Favorite student emails

[downer]

I finally got this email. "I am aware that our exam week will be May {-}, however, I will be traveling that week for vacation."

Somehow it makes me happy.

[apl68]

It never ceases to amaze me how casually so many students apparently take dropping class, and even exams, to go on vacation or what have you.  I don't recall any of that in the 1980s and 1990s.  For me it would have been just unthinkable that anybody would do something like that.  By all accounts this sort of thing is now highly common among K-12 families, so I suppose the college students are just giving their education the priority their parents have taught them to give it.

[the_geneticist]

Yep.  We require attendance in lab in week 1 or else students are dropped & the seat is offered to the students on the waitlist.  If they contact us, we let them stay enrolled & do an online assignment.  Once.

Stu wrote back to say "but I'm still on vacation with my family!"

I gave them the online makeup lab.

Did they do it? Nope.

Now they are emailing in a panic that they are already SO BEHIND & wanting an extension.  They can turn it in late.  If they had read the syllabus, they would know this.  Or just tried opening the assignment.

What did they think would happen? That nothing is due in any of their classes?

Life is full of choices, choices have consequences.  Stu is not pleased by the consequences.

[kaysixteen]

apl is certainly correct to note that this sort of thing would not have flown when we Xers were undergrads.  But let's read the posts more carefully, and note that these Zer vacationers are, ahem, going on/ staying on vacay with their, ahem, parents.  Some of these parents may have even insisted that the kid ask profs for extensions/ earlier exams, etc., and certainly no parent who takes kid on vacay during school session time thinks there is anything wrong with doing so, and most would overtly expect that profs, when contacted, would and should give allowances.   The parents and the kids certainly did this in k12 nowadays.... all the time.... and adminiscritters there do grant such allowances.

[onehappyunicorn]

Today is a critique day for one of the four major projects in this course. I tell students, and have it in the syllabus, and in the course announcements for blackboard, that barring a documented emergency you must be present for critiques. I got this email last night:

"Hey Mr. Onehappyunicorn,
I won't be able to make it to class tomorrow because my mom's hired cleaners had to postpone a day, so I'll have to be home tomorrow morning to make sure they don't steal or break anything."

I've been here for 11 years and I don't think I ever have received an email that I am less sympathetic to...

[fishbrains]

I've had three online students this semester email me to tell me they are "totally lost" on an essay--and then immediately disappear from the class for one or two weeks.

Like they think they sent up the Bat Signal and are now waiting for me to come to their house or something.

Weird.

[RatGuy]

Hey there!
I was recently checking the syllabus and did not see a date. I needed to turn in the final essay and journal portfolio. I was wondering when those dates were.

a) I'm used to flaky students not knowing my name, but I do not know why "hey there!" has become the preferred method of addressing instructors

b) The due dates for those two assignments are on the syllabus (under due dates), on the calendar, on the assignment sheets themselves, and on a slideshow posted to the LMS with the title "Due Dates for April."

[kaysixteen]

"Hey there" is obviously completely unacceptable as a form of address to a professor.   Will you call stu on this?   Would anyone else here do so?

[onehappyunicorn]

Whenever a student does the "Hey there" thing I respond with the way I want them to send emails, something like "Good afternoon Stu...". Most students seem to get it within a response or two.
For those that don't I try to talk to them in-person. Most students, I have found, are coming from a place of ignorance rather than intentional rudeness. When I have explained the importance of appropriate communication, and how that reflects on how they are perceived, I have not had any issues.

Now when I get emails from staff that are addressed that way, well, that is a problem I don't have a solution for.

[apl68]

Whenever a student does the "Hey there" thing I respond with the way I want them to send emails, something like "Good afternoon Stu...". Most students seem to get it within a response or two.
For those that don't I try to talk to them in-person. Most students, I have found, are coming from a place of ignorance rather than intentional rudeness. When I have explained the importance of appropriate communication, and how that reflects on how they are perceived, I have not had any issues.

Now when I get emails from staff that are addressed that way, well, that is a problem I don't have a solution for.

It's surely usually fairer with youths to assume ignorance of conventions rather than deliberate rudeness.  Your approach sounds like a good way to help them to learn what they need to learn there.

[Langue_doc]

We go over email etiquette on the first or second day of class. There's also a sentence in the syllabus under "how to contact me" informing students that emails are professional ways to communicate with profs and staff. "Hey there" and similar salutations would direct the students to the syllabus and/the link to what to include in emails given to students during the first week of class.

[Parasaurolophus]

Not an email, but feedback on a course: "Every topic was quite interesting and i like every topic but they are also boring "

[apl68]

But boring in an agreeable and interesting sort of way.  Not the bad kind of boring.

[fosca]

From a junior in college:

"goodmorning, and i feel like some of the assignments i earned more than what i got my actual work was good just was not formatted how you wanted but aside from how it's formatted the actual work i feel i should have a higher grade in certain assignments"

And no, the actual work wasn't actually that good: they tend to do the minimum (when they do answer all of the questions for each assignment) and hand work in late. Plus the plagiarism, of course.

[kaysixteen]

Hmmmm.... methinks you are granting too much to the notion that ignorance is responsible for this kid's behavior.   He would almost certainly never have dared to email one of his hs teachers this way-- what would he suspect had changed?