It will only take 5 or 10 minutes...

I here this phrase from my students a lot. And while 5 or 10 minutes of my day is not a large chunk, let me put things into perspective...

I have about 120-140 students a semester at any given time. If each of these students wanted 5-10 minutes of my time per week, that would be 10-20 hours of my week (for 120 students) or 11.5-23 hours of my week (for 140 students).

So let's see, I am actually teaching in class about 10-12 hours a week, I have about 8 hours of office hours (which few students actually come to), spend about 5-10 hours planning for classes, about 5-10 hours grading for my classes. Oh yeah, and I am supposed to have about 8-12 hours to do scholarship and service (i.e. researchy things and meetings). This by itself adds up to 36 - 52 hours a week. This doesn't count my time for lunch, talking with fellow colleagues about the classes, my blogging :), etc.

Alright, that is my rant of the day :)