Email Do's and Don'ts...

Finals are done. Grades are posted. And the emails are rolling in.

At the end of every semester, a good friend and I place our bets as to how long it will take for the first angry "why did you fail me" emails to show up. This semester, I barely had enough time to place my bet before the first message popped up in my inbox.

After 10 years of this, I'm used to the emails. I'm even used to the speed at which they show up. And though the students' names change each semester, the emails stay relatively similar. Most involve some modicum of begging or pleading. Others are riddled with disbelief. Some are just plain ballsy. Take, for instance, the email I received shortly after posting my grades today. To his credit, this student hadn't failed. But he told me that he felt that he had learned a lot, and asked if I would just give him the next grade up so he could save his GPA.

Yet another student took offense at an exam questions. In less than polite terms, he demanded that I credit him two points on his exam, because in his mind, there was more than one answer that had been correct. And that one I would have considered, if he hadn't chosen the one WRONG answer for that question. 

The best of the bunch this semester, as I've seen in the past, was the student that spent almost a full page going on about how she felt that her hard work and effort warranted a higher grade. But while her desperation was apparent, her writing skills were not, as there was not one bit of punctuation or a capital letter to be seen. To her credit, though, she DID spell her own name right. The same couldn't be said about mine.

This time of year, when emotions and stress tend to trump common sense, what students really need is a list of Email Do's and Don'ts--a little checklist they could tape to their computers or smart phones. Maybe even a cool little app that pops up before they click send, just to make students think before they shoot off those messages that make their professors shake their heads and sigh.

The checklist could look like this:

DO...think before you send that email you wrote IMMEDIATELY after learning that you tanked the final and failed the class. I'm not going to change your grade anyway, but when you yell and scream at me in an angry email, it makes me wish there was a "G."

DO...spell things correctly and use punctuation. You look pretty silly when you beg for a higher grade, but can't string three coherent sentences together in the process.

DON'T...tell me that you should have come to class more often. That falls under the category of "your problem, not mine." After all, I get paid whether you show up or not.

DON'T...whine. It may be bad karma, but I don't care that you had a rough semester, or that your GPA is a little too low for comfort. These are things you should have thought of BEFORE you slept through the first half of the semester, or spent each lecture making a booty call on the cutie to your left.

DON'T...tell me that you thought my class was going to be easy. I thought you were going to make an effort. Sucks to be us, but it's not gonna make me change your grade.

And finally, DON'T ask me why I "gave" you an F. I didn't give you anything. You earned that failing grade all by your lonesome.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go check my email.