This may horrify some teachers. But to my way of thinking, it’s only fair. I don’t have regular office hours at the community college where I teach—or even an office. (Adjuncts are the knights-errant of the academic world. Have class, will travel.)
The phone number comes with caveats. The biggest is that email is my much-preferred form of contact.
When I review the syllabus with students, I provide an example of a situation that might warrant a text or phone call: A student who leaves town at the last minute for a family emergency and is traveling to a destination with no Internet service. This student can maybe—maybe!— think about texting me to ask for a deadline extension.
There are polite chuckles all around—isn’t most student laughter polite?—but the point is made: My phone number is like a fire alarm on the wall. Undeniably there, but not something that most of them will ever pull.
Emphasizing how rarely this option should be used allows me to humble-brag to colleagues about the inclusion of my personal number without actually having to deal with any of the ramifications. Until last semester, that is, when something strange started to happen.
Students started to call and text.
And not just one or two, once or twice. Multiple students. Multiple times. For reasons big and small:
Hey, I won’t be able to make it to class tonight.
Sorry, I don’t understand this assignment.
Why did I get this grade? I worked really hard.
I even had the leaving-town-for-a-family-emergency scenario. Twice!
And the communication—mostly texts—came at unusual times: While I was standing in line outside a restaurant on Saturday night, mowing the lawn on Sunday afternoon, in the wee hours of weekday mornings. Sometimes when I was teaching the very class where the student was supposed to be.
I wracked my brain to figure out what was different last semester. One section of the course, for example, had far more students using the cellphone option than the other, so I wondered if I had explained it differently or forgotten to share my usual admonitions.
The messages were in earnest. These students wanted help, explanations, or simply validation, and they wanted them at times outside the customary hours of a teacher.
Maybe it was the pandemic, loosening the boundaries between classroom and home with so many virtual options. Or the intrinsic nature of late-afternoon and evening classes, which many community college students take because their days are filled with jobs, kids, other commitments.
These students work on assignments while their children and significant others are sleeping, or in stolen moments on well-deserved work breaks.
Once I got over the initial “aw, shucks, somebody is actually taking me up on this!” reaction, I started answering the messages. Often, it took only a few words: “See pp. 135-137,” “check the assignments folder in Blackboard,” “I’ll take a look at the grade and get back to you.”
I bucked the era of so-called “quiet quitting” by adding an extra dimension to my job: communicating outside the parameters of the classroom and the workday, meeting students where they were — and often when they were — and offering help in real-time.
Did it pay off?
It seemed to. In the course evaluations, multiple students mentioned communication as one of my strengths. Some said they’d never had an instructor respond to them so quickly. Some mentioned other classes where instructors responded days later. Or never.
More importantly, though, it paid off in student achievement. That extra support — I hate the term “scaffolding,” but it fits — may have been the difference between some students successfully completing the course or dropping it. Between students sticking with a challenging writing assignment or gravitating to a chatbot to write it for them.
Granted, students need to recognize boundaries. Calling multiple times on a Friday night, as one student did, is too much. In some cases, I slow-walked answers to serial texters, lengthening the amount of time before sending a response. Occasionally, I texted back “see your email” to direct them to a type of teacher/student communication that was less intrusive — and one where it was easier for me to share the detailed responses their questions warranted. I urged each of them to have a class buddy, somebody—not me—with whom they could communicate when they had questions about the content of a missed class.
Don’t get me wrong: It’s acceptable and necessary for teachers to take time off to be with their families and friends, to recharge their batteries between classes. Being honest with students about this is more than fair. They, too, should set aside times not to be working, to do the things they enjoy.
And Google Voice allows teachers to share a number with students for interactions like the ones above, minus the personal phone number. I need to consider that alternative.
These caveats notwithstanding, I believe I did more right than wrong last semester. Education, like every other profession, is changing rapidly. The old ways of doing business, which include King Kong-sized walls of separation between instructors and students, between “school” and “home,” have to dismantled.
Or broken through, as happened last semester by students who took me up on my offer.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
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