Which also isn't inherently a bad thing, either.) So while going to see your prof and asking for help is reasonable, it's not that simple, and viewing that as the extent of what office hours are is very reductive. During my own time in college many profs emphasized that they absolutely don't give extensions, that you're all adults now, take responsibility, etc. I even had one math professor give the entire class a lecture (I quote) about "In computing we have RtFM, while here we have RtFT: Read the Fucking Textbook," because some the questions he was getting during class were a bit rough. And of course the textbook students were supposed to "RtFT" was also a bit rough and written by his own department so they could make money of forcing students to buy it. I think pretty much everyone in the class was terrified of going to his office hours after that lecture. This isn't to say there aren't plenty of very decent professors. I once accidentally swapped two things on my calendar and missed a final. It was terrifying. I thought it was going to be a life altering disaster, but the prof let me take the final in their office. But up until the moment they did that and said it was okay, I pretty much thought the rest of my life was going to be severely complicated by a calendar screw-up. But everything is really just a morass of YMMV, cross your fingers. Maybe more to the point, I tend to remember an open door policy of some sort always being much more comfortable than office hours. It didn't feel like you'd have to reschedule work hours to make office hours, and it didn't feel like you were reaching by asking a prof to meet outside of office hours because you had another class during that time, etc. And yes, many professors are happy to do things in a more ad-hoc way. It's just that a system that was supposed to be a simple way to make it easy to get help really isn't as straightforward or as helpful as it looks at first glance, and many students have a great deal of uncertainty about professor interactions since they can be extremely variable. But no matter how things are done, there's a big ambiguity zone. Is spending 40 minutes with your prof discussing a potential paper topic fine, or is it taking away from another student who is struggling with with something more foundational? What would happen if every student in the whole class tried to go to the same office hours for that? Are office hours only a thing that even "works" at all because only a select minority of students feel casual enough about them to take advantage? If a student thinks it's not right to get special help on something that's only ambiguously a problem are they at fault or not? If you want to learn more about something that was only mentioned in passing and not course related is going for that okay or not? If I'm at office hours trying to get help on a problem and the person in front of me is just arguing about why they should get 5 more points on the last exam is that alright? I mean it's not like I hate office hours. I just think there one of many parts of college with good intentions that are in practice vastly more complicated, messy, and weird unless you come in very capable of being ...breezy.

shantly 7y ago

> And this can be very confusing, unless you come from a self-centered elite worldview where (a) and (b) aren't highly differentiated. I'm a white dude from a family that was totally fine financially (though more due to good money management than sky-high income) so I can't and wouldn't claim any disadvantage on those fronts, obviously, but socially there's just so much my upbringing didn't prepare me for in the world, or didn't expose me to. We 100% did not run in privileged social circles, even a bit. Rural poor, mostly, in my extended family and such. It's been wild learning how differently those with other social backgrounds see the world, and what's considered acceptable behavior. It would never, ever have occurred to me to attend office hours just to get to know my professors. Woulda seemed pretty dickish, actually. But it's normal and expected and confers all kinds of advantages. Go figure.

secabeen 7y ago
>It would never, ever have occurred to me to attend office hours just to get to know my professors. Woulda seemed pretty dickish, actually. But it's normal and expected and confers all kinds of advantages. Go figure. I wouldn't necessarily say that people go to office hours just to get to know their professors, that would be presumptuous. What people do do is go when they are temporarily stuck on a concept, or want to work through a problem in the exercises, or when developing an idea for a paper. All temporary, normal steps in the process, that most students could get by on their own, or by working in a group with other students or the TA. Privileged students feel comfortable going all the way to the professor for help (even just a little help), in a way that less privileged students don't seem to.
- Izkata 7y ago
  > I wouldn't necessarily say that people go to office hours just to get to know their professors, that would be presumptuous. This. I was a teacher's assistant in college for 3 years for the introductory programming courses, and most years there were only a handful of students who bothered coming to my office hours. One semester in particular stands out, one student came in every single week, not directly for help, but because class was during her part-time job and as a single mother she had no free time at home. It was the only chance she had to get an overview of the lesson (she had a good mind for the topic and didn't need much instruction from me) and complete the assignments each week. Just being in the same room like that for extended periods, conversations tend to wander - or outside life intrudes through phone calls - hence how I know what her situation was.

friendlybus 7y ago

>The whole concept of "discussing your grade" is another overlap. People from a certain strata do this constantly and it's a perfect example of something bluring (a) and (b). I've seen this happen with working class people in high universities. It's not a class issue, you can learn it from others.

