I’m surprised that the answers indicate the absence of student interest in the content of the course. That wasn’t my experience at all. I recall students discussing the material with great interest, often passionately. Frequently office hours became mini-seminars, with many crowding in and participating.

The questions broadly sorted into three kinds: interpretive (what does a term or a text mean), analytical (what is the argument), and evaluative (is it, or any of it, true or false). This is probably because these were the kinds of questions I addressed in class.

However, the conversation typically didn’t take the form of students formally asking questions and me answering them. Problems about meaning, analysis, and evaluation just came up and we discussed them – the questions were in the background and presupposed.

Of course, the students who attended office hours were a minority. Most of them probably got all they wanted in that department from the discussion section with their Graduate Student Instructor.

It’s also true that there were always a certain number of students, every semester, who would show up with strictly instrumental concerns. The vast majority of these were requests to submit a paper after the due date.

When I began teaching at Berkeley, quite a few students would come to office hours to complain that their grade was undeservedly low. This was a surprise because I’d never done such a thing as a student and I’d never heard of anyone doing it. I eventually adopted a policy whereby I would re-read the paper on the understanding that I might lower the grade further as well as raising it or keeping it the same, if on reconsideration I thought the paper called for it. This completely eliminated grade disputes.

On rare but regular occasions, a student would appear who seemed utterly baffled. After some talk it would transpire that the student couldn’t understand the idea of counterfactuals. No matter how you explain it, some people refuse to see that for example the conclusion “Shirley Dean is a man” must be true if it is true that Shirley Dean is the mayor of Berkeley and that the mayor of Berkeley must be a man.

This was frustrating because it seemed that there was nothing to be done, as the inability to grasp a relationship like this causes difficulty in comprehension all down the line. As I said it was very rare, yet kept popping up.

There was also a certain amount of business to do, most of it related to requests from seniors for letters of recommendation. And meetings with graduate students in office hours were different from meetings with undergraduates, the former being focused on very specific issues in the dissertation, plotting about the job market, or gossiping about the profession generally.

I continue to teach even though I’m retired, but I don’t hold office hours. Looking back, they were fun more often than not.