Link: To: [email protected] Subject: Why It's All About Me - New York Times.
I made a prediction in 2000. It was depressing, and few of my colleagues believed me. I'd always been an early adopter of classroom uses of technologies, since 1990. So at that time, with 10 years of what I'd hoped were innovative uses of electronic pedagogies behind me, I was dying, just dying. Why? Because many of the things I'd been doing were being adopted and entrenched university-wide (and I'd often helped with those initiatives). The biggest thing was email. Email and file-sharing with class projects, essentially groupware applied to the classroom. That's what I did. Collaboration and writing, writing writing (hey, I was a writing teacher, what do you expect?)
I'd done it in hopes that a more comprehensive electronic peer review process could/would lighten the grading load that had first started oppressing me as a teacher of first-year composition as a graduate assistant teacher at the University of Arkansas in the late 1980s.
By 2000, on my own personal bleeding edge of technology, I'd become so overwhelmed with student email, department memos and correspondence, research correspondence, the early onset of spam, and so on, that important things were falling through the cracks. I was like George Jetson on that treadmill, never able to keep up and soon to be eaten alive, with the family dog watching as I got sucked into its conveyor belt.
My colleagues were understandably concerned when I sometimes didn't respond to some things, or just didn't respond quickly enough. When I told them I got 200+ emails a day, they sort of blanched, but assumed I was an unusual case, the department techie.
But all of that paled in comparison to the attitudes of students, who viewed my email responses as entitlements. They sent email in the middle of the night, asking "what's tomorrow's assignment again?" and got angry if I didn't respond before the morning class, giving them at least a half hour before so they'd have time to prepare.
And worst of all, as the article below points out, students won't hesitate to trash you on evaluations if you don't respond to their email quickly, even if it comes in the middle of the night.
I told my colleagues at the time, in that prediction I'll never forget: Where I am right now is where you will be in five years. "No, no," they said. "That's an extreme case, very unlikely."
Maybe its one of those things like hard drive space, that gets larger by huge increments, from 40 mb on my first Mac, to 80 when that hard drive fried. To 4 gigs on my first big external SCSI hard drive I thought I'd never fill up, to the 60 gigs on my Mac G3, to the dual external hard drives I have now, with 160 gigs each.
The article below shows how fully my prediction has come to pass, but it raises a lot more troubling issues than that. At one time I'd feel smug that what I'd said came true, but after teaching again last semester in Montana and working HARD to keep my email load managable with all kinds of new tech tricks with blogs that I was eager to try (and I had an extremely managable student load as well), I have to note that I had an emotional reaction to student email that was very difficult for me, sort of like post-traumatic shock syndrome.
In the years since unplugging from George Jetson's treadmill and getting my email down to say 20-30 messages a day through strict partitioning of accounts etc., I began to jealously guard my email space. But I still hear from folks who fall through the cracks, folks I really want to respond to in a more timely manner. My motivation is high, yet some things still get away from me. Maybe my motivation is lower, being off the tenure track. I do find it remarkably liberating to be my own email master, that's for sure.
I do a much better job of keeping up than I used to, but an emotional barrier comes up against the kind of replies that require more thought or reflection, often the emails I'm most interested in, as opposed to the ones that require only a functionary response, "yes we are confirmed for a meeting at 10 a.m."
And I find that the email In Box starts feeling like a place I go where squirrels nibble little pieces off me. I suppose that's a better feeling than being on George Jetson's treadmill, but it still isn't entirely comfortable, because I really LOVE corresponding with people by email, and as many friends know, I can get pretty long-winded. And I still manage a listserv, I value electronic discussions so much.
I don't say this to deter people who might otherwise email me, but are offended at being characterized as squirrels. I don't see things that way at all. I like getting emails. I just don't like the cumulative effect of the list of email in the In Box biting off little bits of me so that it turns into a To Do list of obligations. It's not my correspondents' faults that I went into a kind of shock for a while because of an overwhelming email load in the late 1990s. I just have some emotional baggage from dealing with it back then, baggage that sometimes turns into a barrier to replying very quickly.
Maybe the article below explains it better. It's terrific. And I've gotten examples of every single type of email situation cited below, and one not mentioned, the drunken student love letter sent in the middle of the night. Bold emphasis added below is mine.
Link: To: [email protected] Subject: Why It's All About Me - New York Times.
February 21, 2006
To: [email protected] Subject: Why It's All About Me
By JONATHAN D. GLATER
Correction Appended
One student skipped class and then sent the professor an e-mail message asking for copies of her teaching notes. Another did not like her grade, and wrote a petulant message to the professor. Another explained that she was late for a Monday class because she was recovering from drinking too much at a wild weekend party.
Jennifer Schultens, an associate professor of mathematics at the University of California, Davis, received this e-mail message last September from a student in her calculus course: "Should I buy a binder or a subject notebook? Since I'm a freshman, I'm not sure how to shop for school supplies. Would you let me know your recommendations? Thank you!"
At colleges and universities nationwide, e-mail has made professors much more approachable. But many say it has made them too accessible, erasing boundaries that traditionally kept students at a healthy distance.
[just to clarify, I'm all for deconstructing professorial authority in the classroom and outside of it, to encourage student questioning and critical thinking. I'm not invested in keeping an intellectual distance of "sage on the stage," and I tried to become the "guide on the side" many years ago.]
These days, they say, students seem to view them as available around the clock, sending a steady stream of e-mail messages — from 10 a week to 10 after every class — that are too informal or downright inappropriate.
"The tone that they would take in e-mail was pretty astounding," said Michael J. Kessler, an assistant dean and a lecturer in theology at Georgetown University. " 'I need to know this and you need to tell me right now,' with a familiarity that can sometimes border on imperative."
He added: "It's a real fine balance to accommodate what they need and at the same time maintain a level of legitimacy as an instructor and someone who is institutionally authorized to make demands on them, and not the other way round."
While once professors may have expected deference, their expertise seems to have become just another service that students, as consumers, are buying. So students may have no fear of giving offense, imposing on the professor's time or even of asking a question that may reflect badly on their own judgment.
For junior faculty members, the barrage of e-mail has brought new tension into their work lives, some say, as they struggle with how to respond. Their tenure prospects, they realize, may rest in part on student evaluations of their accessibility.
The stakes are different for professors today than they were even a decade ago, said Patricia Ewick, chairwoman of the sociology department at Clark University in Massachusetts, explaining that "students are constantly asked to fill out evaluations of individual faculty." Students also frequently post their own evaluations on Web sites like ratemyprofessors.com and describe their impressions of their professors on blogs.
[...]
Professor Ewick said 10 students in one class e-mailed her drafts of their papers days before they were due, seeking comments. "It's all different levels of presumption," she said. "One is that I'll be able to drop everything and read 250 pages two days before I'm going to get 50 of these."
[if I had a nickel for every time this happened!]
[...]
Alexandra Lahav, an associate professor of law at the University of Connecticut, said she felt pressured by the e-mail messages. "I feel sort of responsible, as if I ought to be on call all the time," she said.
[...]
Meanwhile, students seem unaware that what they write in e-mail could adversely affect them, Professor Lahav said. She recalled an e-mail message from a student saying that he planned to miss class so he could play with his son. Professor Lahav did not respond.
"It's graduate school, he's an adult human being, he's obviously a parent, and it's not my place to tell him how to run his life," she said.
But such e-mail messages can have consequences, she added. "Students don't understand that what they say in e-mail can make them seem very unprofessional, and could result in a bad recommendation."
[...]
FINALS: American Hanna Teter (left) won the gold medal in halfpipe Monday, with fellow teammate Gretchen Bleiler earning the silver. FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
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