ACow_Adonis 7y ago
Except it is a class issue: just like you CAN learn dining etiquette from others, unless you have been presented with the idea that dining etiquette is something that you should/need to learn, there is no obvious way to pick up it's even a thing that you should be focusing on, because everything in the culture places euphamisms and misdirection between the phenomenon and what's really going on, and you've never even been to a formal dinner party (might not even know what one is). I am in no way lower class, but I was brought up with a distinctly meritorious mindset (and one that I'm generally thankful for on the whole). But it places one at a huge disadvantage in our education system. Office hours were for people who didn't understand the assignment or the material. To go otherwise would be borderline offensive and waste important people's time. What else could they possibly be for? Similarly, what is there to discuss about a grade? It makes as much sense as 'I'm going to talk to my lecturer about the number 7'. The idea of running drafts or queries about assignments past a lecturer or tutor beforehand still strikes me emotionally as, well, cheating. It's not fair, people wouldn't give individual students unique insights into the assessment. How absurd! They'd have the integrity to resign from such a clearly corrupt system before something like that took hold! No one would stand for it! Kissing arse? Getting your face known? But assessment is objective so it would be pointless at best, unethical towards both self and society at worst... Of course now, older and wiser, I know better. But at the time, every message most children receive is to explicitly hide how the social system actually works and reinforce the divisions that are actually there and pretend that systems are objective measurements of ranking ability.
- anon9001 7y ago
  It also took me a while to realize that things don't run on a merit system. My theory is this: If you're smart enough to think that merit should matter, it's easy to fall into the trap of meritocracy. If you look around and realize, obviously, that this is not a meritocracy, then value must be derived from something that isn't merit. Spoiler: It's relationships that matter, not merit.

catalogia 7y ago

Somehow I made it through four years of university without learning until today that "office hours" were ever anything other than (a)...

amalcon 7y ago

I remember one friend back in college who constantly asked for -- and received -- deadline extensions on assignments. Usually, there was not what I would consider a good reason for this (illness, family emergency, etc) but rather something under that student's control (social obligations, just not being happy with the work so far, things like that). For a while, I felt like that student had a superpower: if I asked for any kind of special treatment for such a reason, I would surely just be lectured about personal responsibility. Our other friends were split on this question: either agreeing with me entirely, or not even understanding why one might think that. Until one day, when a professor invited me to his office. It turned out, he wanted to discuss an uncharacteristically poor grade on a particular exam. I was honest, that I simply wasn't feeling myself that day, and I'd been up late for a social engagement the night before. I expected it to just end there. He offered to let me take the exam again, right then in an unoccupied room, and advised me that next time I should just say something. In some ways, that was the most valuable thing I learned in college: that authority figures are just people, and while some are jerks, some legitimately just want to be helpful.

ACow_Adonis 7y ago
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic in characterizing those actions as 'just wanting to be helpful', but until I was a bit more world weary, i would have expected what your professor did in that story to be grounds for instant firing and utterly unacceptable (and would have expected everyone else to share my opinion), as it strikes at the very core of the integrity of an education system.
- jlev1 7y ago
  The vehemence of this response surprises me. First, from the anecdote, there's no particular reason to think this student was the only one who was given a chance to take a make-up test. Second, re: the 'integrity of an education system', there are already all kinds of problems with using tests and exams to evaluate student skill, and one serious flaw is how sensitive they are to random fluctuations -- like being tired or sick the day of the test. Many educators hold this view, and professors often have a lot of flexibility in how they structure their tests (and classes more generally), compared to say, high school teachers. I am curious about the circumstances of the parent post. In a 600-person Psych 101 class, I would agree it would be inappropriate to offer makeup tests (unless they were available to all students). But in a 15-person upper-level class? There's no grading curve, the whole process is basically individualized.

