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9:38am on Tuesday, 3rd November, 2020:

Office Hour

Comment

It's Office Hour from 9-10 today.

Office Hour is normally Office Hours, and in normal times we have to have two of them. In Covid times, we only have to have one, which is annoying because I only had to have one anyway as I'm part-time, but they didn't reduce it to 30 minutes for me because 30 minutes isn't an hour.

The idea behind Office Hour is that students can drop in and talk to you about your module or whatever without making an appointment. This is why mine is at 9am on Tuesdays: only the keenest students are awake at this time, and they don't need help anyway (or if they do, they contact me immediately rather than wait for Office Hour to come round). I've never had a student come to me in Office Hour since the concept was foisted on us several years ago.

I understand the reasoning behind Office Hour: it gives students a time when they know the lecturer will be in, so they can have some face-to-face contact regarding whatever pressing issue is bothering them. Unfortunately, by declaring "these are my office hours", students too often believe that all the other hours are not office hours, therefore they shouldn't approach lecturers out of their defined Office Hour. After all, if they could drop in any time, why would there be a need to have an Office Hour? What began as an attempt to say "you can drop in on me at any time, but if you choose these times then I'm definitely going to be in" became interpreted as "these are the only times when you should approach me".

You can see why they might think this. If they had a lecture timetabled for, say, 11am on Thursday, they would reason from this that the lecture did not take place at any other times, just 11am on Thursday. If they could roll up whenever they felt like and be treated to a lecture, why would there be a need to timetable it?

For Office Hour, X is true does not imply that not-X is false.

For lectures, X is true does imply that not-X is false.

Which of these readings you go with depends on whether you believe that the reason for noting that X is true is to assert inclusivity (first case) or exclusivity (second case). It comes down to your understanding of the rationale of the person who says X is true. How you read the statement depends on why you think it was stated.

This explains much of the pushback when X is "Black Lives Matter".




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