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I genuinely believe a lot of professors are out of touch, especially around this point: >Fourth, students seemed reluctant to come to the office seeking help.

I genuinely believe a lot of professors are out of touch, especially around this point: >Fourth, students seemed reluctant to come to the office seeking help. [...] I suspect there is an increased factor of intimidation associated with being lost in the material and asking a much older male professor for help. Let's ignore the weird second half assumption about 'older males' for now... Young people do not have a concept of 'come to the office seeking help'. In my years of professional experience I have not once gone to someone's office to seek help. Instead, people email each other, text, chat, video call... help can be synchronous or asynchronous. I wonder how many times a student has taken time out of their day to trek across campus to the professor's office only to find the professor away, or head-down busy grading papers, or just about to leave? Young people can be extremely sensitive to how they impose themselves on other people. Professors need to get with the times and make themselves available through channels that their students are more comfortable with, and I think this should include allowing students to get help with the material anonymously. (I don't intend to direct this at this specific professor, but the bemoaning of students not seeking help I find is often linked to professors thinking it's still 1972)

stdbrouw 4y ago
It does seem to be One Weird Trick that nobody knows about: bother the professor and the TAs whenever you need help – whether that's over email or during office hours – and most of them, most of the time, will help. Never had the courage to make use of office hours when I was still in college, and now as a TA I realize how much of a fool I was not to.
- zhdc1 4y ago
  Courses in almost all universities are evaluated. Those evaluations actually do matter.
bee_rider 4y ago
I mean, every professor sets aside time for office hours, but ignoring them while you are getting in bad shape in a class is a time-honored tradition.
capnrefsmmat 4y ago
> I wonder how many times a student has taken time out of their day to trek across campus to the professor's office only to find the professor away, or head-down busy grading papers, or just about to leave? Typically, professors announce office hours during which they will be available to answer questions, so this is not an issue. From a professor's perspective, online options for tutoring students are vastly inferior. Helping a student understand a concept is interactive: you must ask the student questions, listen to their explanations, and formulate explanations to give back to them. That is very difficult in a text-based medium, particularly in a course involving mathematics or other things that don't really fit in plain text. (And while I can write LaTeX math quickly, my students cannot.) You'll also often have multiple students asking questions. In person, it's easy to group together related questions, and to jump from student to student -- or to say "why don't you talk to Sarah, she's working on the same problem." In an anonymous online setting, you lose that, and students can't connect to each other. I've used asynchronous online platforms like Piazza, and you lose all the opportunity to listen to students and figure out what exactly they're thinking. Instead you just provide a wall of text for them. And of course students learn to expect responses within hours at any time of day, including weekends, and start getting annoyed if you don't respond quickly to a question posted at 4am Saturday morning. You start to dread the Piazza notifications. Yes, you can set expectations and insist you only answer during certain hours, but other courses will have that one fanatical TA who answers at all hours, and so your students will still be annoyed. edit: That being said, you're right about students being more willing to use anonymous options. When I lectured online due to COVID, and students could send a direct message to me in the Zoom chat, I got loads of questions. I had to learn to keep the chat open on a second monitor to follow the questions and respond in real-time. As soon as we switched back to in-person teaching, the questions stopped, and the class would just stare at me blankly if I asked if they had questions. But I'm not sure how to replicate that option in person.
- musingsole 4y ago
  > Typically, professors announce office hours during which they will be available to answer questions, so this is not an issue. Saying something once or even a couple times that is at odds with the listener's inherent behavior doesn't count as communicating. Insisting it does sounds like the type of out of touch professors GP is talking about.
kgwgk 4y ago
> Young people can be extremely sensitive to how they impose themselves on other people. > Professors need to get with the times and make themselves available through channels that their students are more comfortable with Let’s all do whatever the students believe it is more convenient for them, so they don’t have to impose themselves :-) (For the benefit of young people who may confused about the timeline of technology in the dark ages, telephones were already quite popular in 1972.)
- musingsole 4y ago
  > Let’s all do whatever the student believe At this point, I'll trust student sentiment over a professor's insistence any day of the week. Professors throw out the word "office hours" like it's self-explanatory. It's not. And unless you're a certain type of person, you just won't know or learn how a professor's office hours could help you. It's not immediately apparent to me (or particularly first generation college students) how swinging by a professor's office hours for 10 minutes on an alternating Thursday is going to help me understand 5-dimensional integrals. If you're students don't make use of your office hours (and need to), it's a failing on the professor, not the students' culture.
  - goosedragons 4y ago
    I mean if you don't know what it means you could ask? Or even google? Simply googling "office hours college" is enough to get: "Office hours are times when you can meet with your professors and teaching assistants to discuss the material being presented in class or other."
    - musingsole 4y ago
      That's frankly not enough. That's plenty for a student who is on the cusp of slipping behind -- who's been trained on the culture of college since grade school. And it's no help at all to the student who is mostly bewildered by the constant swarm of disjoint activity on a college campus. 4x so for a first generation student. These students understand math and exams. The cultural stuff in the middle mostly goes over their heads.
rr888 4y ago
I never had a professor who had time to geniunely help other than some quick advice or a bit of feedback. If you're really behind it takes hours of work to catch up (on top of studying).
pfortuny 4y ago
Your years are of “professional experience”, not of “learning complicated things in a bunch”. It is vastly different. And, well, it is te students who are missing the opportunity…
Daub 4y ago
Office hours for academic consultation is the norm. Apart from anything else, making teaching points via email or any chat app can be a royal PITA, take twice as long and is more open to misunderstanding. Teams and Zoom can be a bit better, but you never know who the student is sharing the room with (parents, little brother etc). As for the older males thing... Certainly the current climate can make personal consultation an issue in that regard. This is the reason I now compel students to book consultation in small groups.
yonaguska 4y ago
> but the bemoaning of students not seeking help I find is often linked to professors thinking it's still 1972 I was not alone in this, as of 2010, regularly spending my evenings in office hours with either TAs or professors for specific classes. For certain math classes, I'd do all my homework in a group setting with other students and a TA. It was weird not to go to office hours for extra help.
meragrin_ 4y ago
> Instead, people email each other, text, chat, video call... help can be synchronous or asynchronous. > Professors need to get with the times and make themselves available through channels that their students are more comfortable with If an international student can write the professor, I'm thinking that is already the case. Email at university has been a thing for over thirty years. "The highest-achieving student was an international student for whom English was not the first language. Yet he wrote me regularly requesting specific topics and textbook pages to prepare for class."
jcpst 4y ago
I don’t see what the issue is here. The professor informs the class of office hours where the door is open. I used these times when I needed to ask a quick question or clarify something. In addition to email. The idea that these young adults should be treated so sensitively is pretty weird to me. Yes, it can be uncomfortable. Transitioning from childhood to adulthood is full of uncomfortable times.
- beej71 4y ago
  This quarter I've tried to frame their role (to them) as professional students with their task simply to learn the material using all available resources, including the instructor. I try to stress that they are in charge of how much they learn, not me. (And this isn't me trying to get out of work--I'm still working my ass off.) We're on the third week now, and I'll reiterate it today. We'll see if it makes any difference.
beej71 4y ago
In my short time teaching so far, in 2.25 quarters, only one person has used office hours, and that was over zoom. I have 2 fixed office hours per week, and allow zoom office hours by appointment any time. On the other hand, I help the students async and at odd hours on Discord every single day. It seems the more a student should be asking for help, the less likely they are to do so. I spend a fair about of time during the quarter trying to break down that wall.
- wink 4y ago
  Kinda offtopic, but thank you for your guide to network programming, it helped me a lot, many years ago.
  - beej71 4y ago
    Glad to hear it! I'm actually teaching network programming right now. The irony is I'm teaching it in Python. :)
rustybelt 4y ago
I think you are greatly over-estimating how often students are seeking help asynchronously. If the professor was actually flooded with texts and emails from engaged students who just have different communication expectations, I think that would have been mentioned in the article especially in the list of possible ways to improve. It seems more likely that the students are not attempting to engage at all.

