My Heart Bleeds

This article made me laugh this morning.

Front page of the Times--at least it's below the fold--basically an extended opportunity for college professors to complain about student e-mail behavior.

The objectional e-mail seems to come in different categories:

1. e-mail asking for inappropriate help: "I missed class, can I have your teaching notes?"
2. Excessive e-mail: multiple e-mails per week, some of it coming--gasp--at all hours.
3. E-mail that fails to demonstrate proper comportment and/or deference.

Somehow, all of this is causing significant job stress among certain professors. I mean, we can't permit arm's length, marginally intrusive communication between students and teachers, can we? Oscar Madison's e-mail went down some time ago due to exceeding capacity--must have been all those pesky students.

Here's my response:

1. Stop whining. Seriously, every job has its problems, but my father is a college professor and I grew up with this life; it isn't exactly a nose-to-the-grindstone type of gig.

2. Make yourself more accessible. I don't know what's standard, but my professors seem to have 1-2 office hours a week. Find a way to make yourself available more, and make it clear that you prefer that to e-mail, and will only respond to email if there's good reason.

3. Acknowledge how much email has benefitted you, reducing the need for meetings, permitting you to communicate with your collegues and students quickly, etc. Taking the bad with the good is called, you know, life. Some professors use email to contact their students as much as the other way around.

4. Don't blame the students, blame the system; kids are marketed to by colleges just like they are marketed to by profit making entities. They are recruted and wooed in a desperate attempt to seperate their parents from their money. No wonder they see a college education as just another commodity--that's how its presented to them.

5. Finally, NYT: find some more pressing news for the front page.