Reading 101

If "Knock three times on the ceiling if you wa-ant me!"had been written for my life, it would have gone something like this, "Knock endlessly outside office hours and the door is clo-osed!"Honestly.

Before you all think I'm nothing but an ornery curmudgeon who absolutely detests students, allow me to explain.
In my current department, faculty is expected to hold ten office hours per week.
Yes, ten office hours. A fourth of our workweek. Ten. Hours.

While at most universities students are lucky if their professors can be found in their offices for maybe two hours on a Wednesday afternoon, we are expected to be available to students two hours each day. If you consider that most of us teach two classes per day (or three or four, if you're the lucky bug who got stuck with the overload), are expected to publish, and then have committee responsibilities as well, you can imagine that two hours is a lot. But we suck it up and do it. This year I actually decided to meet the increasing demand for face-time, and schedule in twelve office hours per week.

Twelve hours people. Add it all up, and it's a day and a half each week.
Granted, all my office hours are  in the morning, which might be a tad earlier than students would like, but you know, I got stuff to do just as much as they do. Stuff that is technically essential to both their academic progress as well as my job security.
But I digress.

So in order to facilitate students' usage of my office hours, I have posted a sheet on my door with both my classes and my office hours on it. It's even color-coded, so students don't have to search for the word "office hours", but can instead look for the pretty purple boxes.

Now in previous years, I used to leave my door open outside of office hours too. I like a little bit of fresh air, to keep tabs on what's going on in the production lab down the hallway, and didn't mind students dropping in to ask a quick question if I had time. But last year, this "quick question" thing got a bit out of hand, and instead of showing up to my office hours, students would show up whenever they wanted to, which left me prepping classes, writing articles, and grading papers at home. Dr. D. did not like that at all. And Dr. D's husband liked it even less.  So last semester, I started closing my door when I didn't have office hours, a practice I started up again today.

And let me tell you, it has been one tough learning curve for my darling snowflakes. They knock, and when I don't answer, they knock again. Then they'll knock even louder, and sometimes they'll even call out my name. On a few occasions they've even yelled, "I know you're in there!', or called my phone from right outside my office, demanding that I talk to them "just real quick, I promise!"
Usually I just ignore them, and they'll eventually go away. A few times, when the yelling got so loud that co-workers started to peek out of their offices trying to find out what was going on, I've opened my door and told them in very succinct terms when my next office hours were, and then closed the door on them again.

I realize my students think I'm not "nice", but I really don't understand why this has taken such a long time for them to understand. There's a sheet on my door, my office hours are on my syllabus, and you would think that my ignoring them would give them a very obvious clue. I've debated putting an even larger sign on my door that says, "If the door is closed it means office hours are over. Don't knock". Or perhaps the more brief but more abrasive, "Don't bother knocking if the door is closed" will work.

Then again, if those devastating test results were correct, the whole reading thing may be the problem. Perhaps the solution is just to take a sheet of paper, draw a big arrow on it, write "READ" next to the arrow, and hang it beside the schedule posted on my door. Who knows, it might work. After all, don't they say that hope springs eternal?