stdbrouw 4y ago

It does seem to be One Weird Trick that nobody knows about: bother the professor and the TAs whenever you need help – whether that's over email or during office hours – and most of them, most of the time, will help. Never had the courage to make use of office hours when I was still in college, and now as a TA I realize how much of a fool I was not to.

zhdc1 4y ago
Courses in almost all universities are evaluated. Those evaluations actually do matter.

bee_rider 4y ago

I mean, every professor sets aside time for office hours, but ignoring them while you are getting in bad shape in a class is a time-honored tradition.

capnrefsmmat 4y ago

> I wonder how many times a student has taken time out of their day to trek across campus to the professor's office only to find the professor away, or head-down busy grading papers, or just about to leave? Typically, professors announce office hours during which they will be available to answer questions, so this is not an issue. From a professor's perspective, online options for tutoring students are vastly inferior. Helping a student understand a concept is interactive: you must ask the student questions, listen to their explanations, and formulate explanations to give back to them. That is very difficult in a text-based medium, particularly in a course involving mathematics or other things that don't really fit in plain text. (And while I can write LaTeX math quickly, my students cannot.) You'll also often have multiple students asking questions. In person, it's easy to group together related questions, and to jump from student to student -- or to say "why don't you talk to Sarah, she's working on the same problem." In an anonymous online setting, you lose that, and students can't connect to each other. I've used asynchronous online platforms like Piazza, and you lose all the opportunity to listen to students and figure out what exactly they're thinking. Instead you just provide a wall of text for them. And of course students learn to expect responses within hours at any time of day, including weekends, and start getting annoyed if you don't respond quickly to a question posted at 4am Saturday morning. You start to dread the Piazza notifications. Yes, you can set expectations and insist you only answer during certain hours, but other courses will have that one fanatical TA who answers at all hours, and so your students will still be annoyed. edit: That being said, you're right about students being more willing to use anonymous options. When I lectured online due to COVID, and students could send a direct message to me in the Zoom chat, I got loads of questions. I had to learn to keep the chat open on a second monitor to follow the questions and respond in real-time. As soon as we switched back to in-person teaching, the questions stopped, and the class would just stare at me blankly if I asked if they had questions. But I'm not sure how to replicate that option in person.

