I'm in 3rd year CS and I almost never go to office hours for my CS courses, because a lot of the time I don't have something specific to ask.

I go to lecture, don't understand the material, and then review my notes & the slides at home, working through the examples until I understand them.

If I get stuck on something, I typically just keep trying until I understand it, instead of stopping, remembering what I don't understand and asking it in office hours 2-3 days later, and then potentially getting stuck on something else later on in the proof/example.

Typically what I lack is is a more general understanding of the entire proof/example/algorithm instead of small individual details, and I really need to sit down with it and go through it instead of another quick re-explanation by a TA where I have to say "yeah, makes sense" before I've had enough time to think about it.

I recall that any problems that I had understanding _how_ to solve something, arose from not knowing _why_ it was being done in the first place. And as a result I had no entry point into the solution process.

Once inside the process of finding a solution things tended to fall into place. But looking at a problem set and not being able to guess what the first step is, thats a sign that I have not developed a means to find my bearing or orientation in the overall problem space.

what distinguishes the forgettable instructors that I have had, from the invaluable and irreplaceable ones? The ability to communicate why we are doing what we are doing as effectively if not more so, than how we go about doing it.

This is the gift that someone like grant Sanderson has, so incredibly rare and strangely opaque to (or even dismissed by) the typical college level instructor of STEM material.

>The ability to communicate WHY we are doing what we are doing I really resonate with what you said. The Why and the contextual motivation is what I'm always so starved for in classes that I don't understand.

This is how I approach things as well. I never got the appeal of office hours as TAs aren't going to be able to regurgitate lecture content for you, it only works if you have something extremely specific you need help with.

> If I get stuck on something, I typically just keep trying until I understand it, instead of stopping, remembering what I don't understand and asking it in office hours 2-3 days later, and then potentially getting stuck on something else later on in the proof/example.

Good! This is what you should be doing! Understanding comes from within, and teachers can only guide you to it. You are your own best teacher, and you will learn the material on a deeper level if you figure it out yourself. Sometimes you do need a little guidance, though, and that's ok.

> Typically what I lack is is a more general understanding of the entire proof/example/algorithm instead of small individual details, and I really need to sit down with it and go through it instead of another quick re-explanation by a TA where I have to say "yeah, makes sense" before I've had enough time to think about it.

First of all, get face time with the actual professor if you can, not the TA. TAs can be great, but they're likely someone with limited pedagogical experience.

Second, you need to learn to ask questions to get to the heart of the matter. Don't walk in saying, "I don't understand this proof/example/algorithm". That gives them nothing to work with. All they can offer you in return is a quick explanation. Tell them what you just told us. "I feel like I've got a good handle on all the small details and steps in this proof/example/algorithm, but I'm having trouble understanding it as a whole." Maybe try, "can I see some more examples?" or "can I see a motivating example?" or even "what historical context led to the creation of this algorithm?"

Context can be everything. It can be difficult to understand material when it's presented to you in its modern form, and you don't see how something so logical and perfect crystalized out of the aether. If you can see a couple of steps in its historical derivation it can make a lot more sense.

Not saying this is the case for you, but I have also seen a lot of students who think they have a good handle on the small details, but it turns out they only understand gist of the details instead of the details of the details. Hell, I do that myself. If you go through every little detail and ask yourself "why?" or "where did that come from?" or "what could have motivated this?" you might discover you have more gaps in your knowledge than you realize.

Best of luck with the rest of your program! Don't be too hard on your teachers. As I explained in another comment, I spent years really trying to improve as a teacher, but it is an extremely unrewarding experience for a variety of reasons. These people are not getting rewarded for any extra effort they put into helping students, and if they're doing it anyway they deserve kudos.

> TAs can be great, but they're likely someone with limited pedagogical experience.

Professors can be great, but they're likely to be experts and researchers who find the course material trivially easy – and have long forgotten what it was like to learn it for the first time as an absolute beginner.

Well said. Empathy is not a prerequisite of being brilliant.

Sometimes the two coexist, allowing an expert to communicate material to the mind of a beginner, and those are the amazing teachers.

> because a lot of the time I don't have something specific to ask.

That's okay. Most TAs/professors will still help. Unfortunately some are assholes and if you get those, sorry. But the best way to deal with this is by asking them how to get started with a problem. Or to also ask about problems you've already solved. Here's some templated questions, modify for your specifics

  I've been struggling solving this problem, can you help me get started? I tried {x,y,z} but that doesn't seem to work because {a,b,c}. 

