Students E-Mails to their Professors.......Problems down the road?

[KoKo]

Email from Students
Posted by Kieran Healy

Dan Drezner picks up on today’s NYT article about students emailing their professors in slightly weird ways. I thought the article ran together several different kinds of email oddness, some of which are more of a problem than others. One thing it didn’t mention: even though universities give students email addresses, it’s often the case that students won’t use them. Instead they prefer their free hotmail or yahoo or gmail addresses. No problem as such there, except that sometimes the students pick the kind of addresses for themselves that aren’t exactly professional-quality. Frankly it feels a bit odd to correspond with, e.g., missbitchy23 or WildcatBongs about letters of reference or what have you.
Example of comments from replies to this:

I am actually a support specialist at a large university, and I see this EVERY DAY.

I can’t tell you how often we get requests to change email IDs from “[e-mail]” to “[e-mail].”

The other awesome request we get is the “Could you please take down the web page I put up when I was a student there? It comes up when you google my name, and I don’t need that picture of me with the beer funnel on my prospective boss’ computer.”

I always tell them “Yeah, it should be down between eight minutes and ninety days from now. Thanks, bye!”

Of course, I can make the change instantly, but I like to let them sit there hitting the refresh button for at least five or so minutes.

More examples here.........
http://crookedtimber.org/2006/02/21/email-from-students/

Link to NYT's Original story..................

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/education/21professors.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all

[utopian]

1. I see this constantly

Just this term, I got an email from a guy who missed about two weeks of class. He offered several excuses, and asked what he missed. I filled him in. He then missed another two weeks, and again asked what he missed. I didn't respond. He then missed another two weeks of class and emailed me in a cheerful tone, telling me he was "still alive" and "please don't drop me from the class." I wrote back that he needed to drop, because he wasn't going to pass.

The insult is that, at the school I where I teach, we're not allowed to have attendance policies, per se. Instead, I attach a certain percentage of the grade for 'participation.'

Oh, and while I'm at it, ipods have become a huge problem. I look out at a sea of faces, and half of them have big, honkin' headphones on. I can hear the friggin music. Now I need to add a rule against headphones to my syllabus.

[otohara]

2. Wow, You Just Listed 2 Reasons

why I want my son to stay at the small liberal arts school he's attending vs transferring to large university.

If you have a class with 400 kids, how does the professor know who's even there? How rude to listen to their I-Pods during class.