There’s almost a complicated layered history here of encounters with email as an epistolary form. For those of us in our 40s, email came to us halfway through life, and we’re probably the ones who were most prone to the embarassing errors like sending a private message to a whole listserv but also the people who integrated previous formalisms of writing into our uses of email more readily. For many current 18-21s, email exists in simultaneity with instant messaging and that’s clearly creating a slightly different style and mode of use.

That, I think, points to what is most disquieting about certain emails — profs can glean from the messages things (about — say — sloth, confusion, and hostility) that are not a part of their manifest content. So willy-nilly, you are presented a piece of information — that you may feel begs address — with which you can do nothing. ugh. It does level the playing field a bit: god only knows that students glean all kinds of extraneous info about their profs from watching them up at the front of the class, 30+ hours per semester, that is similarly not-manifest and thus not-engageable but not for those reasons uninteresting or un-discomfiting or even (to quote Homer Simpson) un-delicious.

The perils of falling between two stools.

I require all papers to be electronically delivered (WebCT rather than email, ’cause it’s easier to archive). I comment via email. I don’t print their papers. I deal them on my laptop — reading in one window, commenting in another. I don’t have to keep track of a main stack of paper, making sure it follows me to class.

‘But student e-mail can go too far, said Robert B. Ahdieh, an associate professor at Emory Law School in Atlanta. He paraphrased some of the comments he had received: “I think you’re covering the material too fast, or I don’t think we’re using the reading as much as we could in class, or I think it would be helpful if you would summarize what we’ve covered at the end of class in case we missed anything.”‘

To me, these student comments seem rather reasonable. And I didn’t email my professors in college, because I don’t think any of them knew what email was (neither did I for much of it).

I’ve also heard faculty comment on the degree to which labor gets shifted to them as, for instance, when students email them papers rather than turning in hard copy. The teacher then has to do the work of printing out all of the papers. (I actually prefer having papers emailed to me, but I’ve talked to people who really resent the expectation that they take the time, use their own paper, etc.)

What about female students who email you to say they plan to work for a few years and then start a family?