  I solved this problem, but it took me longer than I think it should have. Can we walk through it together so I can see how you would approach it? 

  I'm having a hard time starting problems, not even knowing where to begin. Do you have any advice? 

  Can we do more problems in class?

I came from physics and am finishing up my PhD in CS, so the last one might not be as good except for stuff like algorithms. But one key piece of advice for the getting started problem is to do more problems.

In physics, the first thing I'd always start with is a force diagram and writing down my knowns and unknowns. This way I could do a form of dimensional analysis and then I had to just figure out how to convert. I then took these skills to CS and found a similar avenue. Your professors saying to write pseudo code aren't just trying to get you to do more work. This is your map.

I take this same approach when I program. I write mostly in python so this works real well. I use vim and so will have one pane open to my file and another to an ipython terminal. I can test my logic in the terminal and write code side by side. So I try to write something quick first (think "write drunk, edit sober"). Then I start writing my function and I start by writing a small description and the arguments. As I'm writing this, I find my mind often finds edge cases that I can account for. A few minutes of back and forth, and I got a pretty good function. Essentially, I am using documentation as a rubber ducky or the Feynman Method[0].

I also highly suggest working with other students. There's a lot of good reasons for this. They'll see things in a different way than you, and one of the most important tools you can build is getting these different viewpoints/perspectives. Another is you're growing your network. These are very important for jobs. And probably most importantly, you need friends and a social life. If you're kicking yourself when you're down too much, you're gonna be slower at solving problems. Sometimes the best thing to do is get up, take a walk, and come back (that's the hard part).

Also, ask questions in class. Don't worry about what other students think. You're paying for the professor. In today's age you can probably find better lectures online. So get your money's worth and ask in class. Most professors actually will be happy because when lecturing we hate having just blank stares and silence. We all dread the "does this make sense?" question and the absolutely unconvincing murmur of "yeah". Make your time count. I know it can be hard to be engaged, but also asking questions will help with that. And absolutely do not be afraid to interrupt or ask them to slow down. You're paying way to much to just sit in an in-person YouTube lecture.

[0] https://fs.blog/feynman-technique/

Not to say anything about you, but when I was learning physics, either I thought the professor was really good in which case I would usually understand the material just from lecture, or the professor was not good, in which case going to office hours wouldn't help and I would seek other resources, like YouTube videos from other teachers. A resource like OP's that could provide a different perspective and learning style would have been invaluable.

Good thing I wasn't teaching physics ;)

I actually deliberately varied my teaching style during office hours to account for just this. I got great feedback from the few students who actually came. But by the end, I just felt all the extra effort I was putting in to be a good teacher wasn't worth the psychic damage I took from bad students.

All this to say, being a good teacher, or trying to be a good teacher, in a university setting is extremely unrewarding. Your department chair and peers just want you to publish, and the good students just don't make up for the hoards of unappreciative and entitled students who have all the tools in the world to make your life hell.

Personally in my experience office hours were not that helpful, I was working fulltime at a factory while I was attending university, I simply did not have time to hang around professors offices (My Manager allowed me time off to attend lectures but there was no allowance outside of that), if I needed to study for exams I'd have to take annual leave for example.

Email was single best method I had if I needed to ask professor anything, some professors would reply promptly and some would take weeks to answer an email.

Even if Students don't work fulltime many of them rely on part time jobs (at least here in Australia) - for example one of my housemates worked as a delivery driver for a freight company and another worked in a call center. I think sometimes the professors assume students have more time to spare in the middle of the day then they do.

Thanks for sharing. 100% - one of the downsides of focusing on attendance and in-person interactions is - simply the time cost, inflexibility and inconvenience for students who already have saturated schedules.

(I was first-exposed to this talking to students from community colleges, many working part-time jobs.)

This rings true "trying to be a good teacher in a university setting is extremely unrewarding". Thanks for sharing, and the students who make you feel bad despite you doing more than your fair share, can gtfo.

BTW, I didn't mention it, but I still remember vividly a lot of the TAs/profs. who gave a shit about helping me. So while I had a rough time, I remember some of of the good experiences.

And at the end of the day, we all want a place where we're rewarded for doing the right things, instead of punished.

> the psychic damage I took from bad students.

> the hoards of unappreciative and entitled students who have all the tools in the world to make your life hell.

