Help! I’m uber-organized in other parts of my English prof job, but I’ve never gotten a handle on how to “do Email.” I receive between 10-15 messages per day from students and colleagues; these messages essentially increase my “To Do List” and bog me down. My Campus requires we maintain email availability, so just saying “no” is not an option.
Please share what works for you!
This seems relevant.
If it’s complicated I suggest they come to my office hours-- I talk faster than I type. If I get the same question from several people I cut and paste the first answer. If it’s something I think might come up a LOT (error on a study guide, example footnotes, whatever) I use Blackboard to announce it/email to all users. I have my e-mail program auto-sort student messages into folders for each class.
I don’t answer anything before drinking coffee in the morning. If it’s something I might be snippy with I lager it for 15 minutes (or longer depending on how much I feel the urge to strangle) for a tone re-check. I quickly read and delete about 85% of departmental mail and only save things that are important or directly relevant to me-- mark the event in a calendar and chuck the e-mail. If it’s a long ‘thread’, after things quiet down I delete all but the last couple of e-mails-- my colleagues tend to respond with every past message in the thread quoted so it’s like the digest version. After about 6 PM or so I consider myself desert-islanded and only respond to things that I feel like responding to. Having e-mail does not equal being at work every moment of the day: “your procrastination is not my emergency” etc.
Some good suggestions from capybara there.
I make an announcement in the first class about email etiquette. I make clear to the students that i am not their text buddy, that emails need to include a decent salutation and need to be signed at the end, and that the subject line should convey the subject of the email and not just “Hey” or “Class.” In turn, i show students the same consideration when i send emails to them. I also let them know that, while i make an effort to respond to emails as quickly as possible, this does NOT mean that i am available 24 hours a day, and that any student who finishes an email message with “Please get back to me as soon as possible” will likely go straight to the back of my email “To do” list.
I think learning to allocate your time between emails and office hours is essential. If it takes me 15 minutes of typing to explain something, i can probably explain it directly to the student in about 5 minutes, with grater clarity and with the opportunity to make sure he or she understands it properly. For that reason, any email asking about significant matters of content will be answered with a promise to address the issue in class (if i think it’s something that would benefit everyone), or a request to attend office hours.
Also, i’m a strong believer that, if the question is about something they should already know or be able to find out easily for themselves, there’s nothing wrong with telling them so, sometimes rather tersely. For example, if a student emails me to ask when the next paper is due, or what reading they need to do for the upcoming class, my response (cut and pasted from a small series of stock responses that i keep on hand) will be:
If you enable the lazy ones by answering all of the most mundane queries, they will never stop. Like capybara, i try to be careful not to send out snarky emails, and will often give myself time to cool off if i think the message i’ve composed is too harsh, but i also think you need to make it clear that you’re not at the students’ beck and call for stuff that they should be able to work out for themselves.
Having a Blackboard page or some similar type of course site to post announcements and other information is very handy, and if you keep it up to date and tell the students to check it regularly, you can save yourself considerable email hassle.
I try to “push” as much information out via my website as I can. That means putting up the syllabus, class calendar, and useful links to resources students might find useful for completing their term projects. I try to group these links by topic so the students don’t have much room to say, “Your website is cluttered. I couldn’t find such-and-such link.”
Another thing I do at the beginning of the semester is set up a distribution list in Outlook for each class. At the beginning of the semester, I ask students to put their **preferred **(that’s important!) email addresses down, and explain to them that I make heavy use of email. If I get an intelligent question from one student, I often copy my response to everyone in the class.
Personally I would much rather deal with student concerns via e-mail as it gives me a paper trail, and I tend to deal with e-mails when the spirit hits me (10 am, 10 pm, 3 am… it depends).
I have boilerplate responses that I can cut and paste - students inquiring about their admissions status, and my sig contains the URLs for my faculty profile and website.
I have a colleague that fires up his e-mail in the morning and does it for about 30 minutes, and does it at the end of the day. The rest of the time he has it closed (or at least the notification is off).
Sadly, I spend about 15 minutes to an hour - every day of the week - dealing with school related emails.
I always answer - luckily I type fairly fast.
I agree, the paper trail, so to speak, is good to have sometimes, just in case a situation arises that might need me to prove what I said or didn’t say to a student - or to another faculty member.
Actually, I don’t mind all that much. Let’s me know what is going on and sometimes a single question will let me know that I didn’t mention something in class, or need to clarify things to all the other students as well.
Something I am finding useful is Google Voice - it allows people to call me 24/7 and leave a message, that is then translated into text and sent to my Gmail account. This is great when a student simply wants to let me know they will not be in class, but I don’t need to respond. I put this number on my syllabus and tell them to use it if they don’t need me to respond.
I have to give credit to the SDMB for my skills at writing students and faculty - over all the years I have been here, I know just how far I can go when responding without coming across as a jerk, or saying too much. Just reading and responding to the threads here on the boards for all these years has really honed my skills in responding to all kinds of questions and comments.