Students, Teachers and E-mails

Prof. Lehman-Wilzig's weekly post (in Hebrew) discusses a relatively new problem for lecturers - the ability of students to send e-mails rather than only meet them at the office or call them up at home. On the one hand, this makes it much easier for students to communicate with their teachers and ask questions (even send papers in some cases!). On the other hand, students often send e-mails on relatively trivial matters since it's so easy to send them. They also can forget, due to the distance involved, that the lecturer is not their equal or friend and that their authority needs to be respected.

Personally I have had quite a bit of e-correspondence with teachers, both within my university and without. My experience with this has been somewhat mixed. For instance, the response time of a teacher varies from a few days to a few weeks to never. Also, their policy with regard to sending papers via the net is different - some do and some don't allow this. The biggest variable is our relationship afterward - most correspondence is business-like discussion of courses, and in one case I still maintain a correspondence on various matters. At the other extreme, I made the bad mistake of becoming too flippant with a teacher of mine on a number of occasions, and due to this and other matters, we are no longer on speaking terms.

I would like to make the following suggestions to both students and teachers when writing e-mails. Students first:

1. Don't ask questions unless they are very important and can't wait until the next class.
2. Your professor is not your bosom buddy. He/She deserves appropriate respect even if he/she appears to be overly friendly.
3. Consolidate requests into one e-mail rather than spreading them out over several e-mails. It makes things easier.

Now for the teachers:

1. At the beginning of the course, you should state your "e-mail policy". This should include: type of questions and their frequency, the length of time it will take for you to respond (if you intend to), whether students can send papers via e-mail etc.
2. Corollary: Since students rarely get it the first time, and since many don't show up, repeat the "e-mail policy" statement throughout the course.
3. Give students the benefit of the doubt if they don't show the proper deference the first time around (If you hold by such things).

I hope this will help. AIWAC