Okay, now I'm more curious about your experiences here and need some details. What kind of school were you at? US based? R1? Ivy league? Were you teaching undergrad? Were you tenured? What kinds of classes exactly, undergrad, grad, upper division, etc? Full on 300+ person intro courses? Like, I've never heard of a teacher talking about students this way before. So, sorry for the peppering here.

R1 non-ivy engineering-focused university. I was teaching undergraduate math. Non-tenure track. I taught a lot during grad school[0], and then taught some more as an adjunct professor while I was looking for tenure track jobs. I taught everything from pre-calculus algebra and trigonometry up through undergraduate linear algebra. I taught a couple of 100+ student sections, but the majority of my classes were 20-30 people.

This was a decade ago, so my memory is a little fuzzy, but talking about students this way was pretty common at my university. So much so that a committee was formed to investigate the underlying problems. The committee found a few.

1. The math placement exam was trivially easy to cheat.

2. Students were encouraged to cheat on the math placement exam because the college of engineering only accepted students who placed into calculus or higher in their first semester.

3. The university as a whole scored freakishly high on student entitlement metrics. E.g. lots of kids with wealthy parents who assumed paying for college (as opposed to scholarships or loans) implies they deserve to pass classes with minimal effort.

To address the first two problems we switched to in-person math placement exams with ID checks and negotiated with the college of engineering to see to what degree they could budge on their policies. I suspect the third issue remains a problem.

[0] My university was a bit unusual in that grad students actually taught classes, not just TA'd. Helped keep class sizes down when you had dozens of extra lecturers who worked for peanuts.

I've literally never seen TA's/Professors competing for help on an exam. Its always begging for students to come in and ask questions because the average in the class is < 50 and no one came.

I think the only time I've ever seen a line during office hours is when after an exam, students would beg for improved grades.

At Berkeley for most of my CS classes it is always pretty crowded, there is a long wait time to get to talk to a TA for 4-5 minutes.

Think it's a MIT vs. not top 1% uni thing. I'm still scarred by the culture shock I had going from shitty state university dropout from Buffalo to Google employee in Boston.

(also, since I'm being brief and might be read incorrectly: it's a very complex thing, Im not making a value judgement, just was rough trying to communicate with people who experienced things very differently than me through 22)

I’ve definitely noticed a type from top universities (not just MIT). It can come off as kinda in-your-face or confrontational or intense. I have some of the same tendencies, and have to rein it in because people really don’t like it—but it seems to be encouraged some places, they do it way more and harder than I ever have. It even throws me off (that part’s probably my midwesternness coming through)

My guess is part of it’s to do with a much higher proportion of students at top institutions (than at sub-top-1%) having attended prep schools that teach in small group discussion-based seminars rather than traditional classes. Changes how you converse, changes what you consider normal for interacting with your instructors and peers, carries over to the cultures that develop at universities they attend. Plus just everyone there being really driven to get good grades.

I also noticed watching online courses from top universities in a couple areas I’m fairly familiar with from having taken similar courses at a maybe-3rd-tier university, that the content and quality of the lectures was basically the same—the difference was entirely in how engaged the students were, and the kinds of guest lecturers they can pull in for a visit (“holy shit, I know that guy!”)

Man you really made me think. If you just blankly asked me what I thought, I would have written your comment verbatim as a fault of the state schooler. I'll be digesting this for a while. I rarely mention it in public, it really meant a lot to me to get someone's thoughts on this, and it was a Moment for me. Cheers.

My description probably painted this type as more assholish than I intended—it’s mostly that they’re willing, even in fairly casual conversation, to really dig into fine points, to play devil’s advocate (maybe without saying that’s what they’re doing), to pursue any little thing that they don’t immediately get or that seems contradictory.

Conversationally, they poke, they prod, they chase. I assume this is from being educated in environments where that was the norm, and my guess that this is a style that starts in certain types of prep school (and is then imparted on the less-elite folks who attend a university with that set) is really just a guess, but there sure does seem to be a lot of correlation between school prestige and that kind of affect, in my experience, whatever the cause.

As mentioned, I have similar tendencies, but the tenacity at and commitment to this way of chatting from several elite-college folks I’ve met has been a bit much even for me—with more exposure I suspect I’d come to like it, but as it is it feels like being squished on a microscope slide, though I don’t exactly think that’s their fault and I don’t think they’re trying to give offense—but I do think the fact that it can put a person a bit off balance is part of why they’ve picked it up, it seems like a habit honed in a certain kind of affably-contentious intellectual environment (again, I’m just guessing at the causes here)

On the other hand, a passive student will let you go through an entire proof only to raise his hand when you finish and ask something that implies he did not understand the proof from the start.

