It started with quite a simple email from a student I haven't seen in weeks:
Hi it's lowercasefirst lowercasesecond can u please drop me from the class
Class ends this week. I received this email over the weekend and, like I said, haven't seen this student in weeks. Now, I don't care that s/he wants to drop the class. S/he should. However, the school has a very late drop date for students and s/he could have easily dropped by that date. Also, this is the email you send to ask your English instructor a favor? You send an email with no punctuation, your name in lowercase letters, and a frickin' text message "u"?
Ugh. Moving on...
Their final essay was due last Monday. I had one student turn the paper in, via email, on the following Thursday. The email that went along with the essay?
Yeah I know it's really late, but don't try to minus too much points now lol :)
I was pretty shocked when I read this email because I had been, or so I thought, quite stern with this student when I realized s/he didn't turn in his/her paper. Apparently, it was all a joke that I wasn't in on.
To continue with the inappropriate emoticons, this email came from another student in that same class:
Hi Mrs. EA, it's your favorite student in the world lowercasefirst lowercaselast. I'd like to thank you for helping me this semester. I'm honestly not a slacker but, ok, let me be honest, I am ;-). I was just wondering if u could tell me were I stand in the class right now. Thanks in advance.
Seriously? That is really how you want to address your instructor? You are aware that I decide if you pass or fail this class, right? I haven't turned in the grades yet, so this might not be the best email to be sending to me right now.
All these emails boil down to a simple formality that is obviously absent from the relationship between me and my students. This is probably my fault. I like our classes to feel laid back, so I do have a tendency to joke around and try to put out a friendly vibe. But when things don't go too well, I always thought I was strict and I expect respect.
It makes me think about my relationship with my professors. I am opposite end of these emails-waaay opposite. It takes me about half an hour to draft an email to the professor, carefully planning the salutations and polite yet non-stuffy wording. I would never, ever, nevereverever, write such a "hey, wazzup?!" email to a professor or anyone I was in a professional relationship with. Many of my students just do not treat school professionally and so I get emails with winky faces. Awesome.
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ReplyDeleteI received a "Hey Annie" email from a student this morning and thought of you;-)
ReplyDeleteIt's partially a structural thing, too -- assuming that your students know you to be a grad student rather than Ph.D. And, as you may have guessed already, women seem to receive this kind of address from students more so than do men. Form of address is wrapped up in power relationships, and since a lot of undergrads don't really understand that a woman who holds a master's degree can be a full authority figure in a classroom, they jack around with these emails.
ReplyDeleteI've had a few sloppily constructed emails in my time, but my female colleagues have shown me worse. As much as my insecurity might suggest otherwise, my sex grants me a degree of authority and respect in a classroom setting.
I'm looking foward, though, to when I next teach (as a Ph.D.!) and can actually instruct my students to refer to me as "Dr. Koshary." Then we'll see how polite and formal those emails become!
These kind of emails drive me crazy. The acronym "lol" especially makes me want to scream.
ReplyDeleteSo now every semester, pretty early on, I take the time to teach a quick lesson on how to send an appropriate email to a college professor. I talk about how we need to cater to the audience we are writing for and what kind of conventions that audience will expect. It's helped a whole lot.
I actually do not mind them calling me by my first name or being friendly in emails. I think my problem is when they are too familiar.
ReplyDeleteJo(e), that is a great idea that I'm going to have to use. I've talked about professional email addresses before when looking for jobs, but I've never gone through how to write an appropriate email. That will be very helpful!
*face palm* Sigh.
ReplyDeleteI, too, work in a community college as a history and humanities lecturer, and I also try to cultivate a laid-back atmosphere in my classes. I seem to get these sorts of emails a lot too. Part of it may be the setting, specifically, community college. I find that my students that are already in four-year institutions (taking my class for transfer credit) do not do this as often as my two year associates degree students. Of course age of student has a lot to do with it as well, I've found. Older students tend to be more respectful on emails - even though many of them are indeed older than I am. Younger students tend to have the "whaaz up?"-"lol"-"c y l8tr" kind of emails. The thing is, I suspect that most of them have no clue that they are doing anything disrespectful. You and I (and some of the other commenters on here) could really swap stories.
ReplyDelete