jlev1 7y ago

This is just... not accurate. The closest I can agree with your description is that (a) getting help on specific questions about the class, is not highly differentiated from (b') having conversations about the class (or about your studies) with the professor. But (b') talking about school and (b) schmoozing are two different things. Speaking from personal experience (I'm an academic in my late 20s / early 30s, and I know a lot of fellow academics, and we talk about things like teaching and office hours), office hours are for helping students. They're not some kind of country club -- I spend my office hours working on math problems with students, giving study advice, and sometimes talking about my students' academic plans (e.g. recommending other classes for them to take, or telling them about resources they can access on campus). The injustice in this situation isn't that "rich students are getting unfair help", it's that poor students aren't accessing this appropriate help. Going to office hours, asking professors for help, asking for the occasional (well-justified) extension -- these are not "entitled", they are all perfectly appropriate things to do. (To add, I see a weird vibe of resentment running through this and a handful of other posts. For what it's worth, I will say that academics basically universally loathe students who suck up to them and complain about their grades. So we're agreed in that...)

Glyptodon 7y ago
> "Working on math problems with students, giving study advice, and sometimes talking about my students' academic plans (e.g. recommending other classes for them to take, or telling them about resources they can access on campus)" By your own words basically it's potentially kind of a social group where a subset of students get extra instruction, advice, and help, while maybe making a personal connection with their professor. I'm not saying that's evil. But it's definitely a resource that some are better able to leverage than others for numerous reasons. (Which also isn't inherently a bad thing, either.) So while going to see your prof and asking for help is reasonable, it's not that simple, and viewing that as the extent of what office hours are is very reductive. During my own time in college many profs emphasized that they absolutely don't give extensions, that you're all adults now, take responsibility, etc. I even had one math professor give the entire class a lecture (I quote) about "In computing we have RtFM, while here we have RtFT: Read the Fucking Textbook," because some the questions he was getting during class were a bit rough. And of course the textbook students were supposed to "RtFT" was also a bit rough and written by his own department so they could make money of forcing students to buy it. I think pretty much everyone in the class was terrified of going to his office hours after that lecture. This isn't to say there aren't plenty of very decent professors. I once accidentally swapped two things on my calendar and missed a final. It was terrifying. I thought it was going to be a life altering disaster, but the prof let me take the final in their office. But up until the moment they did that and said it was okay, I pretty much thought the rest of my life was going to be severely complicated by a calendar screw-up. But everything is really just a morass of YMMV, cross your fingers. Maybe more to the point, I tend to remember an open door policy of some sort always being much more comfortable than office hours. It didn't feel like you'd have to reschedule work hours to make office hours, and it didn't feel like you were reaching by asking a prof to meet outside of office hours because you had another class during that time, etc. And yes, many professors are happy to do things in a more ad-hoc way. It's just that a system that was supposed to be a simple way to make it easy to get help really isn't as straightforward or as helpful as it looks at first glance, and many students have a great deal of uncertainty about professor interactions since they can be extremely variable. But no matter how things are done, there's a big ambiguity zone. Is spending 40 minutes with your prof discussing a potential paper topic fine, or is it taking away from another student who is struggling with with something more foundational? What would happen if every student in the whole class tried to go to the same office hours for that? Are office hours only a thing that even "works" at all because only a select minority of students feel casual enough about them to take advantage? If a student thinks it's not right to get special help on something that's only ambiguously a problem are they at fault or not? If you want to learn more about something that was only mentioned in passing and not course related is going for that okay or not? If I'm at office hours trying to get help on a problem and the person in front of me is just arguing about why they should get 5 more points on the last exam is that alright? I mean it's not like I hate office hours. I just think there one of many parts of college with good intentions that are in practice vastly more complicated, messy, and weird unless you come in very capable of being ...breezy.