Why didn't you say so? You wasted both of our time... I even turned around a few times and asked if everyone was following!

I know it's hard to understand when you don't understand. But I don't know how to deal with this problem and the senior lecturers don't seem to know how to, either...

t. just started lecturing

> very few people would come. And then I'd get feedback at the end of the semester that I "was never available to help."

My guess is that when they "needed help" was 2 hours before the exam, upon realizing that 10 hours of cramming was not going to make up for 12 weeks of slacking off (source: I was one of these types). IOW, their deficiency not yours.

My profs in my social science-like undergrad also held office hours.

However, I had no idea “how” to ask for help or about what. In my perspective, most of the stuff could be learned or memorized if you sat your butt down.

Or they totally lack foundational skills.

I tutored a group in an MBA program who were really struggling especially in more quantitative core courses. Which was not at all uncommon but this was extreme.

And it was pretty much a case of: Teach me all the basic high school math I never learned.

For me, day one used to be handing out the syllabus and getting right into whatever the first topic of the course was. I taught a lot of calculus 1, so usually I'd open with a motivating example for the concept of a limit.

After a couple of years, I decided to instead spend day one on the most common egregious gaps in knowledge, so day one was how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide fractions, and then a little practice solving simple rational equations of a single variable.

> I had the exact opposite problem when I was both a TA and later a professor. I would beg and plead for my students to come to office hours. ... And then I'd get feedback at the end of the semester that I "was never available to help."

My first year of grad school I had this problem and it made me immediately become disillusioned because the reality was so starkly different from what students wrote.

I worked in my office and would be there from 9am/10am till 10pm most days. I had an open door policy along with my scheduled office hours and 2 lab sections. I also frequently responded to emails at or after midnight. I wrote custom mini lectures for the lab sessions based on asking students (in those lab sessions) what were the things they were struggling on (and using what I ended up helping the most on + feedback from the good students that were always the "help sinks" where others would go to them for help). My own office mates complained at the end of the term (but not before. To be fair, I was usually the only one in the office (of 3) and the other two only started showing up more at the end of the term). YET I was student ranked as 2 standard deviations below the median for availability and one below my department.

I literally could not be more available! What's worse, is the department sent an email to me about how I should be more available. -__- What I learned is that these things don't mean anything about my performance. They were low ranked because the course was very hard. This is also a course I caught 2 junior CS students cheating and told the professor and I that they didn't know "GitHub" was on the internet (syllabus had a weird policy about not using the internet, but intended to basically mean don't copy GitHub or SO solutions). I had a hard time trying to not fall over laughing and I saw the prof's brain just break.

(Side note on that last part. We reported it to the department. They didn't care. It is because it makes the department look bad because the uni measures department rates of cheating by how many people are formally disciplined for cheating and so if you don't report it, you don't look like your department has a problem. We gave them a 0 on the assignment and said they'd fail if they did it again. They did anyways)

(I also had two students write that I was the best TA they've ever had and two students write that I was the worst. I learned a lot, that's for sure)

Hey sorry to hear your experience. First to clarify - it varies - the classes (usually required CS classes), usually had overcrowded Office Hours, but there were many classes in math & physics where OH was very available (and I did very well in as a direct consequence, though I was a CS major).

If students complain about availability, but never show up despite everything you did, then that's their problem. What people say and do is, unfortunately, not the same.

And I'm sorry to hear about the strange incentives for not being able to report to the department about cheating.

Initially when I started the app, I was very anti-teacher. But as I learnt more and talked to more teachers, I realized, man teachers also have their fair share of indignations from the system.

> realized, man teachers also have their fair share of indignations from the system.

Oh for sure. I think many would be surprised how political (not in like government terms) a department can be. It can vary dramatically within a school too. My partner's department is very functional while mine seems to be continually shooting themselves in the foot trying to dislodge the previous bullet hole. But when I started, it was very functional. I can certainly say that very few professors are happy with the system and I think it is failing everyone involved. This is why in my main comment I suggested that there is real opportunities to disrupt education in a very traditional sense. Because the truth of the matter is that we started treating academia like a business and the results were probably what anyone could have predicted: metric hacking galore. It's a big part of why students themselves cheat in the first place. Then try being a grad student where you are doing half of your advisor's job, leading other students and writing grants, while trying to also do course work (first few years), TA, publish, and research. It's a lot. Everyone is overworked.

