Office-Hour Habits of the North American Professor 286
An anonymous reader writes "For those of you who wonder just exactly what it is that your advisor is up to when you try to find him and meet with him, The Chronicle of Higher Education has a study on the
Office-Hour Habits of the North American Professor."
That door-closer... (Score:5, Interesting)
Tenure seems far more detrimental to the North American University than it is useful.
It's not that bad (Score:4, Interesting)
But I suppose US students have a right to see their teachers and receive quality tuition, given the outrageous amount of money they leave to their colleges
The Invisible Man (Score:1, Interesting)
professors..... (Score:4, Interesting)
I just took a class at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the prof decided not to lecture for the last month of the course.....and the school let him get away with it!
I thought that professors were supposed to be at a school to teach. Most of the ones that I have dealt with have done everything in their power to avoid as much as possible of their teaching responsiblility.
Why do we tolerate that?
Re:That door-closer... (tenure) (Score:2, Interesting)
The ability to speak freely is definitely a good thing though, in my experience tenure still does more harm then good.
Re:Keep in mind (Score:5, Interesting)
While I joke about being in liberal arts as much as the next person - as I say i'm in the collegs of Arts and Crafts - liberal arts includes many disciples. Economics, History, Political Science, etc, etc. Not "hurl crap at a canvas"
I could just as easily make fun of the CS deparatment at most colleges consiting mainly of smelly professors who can't teach and have no social skills.
But please, continue your ignorance and prejudice it does make you look oh so smart.
Re:It's not that bad (Score:4, Interesting)
TA's (graduate students) teaching most of the classes, professors well hidden somewhere campus with notes on their doors claiming to be elsewhere or "be right back," etc.
This is far from an isolated event in the US. Private school is a bit better, but then you're taking a loan the size of a house to get a a degree or degrees worth anything of economic or intellectual value.
Re:That door-closer... (tenure) (Score:2, Interesting)
The most effective way of maintaining standards is to require those who are not professionally active to teach more, and to keep pressure on them to teach well. This should happen at the level of the Deans, precisely to avoid the department-level politics.
Re:That door-closer... (tenure) (Score:3, Interesting)
BTW. The Montana legislature is extrememly cheap. Their votes can be bought for what a NY congressman pays for parking!.
Re:The Absent. (Score:3, Interesting)
He usually has 3 or 4 phone numbers, at least 2 of which are answered by a secretary of some sort (or wife/kid, who are just as clueless as to his whereabouts), 3 or 4 email addresses, at least 2 of which forward to the other two, sometimes in circles, and 1 random one is always unavailable each week, for no apparent reason.
This person rarely checks their mailbox in the department office, and the department secretary hasn't seen him for *at least* a week.
If you ever get into Dr. Absent's office, you'll think it's been hit by a tornado or something. He doesn't seem to notice this. He has no idea what's in there, but it's all in a large heap. There are precious few books on the bookshelves -- if any at all. If books exist in this man's office, they're on the floor (read: trash heap) under a few lunch trays, t-shirts, and the "lost finals" from two years ago that suddenly "popped up" last time Dr. Absent lost his cell phone and dug through the heap hoping to find it. Sometimes there's a computer in one of these heaps (maybe on the one that's kind of desk-shaped?), and sometimes there's a file cabinet. If there is a computer or file cabinet, Dr. Absent has no keys or password to use it, and has no idea what's stored there.
If you *do* manage to catch this person, NEVER GIVE HIM ANYTHING, FOR HE WILL IMMEDIATELY LOSE IT. He will be more than happy to help students with any class work, but they usually have to take a number since at least 10 of them will be piled up in the hallway at any given time (office hours or not) hoping to catch a glimpse of Dr. Absent. This tends to happen a LOT near midterms and finals since Dr. Absent never returns old homework/tests/quizzes, regardless of whether they're graded: he lost them or forgot whether they were graded.
