Anxious Student?

[smallcleanrat]

Have you tried not responding for one day to see how the student reacts? Do you think student would complain or just send more emails asking why you didn't reply to the others?

I like clean's suggestion of waiting for a day's worth of emails from student to accumulate then bundle them with one answer.

Do these tend to be quick questions in each email or do they often seem to be asking for an in-depth response?

[Baldwinschild]

In 30+ years of teaching I've never experienced a student do this, so it must be very rare behavior. I've had plenty of bipolar and spectrum students.

I tend to reply to student email swiftly the first time if the email is reasonable. My response rate slows down quickly as soon as emails get less reasonable, and I don't generally reply to unreasonable emails.

The alarming part of the behavior is not so much the frequency of posting but the fact that the student does not respond to OP's requests to not send so many emails. That is the especially unreasonable part of the behavior.

Would like to second this.  I am in the tenth year, and I've never seen it get this out of control.  The consistency over such a long period of time is striking to me.  I've definitely had some persistent emailers and some students with personality disorders, but I've never experienced anything like this.  It feels like manic behavior. 

I'm sorry you are going through this.  You've been awfully patient. 

[mleok]

For me, any email that takes more than a short paragraph to respond, I ask that the student come to office hours instead. I have spent too much time trying to explain something in detail by email, only to get a new email before I send off my response saying that they figured it out.

I suggest setting up a rule in your email client that automatically routes emails from this student to a special folder, and only looking at it at most once every two days during  the work week, and never during the weekend.

[evil_physics_witchcraft]

Everyone:

Thanks for your comments and suggestions. Amazingly enough, the student did not email me today. *Gasp!*

I did wait until today to respond to yesterday's barrage of email.

I also mentioned, in the email I sent suggesting that hu slow down the flow of emails, that we could do a Webex meeting that might answer a lot of hu's questions instead of sending rapid fire emails (though I didn't use that terminology).

Haven't heard back yet.

[kaysixteen]

Hmmmm... I get the part about the possibility of the student being on the spectrum, and I get the complaint about the possibility that the OP was perhaps spoiling the student, autism prospects or not.  All true.  That said, I am wondering about the OP, is hu a tenured professor?  Tenure-tracked?  Adjunct?  This is  not an academic question, pardon my pun.  A tenured professor can easily and without essentially any potential negative consequences or blowback, do what has been suggested to 'unspoil' the kid.  Maybe even a non-tenured tt prof could.  An adjunct, otoh, well not so much.  Even, further, if there would *actually* be little likelihood that student complaints for professor's not answering emails instantly, etc., IOW not continuing to 'spoil' kid, would actually result in end of adjunct's job (and methinks in many cases there would be more than a little likelihood that it would indeed be a real job threat), it is very very reasonable to  assume that said adjunct could and likely would result in such depressing results, leading to the very real and logical decision to 'spoil' hu.  Welcome to the real life of adjuncthood, something that is likely to become very much realer in post-covid academic conditions.

[Hegemony]

I know adjuncts are oppressed — seriously.  But I think a situation where "The student emails me every day up to ten times a day, and I did not answer all ten emails immediately, but sent only one response to the group of emails, and the student complained" is not one where even an oppressed adjunct would be blamed.

[kaysixteen]

Probably not.   Probably not.   But not definitely not, and, esp if an adjunct in such a situation had already, ahem, experienced negative feedback/ consequences, due to student complaints in the past, hu might well decide to proactively cave.  That would have been true in summer 2019.  Now, in summer 2020/ aka 1A.C. (after Covid), with adjunct jobs very much harder to acquire (something which really shows little chance of changing anytime soon, all the while with new PhDs continuing to glut markets, etc), well it would just be even harder to expect 'backboned' reactions in such situations.

[Hegemony]

The great thing about this situation is — let's imagine that the student did complain. I think it's very unlikely, but let's say it happens. So the student emails the department chair and says, "I have questions about the course and the instructor doesn't answer me quickly and I get very worried!  I can't get a good grade in the course unless the instructor answers me!  Do something!"  So the head will send the student an email: "Thank you for your concern. Rest assured that we care about quality education and we will be looking into all concerns. Yours sincerely."  And thinks, "Aw fer Pete's sake, now I have to email this instructor and find out what's up, what a hassle."

Then half an hour later a new email comes in from the student: "You said that you will be looking into all concerns, have you found out something yet? Will my instructor be answering me right away?  What do I do if he doesn't?  I am so afraid I'm going to fail this course and what if I am confused and the instructor doesn't answer me?! What should I do?!"  And the head thinks, "Oh Jesus."  Thinks about drafting a reply but decides to get in touch with the instructor first. Starts to draft an email to the instructor.

In comes another email from the student: "I am really concerned about whether I will get replies from the instructor!  I had a question about our page numbers because it seemed like 30 pages would be too much to read for one class, so I emailed but I didn't hear back right away, so I didn't know whether I should go ahead and try to read those 30 pages which are like I say quite a lot of reading and might take up the whole afternoon, but then if that was wrong I would have wasted the whole afternoon, so I didn't know and I didn't hear back, and I am still wondering and it has been three hours since I emailed. What should I do?" 

