I belong to group on Facebook for parents of students at my daughter’s university. It’s mostly a supportive fascinating group, but as tensions mounted with the uncertainty of fall term, a parent began complaining about lack of rapid email response from one of his student’s professors.
This was my reply:
“On behalf of all the teachers and professors out there, let me tell you about my Sunday afternoon. Your students (especially first year students) are undergoing massive personal growth right now. That’s part of the experience of being a young person. What this means, is that professors – especially those teaching first year – are under email triage the first few months of school. September typically starts off strong, and the worst of it hits mid-October, after the first round of midterms.
If I get an email from a student with a question about class? THAT IS AWESOME! But – it may take me a few days to get to it. Because my email triage means that I have students who may be suicidal, who are paralyzed with homesickness, who are experiencing early stage of mental illness, who are in horrible unexpected housing situations and need immediate emergency university housing (which is extremely limited right now, beings as we are in the midst of a pandemic). I have dealt with all of these.
The reality is, we care about your students. I know it’s frustrating, parents, to see what your kids are going through with this shift to online learning. Believe me, I would like nothing more than to be in the classroom with my students. Instead, I spend Sunday afternoons translating what would be a dynamic in-class learning experience (today we would be learning meiosis with pool noodles as chromosomes) – into what I hope will be an equally dynamic Zoom experience. I don’t have enough time to do this, but I’m trying anyway. So is almost every one of my colleagues.
Which brings me to now – 7 PM on a Sunday evening – and here I am at the drug store buying and delivering supplies to one of my students. (My class is medium sized – I expect enrolment to be about 110, even though it’s “full” at 96.) This student recently returned to the country (Canada) and is undergoing mandatory quarantine and can’t get lab supplies for class. So this filters to the top of my triage this evening – and then I will be up late addressing other student concerns. All that to say that I see you, teachers and professors! I’m proud of all of us for the work we are doing.”
I believe that each of us develops our own email triage system at the start of the school year.
This is my person method:
(1) Students in crisis are obviously first. Depending on the term and the specific crises, this may be all I get to in any given day. Part of the grace I am granting myself this year is to accept that some days this is enough.
(2) Student course concerns. Again, this can easily take a full day – particularly around midterm time when there are lots of questions. I have two amazing TAs this term who help with a lot of this one.
(3) Reference letters. Any given term, I would estimate I write between 25-50 reference letters. I keep a sticky note on my laptop with a list of references that I need to write as the email requests come in.
(4) Individually addressed emails from committees/working groups. This ebbs and flows. Sometimes I get to these within a few days, and sometimes I don’t.
(5) Other individually addressed emails from colleagues at work. Sometimes I don’t get to these at all. I usually see them and flag them to get to later, but the truth is that I often don’t.
(6) On the rare days when I get through 1-5, I will read mass emails from work. By “mass”, I mean not specifically addressed to me, but maybe addressed to the department or faculty.
(7) Work spam. I rarely get to these, but these include a lot of emails that come to or through the university at large.