Every year I ask my classes to send me an e-mail with their name and their class so I can create a class e-mail list. It has always worked great with the calculus classes, not so great with some of the others. The kids only want to AIM and that is something I have no desire to do with them. This year has been different. Even my lowest level classes are sending them in and I am getting requests for homework when they copy the wrong page or when they are absent. I've even gotten a question or two about the assignment.
I know, some might say this is going too far, that I am taking too much work home but I disagree. E-mail is non intrusive. If I choose to ignore it, I can. No one really knows whether it has been read or not so no feelings get hurt. Besides, it only takes a minute or two to check and respond and just this little thing helps me relate better to my students.
This year I am encouraging them to use the list to contact one another instead of me. I'm looking at it as a team building project, good for the group work that I don't want to use in class.
(I just sent the above cartoon to my calculus kids. We just finished limits to infinity and I thought they might appreciate it.)
2 comments:
I for one do not like the idea because the emails would come mostly from the pain-in-the-but parents. I encouraged the class to exchange phone numbers with kids that do their homework and also campaign hard for them to use Dial-A-Teacher. After all my dues pay for that service. It's a good service that also staffs teachers that can converse in other languages.
FYI: On certain services you can check the status of an email. I know which of mine are read, not read, or deleted. The same thing is true of the DoE service. It's easy to check the status within the same network.
In high school, kids do their own e-mailing. I did forget that status can be checked but I still don't owe anyone an answer if I choose not to do so. Besides, the parents can always reach us on the DOE address.
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