PTSD

To email or not to email, that is the question

To keep yous occupied, an issue that's been discussed quite a lot lately--about students emailing professors and "erasing boundaries that traditionally kept students at a healthy distance" (Notice that distance is supposed to be "healthy").

The NYT article, from which I took the quote, goes on to classify a lot of the emails as "too informal or downright inappropriate" without actually specifying what these mean.

As a regular emailer to professors (who email back, often in great and much-appreciated detail) and as one who had to be trained to see them as normal human beings (Undergrad communication classes used to be conducted in the Uni's student union, which served alcohol) and then re-trained to "establish boundaries" at TUWSNBN, I much prefer email to calling.

A Professor Ewick is quoted in the article saying that she received numerous drafts of students' papers, asking for corrections. I'd have thought an easy way to avoid that would have been to just tell students that the professor would not correct drafts but would only evaluate final papers. Oh, I'd also prefer a response (any response) to none. No response to a query would be even more scary than a politely-worded and firm negative response.

I'm not saying students are not dificult. WE all know we/they sometimes are. But, we/they are not often imbecilic either. We/they appreciate communication, we/they are willing to discuss availability of/with professors and, let's face it, we/they are usually aware that professors have lives apart from us students. The article, by positing that students are some sort of email-crazed loonies who don't understand boundaries while professors are raising the drawbridges of their castles (offices!) and hiding, is not helping foster student-teacher interactions.

In these days of rapid Internet-based communication--emails, chat, blogging, podcasting, and so on--I hardly think emailing is going to go out of style. We all need to find ways to deal with it that we're each comfortable with. I love being able to email my professors and colleagues. If they don't fancy writing back, I reckon they will just tell me. Or so I hope.

posted by Priya @ 2:51 PM