And the head thinks, "I'm beginning to see the problem."  Softens the tone of the email. As soon as the email to the instructor is sent, in comes another one from the student, "I apologize if the last email was too insistent. I know I should just read what is on the syllabus and if I fail because it was too much, that is my own fault. I only wanted to know if 30 pages was the right amount and if the instructor was going to help me. Do you know if the instructor is going to help me? Because I took a class last year where..."

And the head of department thinks, "You couldn't pay me enough to deal with what this instructor is dealing with." Etc.

[evil_physics_witchcraft]

This. ^

[kaysixteen]

OK, given the scenario that hegemony posits, I can easily see that chair acting the way hegemony concludes.  But my point still stands in general--- it would not only be explicit threats to complain, but also the  generalized fear of potential complaints, that would make the adjunct quake in his boots, and likely provoke reactions to emails that would not be the same as hegemony's scenario suggests.

[AmLitHist]

OK, given the scenario that hegemony posits, I can easily see that chair acting the way hegemony concludes.  But my point still stands in general--- it would not only be explicit threats to complain, but also the  generalized fear of potential complaints, that would make the adjunct quake in his boots, and likely provoke reactions to emails that would not be the same as hegemony's scenario suggests.

I agree with Kay--most of the time, rational chairs, deans, et al. would blow this off and not punish the instructor for the unreasonable student's acts.  But I think it does depend a lot on those chairs and deans:  when I was adjunct faculty coordinator and later chair, my default setting was to defend my faculty nearly regardless (unless they'd done something truly egregious).  Two of my four chairs have had similar outlooks.

One of the four deans I've worked under would get a student rant about something like this, go to the faculty member for the details, and then rain down all hell on the student and explain to them in no uncertain terms that their email blitz was completely out of line, unprofessional, and wouldn't be tolerated.

On the other hand, my first dean had a long track record of taking such a situation and turning it on the faculty member, because for him all of us in academic disciplines were mean, evil crushers of dreams who were simply wanting to be paid to crush students' dreams and careers.  (He came from a very small, self-selected discipline and never had to deal with anyone who didn't want to be in his classes or had no interest in or aptitude for learning anything besides that self-selected field.)  More than once I saw him lean on our chair to fire/not rehire an adjunct over something like the OP's student, and I know of two instances in which he put letters charging insubordination in  FT faculty members' personnel files without telling them (those both resulted in union grievances which the dean lost, but still.)

As with so much, not just for adjuncts, situations often come down to personalities/neuroses/psychopathies of the admins involved.

[kaysixteen]

Yes, and of course adjuncts have pretty close to zero clout, and their low pay also precludes their more or less ever being in the position to say essentially 'take this job and shove it'.  Indeed, fear of student complaints/ low evaluation scores is probably sufficient to make most adjuncts proactively cave.

And, as I noted, that was true enough in summer 2019, but the vast and almost all negative changes wrought by the covid pandemic, well... they ain't gonna improve things, and are probably even more likely to foster an increased customer service mentality expectation on the part of well-insulated adminiscritters.

[Caracal]

Yes, and of course adjuncts have pretty close to zero clout, and their low pay also precludes their more or less ever being in the position to say essentially 'take this job and shove it'.  Indeed, fear of student complaints/ low evaluation scores is probably sufficient to make most adjuncts proactively cave.

N=1 and all that, but  for me it goes both ways. On one hand, on the one occasion my chair wrote me about a student complaint, I was painfully aware that if he were to decide I wasn't a good teacher, he didn't even have to bother firing me. He could just tell me my services weren't needed next semester. On the other hand, that creates a situation where if you're an adjunct there are really only two signals, thumbs up or thumbs down. For people on the tenure track, they often get judged based on if they are doing a "great enough" job in terms of tenure. If Evil is an adjunct, is their chair going to really not renew someone who is competent and doesn't cause problems because of one complaint from one weird student?

Same thing for taking the job and shoving it. Sometimes the advantage of knowing you're underpaid is that if you stop liking the other conditions of your employment, you aren't losing much by quitting. Of course that only works if you're lucky enough to have some safety net and I'm fully aware I'm lucky in that respect. If you don't the low pay works the other way...

[evil_physics_witchcraft]

Happy to say that the student hasn't been emailing me-at all. Well, I don't mind if the student emails me, just not 5+ emails a day. I'm wondering if the grades that I posted have something to do with it?

[kaysixteen]

Unfortunately it is essentially a vicious circle... if adjunct x has never had a real ft academic job, he'll not likely have the samoleans needed to have any such safety net allowing him to tell the boss to take this job and shove it, resulting in it becoming even more necessary to not get fired, and potentially to head off that fate by acceding to student demands proactively.

And I strongly maintain that the new employment realities attendant to covid will make these jobs even harder to acquire, and  thus make it even more likely that the struggling adjunct will have to do much to avoid the possibility of discharge.  Just look at how many k12 teachers are being laid off now, as tax revenues' toileting are forcing the hands of many districts, however much the unique conditions of students' returning from the extended covid layoff should be rendering such layoffs all but unthinkable.