Office Hours for the Soul

By Siena Giacoma '27

Walk into Professor Eduard Fanthome’s office hours expecting to talk about ancient ruins, and you might walk out with advice about joy, softness or why “you don’t matter,” and it is the most freeing thing you’ll ever hear. Sure, this semester he’s teaching Space and GIS, Intro to Archaeology and Ancient(ish) Urbanisms, but the real syllabus he’s handing out isn’t about ancient ruins or mapmaking. It’s about how to live.

Fanthome’s own teaching origin story is worthy of a Netflix miniseries: His parents were the founding teachers of a high school in Bhutan, where his dad taught English and his mom taught chemistry. More than genetics, however, what he really inherited was the conviction that teaching changes lives. For decades, his parents weren’t just educators; they were pillars of their community, guiding entire generations of Bhutanese students. Growing up with that legacy left him deeply inspired and acutely aware of the ripple effects a good teacher can have.

When I asked Fanthome what advice he’d give his 20-year-old self, he didn’t hesitate or reach for something polished. He went straight to a word most people avoid: softness.

“Being soft and strong at the same time is very difficult,” Fanthome said, “but it would’ve made me a much better friend.”

The best advice he’s ever received? “You don’t matter.” Which, yes, sounds like the world’s harshest fortune cookie, but Fanthome swears it’s anything but depressing. In his mind, it’s liberating. If no one’s ranking you on some cosmic leaderboard, the pressure to measure up, to compete, to perform according to someone else’s rules, evaporates. 

“You stop trying to live up to hierarchies that were never worth your time in the first place,” Fanthome said.

Much of Fanthome’s life philosophy can be traced back to an unlikely source: a Snoopy comic strip. In it, the question is posed: What do you want to be when you grow up? The answer is simpler than most think. Not a career or a title, but to be happy. Simple. Obvious. Yet revolutionary if you actually stop to think about it.

For Fanthome, this small comic carried a huge lesson: Life isn’t a checklist of achievements, promotions or accolades. It’s about the ongoing, messy work of finding joy, curiosity and fulfillment. That little strip reminded him early on that the end goal isn’t a résumé, it’s a life you actually want to live. He carries that lesson into the classroom, showing students that the pursuit of knowledge, curiosity and connection can be about far more than grades.

For him, there’s a special kind of satisfaction when a student finally grasps a tricky concept, when the gears click and they see the world in a new way. But there’s something far more meaningful: The moment a student recognizes that the thought they’ve been nursing, perhaps doubting themselves for weeks, isn’t just valid — it’s brilliant.

For Fanthome, this is the reason he keeps showing up, day after day, to classes, office hours and conversations. The tiny sparks of validation, he said, are the real currency of education: “I find those moments of affirming students — and it can happen one-on-one, it can happen in a classroom — … the best student scenes that you can have as a teacher.”

So yes, Professor Fanthome is the guy who teaches classes with titles such as Critical Cartography (punk band name pending). But the real curriculum? How to be soft without breaking, how to be strong without hardening, how to laugh at hierarchies that don’t deserve your energy and how to remember that “happiness” is a perfectly good life plan.

An unabridged version of this piece originally appeared in “The Student Life.”