If you think you might be faced with working for (or worse, taking a class with!) a Dr. Absent, my advice to you is to pretend you're doing correspondence work, because you will never find this guy. He simply isn't around. He's not on campus, he's not in his private lab, he's not at home, he's not at the bar you *know* he frequents (though never for more than an hour), he's not out with his wife, girlfriend, kids, colleagues, business partners, or anyone else. Just give up, because this man is unavailable for contact, and probably doesn't know/care that everyone is looking for him.
Re:Tenure (Score:4, Interesting)
The reason you don't want such a model of employment is because is does not encourage achievement. In fact, history has shown that in most cases, it breeds corruption and neglect. It's why most modern governments don't have lifetime positions for their leaders. Okay, the Supreme Court is an exception. However, the reasoning behind keeping justices for life doesn't apply to professors. At least, they don't anymore. Tenure was meant to keep professors with non-conformists ideas from getting fired. Now thanks to terrorism and political correctness, no professor is safe from firing due to perceived misconduct. Tenure only remains to keep the lazy employed. Sad, but true.
why should they care for office hours anyway ? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:That door-closer... (Score:3, Interesting)
I had a professor who was hired and given tenure as a photography professor. He was a good, competent photographer and well qualified to teach same. He then decided he was going to teach something called "Visual Dynamics" which was his own pet discipline that he'd invented. The course was a requirement for graduation (otherwise NOBODY would have taken it) and literally consisted of the ravings of a French-Canadian of Greek origin who NEVER changed his clothes, banging away about God knows what.
"Ze meening huv life hiz to survive to reproduce before death." (What this has to do with visual perception I have no idea). "Zere is a deeference between zee masculeen way huv doing teengs hand the feminine way: zee masculeen way hiz to see ha problem, train to solve hit, and solve hit, hand zee feminine way heez to cry huntil someone else solves it for her." Needless to say, his ravings about visual perception and his grading of lab work was completely capricious and taught nobody anything at all. The only person who cared was some harridan TA grad student who wanted his job.
Trust me, the "Simone De Beauvoir Wimmins (sic) Studies Program" students tried to get him canned, but tenure wins out. So in essence, he never taught a single lick of what he was hired for the moment he was tenured.
Rarely go in for office hours (Score:2, Interesting)
I rarely went to the professors' office hours (I'm a senior... almost done!). In fact, I only went *once* by choice when I was actively enrolled in a class--and that was to drop the class (my calculus skills are... lacking:)
Other than that, I visited with my two favorite professors (both are psych. guys) after I finished taking their courses, and I still visit periodically.
For what it's worth, at my institution, the office hours tend to be *short*. I was surprised when I saw people talking about 10-20 hours per week. Here it's more like 4-5 a week, mostly because professors here are either: A) super active in research, and/or B) have jobs in private industry outside of teaching (e.g. clinical psychologists that do teaching on the side, programmers that do teaching on the side, etc.).
Re:wait... (Score:3, Interesting)
Ron Jeremy is a hero for large, hirsute men everywhere, even if I don't wanna look at his hairy ass, either.
Link: http://www.lukeford.com/stars/male/ron_jeremy.htm
Re:Deep hack mode... (Score:3, Interesting)
For many (most?) researchers in the sciences, it just isn't possible to do research in the office. It is possible to write grant proposals, draft manuscripts, and grade papers, and when those tasks are being performed, one may find the scientist in the office. Otherwise...
"I have a timepoint in four minutes. I can talk until then. Then I need to collect data for seven minutes; then you can talk to me for another six minutes. Is that okay?"
"I have three days on the accelerator; I'll be down there 24/7 with my grad students until Tuesday. No, you can't visit--you don't have a dosimeter badge."
"Of course I'll regrade your term paper. Drop by my lab--oh, does your paper contain any flammable material?"
"I'm doing work with photomultiplier tubes. If you open the door and let light in then I'll bill you six thousand dollars for new tubes."
Many undergrads are under the impression that professors are at a university to teach courses. This is often a fallacy--teaching is frequently the third or fourth priority at best. The teaching is strictly a part-time sideline. The research is why professors are hired, why they are funded, and really what they do for a living. Good professors take their teaching duties as seriously as their research work--as they should--but they cannot be expected to spend forty hours a week in the office waiting for students to show up.