> 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.
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.
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.