musingsole 4y ago
> Typically, professors announce office hours during which they will be available to answer questions, so this is not an issue. Saying something once or even a couple times that is at odds with the listener's inherent behavior doesn't count as communicating. Insisting it does sounds like the type of out of touch professors GP is talking about.

kgwgk 4y ago

> Young people can be extremely sensitive to how they impose themselves on other people. > Professors need to get with the times and make themselves available through channels that their students are more comfortable with Let’s all do whatever the students believe it is more convenient for them, so they don’t have to impose themselves :-) (For the benefit of young people who may confused about the timeline of technology in the dark ages, telephones were already quite popular in 1972.)

musingsole 4y ago
> Let’s all do whatever the student believe At this point, I'll trust student sentiment over a professor's insistence any day of the week. Professors throw out the word "office hours" like it's self-explanatory. It's not. And unless you're a certain type of person, you just won't know or learn how a professor's office hours could help you. It's not immediately apparent to me (or particularly first generation college students) how swinging by a professor's office hours for 10 minutes on an alternating Thursday is going to help me understand 5-dimensional integrals. If you're students don't make use of your office hours (and need to), it's a failing on the professor, not the students' culture.
- goosedragons 4y ago
  I mean if you don't know what it means you could ask? Or even google? Simply googling "office hours college" is enough to get: "Office hours are times when you can meet with your professors and teaching assistants to discuss the material being presented in class or other."
  - musingsole 4y ago
    That's frankly not enough. That's plenty for a student who is on the cusp of slipping behind -- who's been trained on the culture of college since grade school. And it's no help at all to the student who is mostly bewildered by the constant swarm of disjoint activity on a college campus. 4x so for a first generation student. These students understand math and exams. The cultural stuff in the middle mostly goes over their heads.

rr888 4y ago

I never had a professor who had time to geniunely help other than some quick advice or a bit of feedback. If you're really behind it takes hours of work to catch up (on top of studying).

pfortuny 4y ago

Your years are of “professional experience”, not of “learning complicated things in a bunch”. It is vastly different. And, well, it is te students who are missing the opportunity…

Daub 4y ago

Office hours for academic consultation is the norm. Apart from anything else, making teaching points via email or any chat app can be a royal PITA, take twice as long and is more open to misunderstanding. Teams and Zoom can be a bit better, but you never know who the student is sharing the room with (parents, little brother etc). As for the older males thing... Certainly the current climate can make personal consultation an issue in that regard. This is the reason I now compel students to book consultation in small groups.

yonaguska 4y ago

> but the bemoaning of students not seeking help I find is often linked to professors thinking it's still 1972 I was not alone in this, as of 2010, regularly spending my evenings in office hours with either TAs or professors for specific classes. For certain math classes, I'd do all my homework in a group setting with other students and a TA. It was weird not to go to office hours for extra help.

meragrin_ 4y ago

> Instead, people email each other, text, chat, video call... help can be synchronous or asynchronous. > Professors need to get with the times and make themselves available through channels that their students are more comfortable with If an international student can write the professor, I'm thinking that is already the case. Email at university has been a thing for over thirty years. "The highest-achieving student was an international student for whom English was not the first language. Yet he wrote me regularly requesting specific topics and textbook pages to prepare for class."

jcpst 4y ago

I don’t see what the issue is here. The professor informs the class of office hours where the door is open. I used these times when I needed to ask a quick question or clarify something. In addition to email. The idea that these young adults should be treated so sensitively is pretty weird to me. Yes, it can be uncomfortable. Transitioning from childhood to adulthood is full of uncomfortable times.

beej71 4y ago
This quarter I've tried to frame their role (to them) as professional students with their task simply to learn the material using all available resources, including the instructor. I try to stress that they are in charge of how much they learn, not me. (And this isn't me trying to get out of work--I'm still working my ass off.) We're on the third week now, and I'll reiterate it today. We'll see if it makes any difference.

beej71 4y ago

In my short time teaching so far, in 2.25 quarters, only one person has used office hours, and that was over zoom. I have 2 fixed office hours per week, and allow zoom office hours by appointment any time. On the other hand, I help the students async and at odd hours on Discord every single day. It seems the more a student should be asking for help, the less likely they are to do so. I spend a fair about of time during the quarter trying to break down that wall.

wink 4y ago
Kinda offtopic, but thank you for your guide to network programming, it helped me a lot, many years ago.
- beej71 4y ago
  Glad to hear it! I'm actually teaching network programming right now. The irony is I'm teaching it in Python. :)

rustybelt 4y ago

I think you are greatly over-estimating how often students are seeking help asynchronously. If the professor was actually flooded with texts and emails from engaged students who just have different communication expectations, I think that would have been mentioned in the article especially in the list of possible ways to improve. It seems more likely that the students are not attempting to engage at all.