There are plenty of great advisors and departments. But unfortunately these tend to be the exception instead of the norm and appear to becoming rarer. Or maybe I've just gotten more experience. Personally, my PhD has left me with a very bad taste for academia, and I know a lot of others at other schools who have the same feelings. What's also surprising to many outside of academia is that my dream is to spend my days researching. But they cannot understand how academia nor industry provides me a environment to actually do this (fwiw, academics usually to understand).

When I went to school office hours was where you went if you wanted to get hints on what you needed to know for the exam, not to learn stuff. It was a means to an end. Honestly I never even considered the idea that office hours could help me better understand the material. Goes to show you what the mind of a college student is like.

I think this speaks to something in the OP that bothered me:

So much of the student-hostile elements of teaching come down to manufacturing efficient metrics for learning. They don't guard past solutions because they don't want you to study from them, but because they need to be able to report whether or not you learned the material, and writing an appropriate test question, especially at higher levels, is hard.

Likewise, you didn't view office hours as a tool to learn the material, it was a tool to game the metric they force on you to determine if you're learning in the first place.

Its very easy for the execution of modern education theory to slip into an ouroboros of perverse incentives.

Its also cultural. Office hours never even crossed.my.mind.

Who am i to take a full hour of the prof? Am i a remedial student? Ive never had to consult with anyone for my grades. What is this tutor everyone speaks of? My parents never had to pay for any tutor.

For me, the whole office hours its like eating raw meat. You know people do it. But you are not running on those circles, you donr go to those restaurants, and you dont even know the food name and you couldn't tell if it was raw meat even if someone threw it at your face.

Its a resource for those willing to take advantage of the system as it is set up. And in the odd case everyone does, well, eventually the service degrades enough so that one of the students eventually creates an app for it.

It's a difficult balance tbh. You have to struggle to learn so teachers can't just work through the homework problems for you. So they want to give you hints to get you unstuck but not give the answer away. What would be better is to work through a non-homework problem. If this is happening to you, try to find a similar problem in the textbook and work through that one together. They'll still want you to struggle but be more relaxed with giving you hints because they aren't just handing over the solution.

Not all college students are the same, I used office hours to get help building things, designing things, and to better understand the materials, especially when I got into silicon fabrication and electromagnetics, it was fascinating, learning exactly, in detail, how a PC works at the atomic level.

As an academic educator myself I must sadly concur. Students always demand a lot of things, and then they don't use them.

That doesn't mean offering them is a bad thing, because there are people who do, but most students I know "don't have the time" and I know for a fact that they don't do shit. And I know that for a fact because I studied at my university a few years prior. Back then I was a freelancer while studying, ao when I said I don't have timw that meant I had a job. Ut for most of my colleagues that meant they were occupied with loafing around.

Not that everything and everybody needs to be efficient, but if you loaf around blaming a lack of time is a fucking joke. Maybe they are lacking energy, direction, discipline, willpower, ambition, etc. and sure, some — e.g. young mothers — are truly lacking time. But most students are not.

I never understood what office hours were for. In college, I felt like it was better to just spend a few hours working on homework problems, how could anyone explain this stuff to me if I couldn't learn it on my own?

I TA'd some classes also (as an undergrad and grad student) and tried to help people with their homework, but in the back of my head I couldn't help but feel that it wasn't the the most effective approach.

I can imagine some things that I don't grock yet (like some computer graphics algorithms that I just cargo cult, or machine learning in general), maybe this is blocking me from learning them, I just need to ask someone who knows it to explain the intuition to me?

> I would beg and plead for my students to come to office hours. "It's free one on one tutoring from the guy who writes the test! It doesn't get any better than that! If these times don't work for you, I can accommodate your schedule!" And yet very few people would come. And then I'd get feedback at the end of the semester that I "was never available to help."

You need to constantly remind your students of your regular office hours, always be there (e.g., a live webcam they see by clicking on a link,) and have a lot of office hours at easy to remember times.

I just moved to a new college. At my prior place, I might see one student in hours in an entire semester. Here, in hours there are usually two or three each session. So yes, it varies.

It's the student loan industry and lowering standards for college admissions. Most of them should not be in college.

Also the general level of confusion of students coming in to office hours can be a valuable part of the feedback loop.