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 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 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.