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February 21, 2006
Academic email and the too-casual style
Today's silly New York Times story about email from students to professors quotes complaints about being asked to send notes for missed classes, about receiving pleas for help with personal issues, about being asked about what kind of school supplies to buy.
Although I can relate to many of these experiences, and have now and then received an email from a student with a cheeky "hey teach" sort of flair that put me off, I think there's a strong reactionary streak running through a lot of the professors' moaning.
English Professor Meg Worley of Pomona College, was quoted as saying that
she told students that they must say thank you after receiving a professor's response to an e-mail message."One of the rules that I teach my students is, the less powerful person always has to write back," Professor Worley said.
She is saying that she was misquoted, here on Tim Burke's blog and in an email to Pomona faculty, and that she just makes suggestions about etiquette for email to profs and points out "conventions." The suggestions, although basic and reasonable things your mother or Emily Post might say, still reveal a little anxiety about authority such as often accompanies new forms of communication (I guess the New York Times thinks email in academia is new).
There has always been disrespectful (and, following the analysis in the article, perhaps increasingly consumerist) behavior between students and faculty: acting up in class, nasty things written on bathroom stalls, home phone calls at inappropriate hours, overly personal issues raised in office hours, an "exaggerated sense of entitlement" exhibited in comments about classwork or grades. The medium is not to blame when occasional behavior like this shows up in emails.
Personally, I like it that students can send me email at 2 a.m. when they're up studying or whatever. I can answer it right away if I'm up - embarrassingly often, actually - or wait to respond until it's convenient for me. I do let students know that although they may frequently get quick responses at odd hours from me, they can't always count on it. I get lots of breezy and sometimes mildly inappropriate emails, but I don't find that it undercuts my authority where it matters, and I think the informality in this medium is good, on balance. The empowerment given to students through email can be helpful to some, the shy ones, for example, something I also notice in my students' blogs in my "Life Online" course. I too communicate to students differently via email, more teasing, maybe, sometimes more terse, sometime more prolix than in "RL." Since there is less and less socializing between students and faculty (damn lawyers again?), email is a nice escape from more scripted forms of interaction. On the other hand, I also get some emails from students that are far more formal than what I assume they are exchanging with peers, sometimes comically so. As in all Internet interaction, the way users interpret and imbue meaning to particular sites, and communication media are unpredictably connected to cultural values from other arenas and other times.
As for the offensive email asking about what kind of binder to buy, jeez, I answer that question all the time in my classes. They usually want to know whether they are going to get a blizzard of handouts they will have keep organized (the answer is no, due to the miracle of course web sites, an even newer educational technology the New York Times might want to look into).
Letting students email assignments, another point of contention, does introduce a whole new genre of sometimes dubious excuses, but it's often a whole lot more convenient for me and them. It saves them money, and as long as the College is paying for my paper and toner....
Posted by johnn at February 21, 2006 11:47 PM
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