The time between third and fourth period is the biggest waste of time imaginable. Office hours is a time for all sorts of activities like talking, eating, and sleeping, but rarely ever for its actual purpose: working. Office hours exists to provide struggling students time to get help from teachers, however rarely is this goal achieved. Instead, office hours has devolved into a time of chatter and procrastination, and thus, it should be removed.

When walking into most any office hours class, one is met with the loud sounds of chit-chat, scarcely ever peace and quiet. Due to the rarity of silence, few to no office hours classrooms are the place of productivity. The environment office hours fosters is one where distraction is bound to occur at least once for a student. However according to the New York Times, it takes 25 minutes to refocus one’s attention after being interrupted. So by the time one fully concentrates, office hours is at a near end, making the time rather futile. Furthermore, even under the assumption that students are not interrupted and are met with the perfect working environment, the time itself is still too short. Office hours is only twenty minutes long, so it still doesn’t reach the 25 minute threshold for concentration. Thus no matter the conditions, one can never truly achieve proper focus on whatever tasks one hopes to achieve in the small window of time that is office hours.

On top of the time itself being pointless, oftentimes it also makes doing some assignments at home appear to be a waste of time. Procrastination is a problem that plagues teenagers and adults alike. According to Psychologytoday.com, many procrastinators typically tell themselves lies or justifications as to why they’re delaying a task. Office hours enables procrastination by giving students the justification and lie of “I can do it during office hours.” The amount of times such a phrase has been uttered but not acted upon is too high to count. Instead of teaching good habits all office hours does is fuel the fire of procrastination, without actually giving students enough time to succeed in such a feat.

Office hours simply does not achieve any of its aimed goals. Many in favor of office hours argue that it is a necessary time slot for students to be able to get help from teachers on topics they’re struggling with. However, rarely is the “extra help” a student can receive during office hours effective. If numerous students are seeking help from the same teacher, due to time constraints, the most a student can do in that time is ask one or two simple questions, not get an in depth explanation or help. Additionally, office hours is not the only option for students to receive help and is in fact the worst option. Students instead can get extra help during class where there is much more time, or go to the free after-school tutoring provided by CHS where the help is much more individualized than during office hours.

While the general concept of office hours is admirable on the surface, its implementation is rather lacking. Overall office hours is more harmful to students than beneficial. Office hours encourages students to get ineffective help from their teachers and to even manage time ineffectively by procrastinating. These harms cannot be fixed systematically since it’s more than just it being too short or too loud, instead it’s a culmination of harms. So instead of putting a bandaid fix on a broken arm, office hours should just be removed completely.