Comments on: Thank You, Professor Powerful

By: billnovak

billnovak — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 23:02:11 +0000

Don’t know what is wrong what is rite but i know that every one has there own point of view and same goes to this one..

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 14:09:33 +0000

That’s a good point, Kathleen. I’ve seen a bit of that too, that a student email can be unintentionally revealing.

There’s almost a complicated layered history here of encounters with email as an epistolary form. For those of us in our 40s, email came to us halfway through life, and we’re probably the ones who were most prone to the embarassing errors like sending a private message to a whole listserv but also the people who integrated previous formalisms of writing into our uses of email more readily. For many current 18-21s, email exists in simultaneity with instant messaging and that’s clearly creating a slightly different style and mode of use.

By: Kathleen

Kathleen — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 21:13:53 +0000

I hadn’t logged in in so long I lost my registration as “Kathleen Lowrey” — anyway. I certainly chuckled at the NYTimes article, and didn’t think they were inventing a non-phenomenon. Even though one class I teach is quite large, I don’t get an overwhelming number of emails nor any extraordinarily rude or goofy ones. In fact I would say a majority are rather charming. However, I do think email is more revelatory than students realize. Peremptory emails display vastly more about students’ attitudes toward the class/prof than they probably intend (given that it’s often the students most concerned to approach university “strategically” who send such emails).

That, I think, points to what is most disquieting about certain emails — profs can glean from the messages things (about — say — sloth, confusion, and hostility) that are not a part of their manifest content. So willy-nilly, you are presented a piece of information — that you may feel begs address — with which you can do nothing. ugh. It does level the playing field a bit: god only knows that students glean all kinds of extraneous info about their profs from watching them up at the front of the class, 30+ hours per semester, that is similarly not-manifest and thus not-engageable but not for those reasons uninteresting or un-discomfiting or even (to quote Homer Simpson) un-delicious.

By: Doug

Doug — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 09:42:58 +0000

If you can do comments on screen, you might consider asking students to submit their papers as PDF files, and then you can attach the comments as notes from Acrobat. Chances are very good that after graduation they will have to deal with PDF documents on a near-daily basis, so practice at Swarthmore (or elsewhere) could be a good thing.

By: jim

jim — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 04:28:29 +0000

“I have to admit that I find papers sent to me via email to be fairly difficult to handle. I find that they tend to get separated from my main stack of papers”

The perils of falling between two stools.

I require all papers to be electronically delivered (WebCT rather than email, ’cause it’s easier to archive). I comment via email. I don’t print their papers. I deal them on my laptop — reading in one window, commenting in another. I don’t have to keep track of a main stack of paper, making sure it follows me to class.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 03:11:09 +0000

Lalalalaura’s point is a good one: I have to admit that I find papers sent to me via email to be fairly difficult to handle. I find that they tend to get separated from my main stack of papers that I’m graded, or that I have difficulty tracking them the same way–I may receive them on my home computer, or even while I’m travelling.

By: t-durkin

t-durkin — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 00:39:35 +0000

We discussed this in Social Interaction class today, & some students reported that their other profs “didn’t do” email. I think it is crucial, especially in large classes, as a way to keep in touch w/ the students. (That said, I read my first stack of students evals w/ some amusement. The first student said ‘speed it up & use fewer examples. The second said ‘you go to fast. use more examples’.
I require students to email papers. I can use the edit function of word to put comments in color, and if I suspect some cheating, sections can easily be googled or sent to Turnitin.

By: mrscoulter

mrscoulter — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 23:31:19 +0000

I found this rather bizarre as well:

‘But student e-mail can go too far, said Robert B. Ahdieh, an associate professor at Emory Law School in Atlanta. He paraphrased some of the comments he had received: “I think you’re covering the material too fast, or I don’t think we’re using the reading as much as we could in class, or I think it would be helpful if you would summarize what we’ve covered at the end of class in case we missed anything.”‘

To me, these student comments seem rather reasonable. And I didn’t email my professors in college, because I don’t think any of them knew what email was (neither did I for much of it).

By: lalalalaura

lalalalaura — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 23:25:13 +0000

It may not take long to reply to an email, but of course it matters how much of it you get. That few minutes to reply to each individual email can add up and create a substantial burden on an already-busy life. And a student who emails constantly about minor things can certainly give the impression that they don’t think your time is valuable – as valuable, for instance, as the time it would take them to figure something out for themself.

I’ve also heard faculty comment on the degree to which labor gets shifted to them as, for instance, when students email them papers rather than turning in hard copy. The teacher then has to do the work of printing out all of the papers. (I actually prefer having papers emailed to me, but I’ve talked to people who really resent the expectation that they take the time, use their own paper, etc.)

By: kieran

kieran — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 22:21:24 +0000

As always, it’s possible that the Times has conjured a “problem” from nowhere,

What about female students who email you to say they plan to work for a few years and then start a family?