Time now: 11:25 p.m.
Email JUST received:
Dear Dr. Cynic:
I would like to meet with you before 9 a.m. tomorrow so you can go through my essay for corrections, then I would have a few minutes to make it right before submitting. Have a good evening.
Fyllis Flake.
My imaginary response: "You're fucking kidding me, right?"
My real response: *delete*
I'd reverse those: as much as I'd like to delete emails that brazen, I feel obligated to respond to ALL student communications. In this case, I'd have no qualms about saying "No, I don't provide that kind of feedback, but if you want to show me a draft a few days before the next deadline, that would be fine."
ReplyDeleteDo you have office hours before 9? Then, you can have some fun playing "spot the proofreading error" with the student for awhile, as in, "Hrm...I found a comma splice in this paragraph. Can you see it? Do you know what a comma splice is? Here...let's open up our textbook..." Read the definition of a comma splice, and then provide several examples. Then ask the student to find the comma splice again. Or, have the student read the draft aloud, and ask vague, meandering questions about it. Until 9 a.m. on the dot.
ReplyDeleteIf you don't have office hours, ignore the email entirely, and breeze into class at 9 a.m. precisely. If you are confronted just before class, or after, blink stupidly. "Oh, you sent me an email? When? Last night? What time...I checked my email last at around 11:15...oh, you just missed me...darn!"
Better yet: Meet with the student at 8:45, and quickly circle ALL of the proofreading/grammar/spelling errors in a single paragraph. (If your students are like my students, you'll be able to easily spot the mistakes, and there will be three or four per sentence.) Then say that it's all you have time to correct before the paper is due, but hopefully the other paragraphs are cleaner than this one. That ought to make the student cry.
ReplyDeleteLike Jonathan, I would answer this one, but not until morning, and not necessarily before class unless I had office hours then.
ReplyDeleteI've found the early morning response to be the best passive-aggressive way of reminding the student whose clock the relationship runs on. When I come in and there are Urgent! messages from overnight they get replied to first thing. Sometimes even before morning caffeine. Those are the best.
ReplyDelete@ Stella
ReplyDeleteI like it!
I just had a student e-mail me last night wanting me to look over his essay that was due at midnight. I e-mailed him back at 11:55 saying that his essay was too short and I would look at a revised on if he could get it to me before midnight.
ReplyDeleteWhere have you folks been all my adjuncting life? :)
ReplyDeleteI'm a fan of answering emails when I answer emails. I make a big deal of telling my students that I answer emails between 9 and 5 Monday-Friday, I check once or twice on Saturday, and never on Sunday. It has preserved my sanity to stop checking my email after 6PM. If I do, then I never respond to the emails.
ReplyDeleteI think that students send these late night emails not because they want a response and a resolution but because they want to be able to say that they sought help and that they tried. It helps them live with subpar work. It's so that they can displace blame when the inevitable happens.
@CMP,
ReplyDeleteTHAT, is EXACTLY why this pisses me off so much. This student then came to class whining that she had asked for help and that I hadn't been willing. When I asked her why she hadn't shown up for her scheduled one-on-one conference last week, she claimed an emergency had cropped up. Where in the world do they learn to deflect responsibility from themselves like this?
Thanks, everyone, for helping me put this in perspective.
@Ladie: welcome to the world of whine. :o)
ReplyDelete"Where in the world do they learn to deflect responsibility from themselves like this?"
ReplyDeleteI can only presume in the home, but I am not sure. As a parent, I worry about this constantly. So much so that I am always saying to my kid, "OK, so, you made a mistake. How can you make it right?" and then guiding her through apology notes, payments with her allowance, and so on. I fear I am producing a guilt-ridden wreck, but is that perhaps better than a child without any sense of the relationship between her actions and outcomes?
I definitely wouldn't have deleted the email. Annoying though the email is, I would have attempted to gently make the student aware of the various levels on which that kind of request is inappropriate (though some of the suggestions above are better than anything I could have come up with!).
ReplyDeleteThat would have gone some way towards deflecting the kind of response you got from the student, and hopefully prevent a future occurrence, with me or with my colleagues.
You didn't reply so the student has no idea what was wrong and simply feels aggrieved that no help was proffered. Yeah, it shouldn't be our job to help them not deflect their responsibilities, but the fact still remains that if nobody points out their responsibilities to them then they aren't going to learn it by magic.
@F&T: I would respectfully suggest, as the recovering child of a bat-shit-crazy mother, that the fact that you emphasize cause-and-effect, and that the consequences of your daughter's actions are logical, you are not producing a guilt-ridden wreck. In fact, explaining the "make things right" concept seems like a very good idea to me. I learned the "make things right" business in retail and it's actually helped me a lot in other parts of my life. Sometimes people are stunned when I say "Okay, I made this mistake. What can I do to make it right, or at least, address the problem I've created?"
ReplyDeleteMy mom was totally unpredictable in her reactions...and that's where the problem lies. Okay, end of parenting advice from the childless whack job.
I concur that these late-night emails are the basis of "I tried" whining later on + critiques that we as proffies are "not available." And that, as we all know, is some powerful bullshit. Putting hours when I answer email onto my syllabus has cut down on this form of whining a great deal. (Plus, because my email moratorium runs from Friday to Sunday morning, they all assume it's religious which for some reason they've learned to 'respect' more.)
I once received a similar e-mail and was reprimanded at the grade grievance meeting for not being helpful enough.
ReplyDelete