Legal Commentary

My office hours after we discuss hearsay, students get their "results" back from their ungraded midterms, or in the days before the final: There's a line outside of my office, and it might take a student 30 minutes before he or she sees me. My office hours on some random Thursday or after we have a class on a topic such as the rape shield rule that won't be covered on the exam: nary a soul in sight. And, how did I arrive at my office hours? At the start of the semester, I picked some times that I didn't think would conflict with my schedule. Which of course means that at least one of those hours will start conflicting with something a week into the semester. And that my office hours will conflict with the schedules of many of my students. This all seems terribly inefficient to me, and it prompts the question: Do we still need office hours in the traditional sense?

A post on Confessions of a Community College Dean notes that traditional office hours used to make sense in a world that lacked asynchronous-but-quick communication. Back in 1990, if there were no traditional office hours, if a student couldn't schedule a time to meet with a professor before or after class, the student would be stuck with stopping by the professor's office and waiting for the professor to arrive or playing a game of phone tag. But now, I can, and do, easily schedule meeting times with students relatively rapidly over e-mail. In fact, I encourage students to do so because of the possibility of a student backlog during office hours. Moreover, such students often tell me the specific subjects they want to discuss over e-mail, which often leads to more fruitful conversations.

So, do traditional office hours still make sense? I don't know, but I think that I'll keep them just in case they do. I still think that it's comforting to students to know that I will always be in my office certain hours during the week, ready to answer their questions. And I still worry that there are students who will stop by during office hours but won't make the extra effort to schedule a meeting in the absence of such established hours. So, what do readers think? You can respond by leaving a comment and/or responding to the following poll:

-Colin Miller