The Email Problem

A colleague of mine recently had the frustrating experience of having spent time commenting on a draft of a student paper, only to have the student later confess that they'd* never looked at the colleague's comments. For those of us who teach writing-intensive courses, the experience is of course a familiar one, but in this case it was particularly frustrating because the draft was unassigned, and was sent to the colleague via an email soliciting comments. My colleague had gone out of their way to do some extra work in order to comply with a student request--but it was a request the student had apparently not made in earnest.

The situation reminded me of what was at the time for a me a "nightmare" exchange with a student over email. Back when I was still very new to the classroom, I encouraged students to send me drafts outside of those assigned for the course, with the offer to email them comments on their work. This seemed like a good idea at the time and worked well enough for a couple of semesters; but then I encountered a student I will call "Jimmy." Jimmy was highly engaged and seemed inclined to work hard at the class, and so I was more than happy to encourage his efforts by commenting on any work he was willing to send me. One fateful Saturday, however, Jimmy went a little overboard--and I jumped right after him. Over the course of about 5 hours, Jimmy sent me something like 4 drafts of the same paper. With each draft, I sent a response--usually within about half an hour of receiving the draft. As you might expect of work "revised" so rapidly and in such a compressed period of time, each draft was worse than the previous. This would not have been so bad if the exchange between us had not also grown increasingly heated--when I tried to tell him that the quality of the drafts wasn't improving, Jimmy grew belligerent, blaming me for being unduly harsh in my criticism. This got my dander up, and in return I accused him of not recognizing that he still had things to learn. All this over email, on what might have otherwise been a lovely Saturday afternoon. It was ultimately the opposite of a productive exchange, and it was only by the intervention of my truly wonderful mentor that I was able to right the ship with that student and sail back into more pedagogically sound waters.

The experience with Jimmy gave me two insights (not unique to me, but new to me at the time) into the problem with email as a pedagogical tool. The first is universally a problem with "work" email: it makes us over-connected, which can foster potentially unhealthy expectations (which the interaction with Jimmy illustrates). For anyone who uses email in the workplace, email creates the well-known problem of blurring the distinctions between work and non-work time, making it difficult ever to "clock out." In an educational setting, however, email creates the additional problem of creating for our students the illusion that they can have their questions answered at any time of day or night. Firing off an email at 1am is easy; why shouldn't the response be as easy to fire back? This in turn, I think, enables poor decision making when it comes to time management for our students. If students could ask questions only during scheduled face-to-face time, like class and office hours, there would be an incentive for them to get started on assignments early: there's a specific time-window during which they get to ask questions, so they know in advance that, if they want to ask questions, they have to be prepared. If they know they can reach us whenever they have a question, however, then the need to work ahead of time to make effective use of classes and office hours seems to disappear. Email makes it easier to procrastinate because it creates the (often false) sense that it's never too late to ask a question or to get clarification on the assignment.

The second insight the situation with Jimmy provided me is closely related. In the same way that email makes asking questions so "easy" that it encourages bad time-management habits, email also makes the draft-commenting process so "easy" from the perspective of the student that the commenting process appears frivolous. In my experience, sometimes (though by no means always) students will email drafts, not because they want comments to help them revise further, but because they're checking to see if the draft is "good enough" yet--they're checking to see if they can stop working on it. The work of revision is something they already have to do for the assignment, but it's the easiest thing in the world to put the draft in an email and send it off in the hopes that the instructor will say, "not bad!", and then they can be done with it (this was very much what Jimmy was looking for, and he was frustrated when he wasn't getting it). These are the situations in which students aren't reading our comments: and frequently I think, after a good night's sleep, they wake up realizing that the paper isn't "good enough" without even receiving our comments, and they get back to work before they've seen any feedback from us. Email here just makes it too easy for them, in a moment of weariness, to send us their work simply because, at that moment, they either don't want to work on it anymore, or don't know what else to do with it. The problem is that we have no way to know which students are earnestly seeking comments and which are sending the email as a way to stop working for the night. This creates extra work for us that is not useful to our students--it's lose-lose.

So I've adopted two policies to deal with the email problem. The first is that I have a "24-hour" clause in the email section of my syllabus that states that students should expect up to 24 hours to pass before I respond to their emails (and 48 on weekends and holidays). This is both to create some breathing room for me--as a human being I have a right to have an evening in which I do nothing work-related--and to cut down somewhat on last-minute emailing: if my students know that they can't rely on getting a response from me 12 hours before a paper is due, they know that they have to plan ahead a bit (whether they actually plan ahead or not is their choice). The second policy I adopted, not long after the Jimmy situation, is that I no longer comment on drafts via email: I will only provide comments in office hours. I tell my students that I am very happy to read extra drafts of their work, and that they should (1) make an appointment to see me in office hours, and (2) email me the draft they want to discuss at least 24 hours before their appointment. What this does is balance the equation of effort: if I'm going to put in the time to read over extra drafts and provide feedback, they must also put in the time to meet with me. As a result, I almost never see "please just tell me it's good enough" drafts coming my way anymore. Students who genuinely want the extra help are also willing to put in the time to meet with me, and the requirement that drafts be sent 24 hours in advance of a scheduled appointment removes the "I'm just sick of working on this, maybe I'll send it to my teacher" option that produces non-serious requests for comments. It's no longer so "easy" to get extra comments from me: students must plan a little and use a little forethought, which I hope also teaches them better time-management skills than my previous "email me anything anytime" system had done. It also has the added benefit of getting a few more students into my office hours, where it's a lot easier to assess the difficulties they are having and to address them.

At the end of the day, balancing effort--making sure that effort on my part is matched by some level of effort on their part--is a key element, I think, of teaching effectively. If we're doing all the work, we're not teaching our students to try. If we show them that, when they do work for us, we'll do work for them, we're rewarding them for their efforts, which seems like the right lesson to teach. In the electronic age, this balancing-act becomes much more difficult but also, I think, much more important.




*In case anyone objects to the use of what is considered a plural pronoun to refer to a singular antecedent, I'll just quote The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (eds. Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum [Cambridge, 2006]): "The use of they with a singular antecedent goes back to Middle English, and in spite of criticism since the earliest prescriptivist grammars it has continued to be very common in informal style. In recent years it has gained greater acceptance in other styles as the use of purportedly sex-neutral he has declined" (493). Having one pronoun serve multiple functions is not uncommon in language--see, for instance, the German pronoun sie--and I prefer to avoid both the clunkiness of "s/he" and invention of new pronouns (like "hu") when we have a pronoun that has served this purpose for centuries.