Dear Professor,

Dear Professor,

I was wondering if you could provide details for the upcoming assignment? I think you went over it in class, but I couldn’t attend the lecture because I went to office hours for another class. Also, do you have office hours, because I couldn’t find the details about them. Thank you in advance.

Best wishes,

Asher

Okay Asher. I get it, you are a first year student trying to navigate the university context, in an online environment, at a very difficult time. I’m going to cut you some slack. Yet, the amount of frustration that I feel when I read your email puts me a little on edge.

There are some things I would like you to know. First, you chose to prioritize office hours for that other class over my lecture. OK, maybe that’s a class that you need for your major, and mine isn’t, so that’s why you chose to skip my class. Even if this is not the case, something in your mind told you that the office hours were the priority. Cool. That decision is yours. My question for you is why, when you made this decision, does it become my responsibility to fill you in on what you missed?

Asher, we had an agreement. You signed up for my class and we went through the syllabus. As part of that process, I agreed to meet you and your classmates at a designated time and place. I showed up, your peers showed up, but you didn’t. In addition, I am fairly certain that you haven’t looked at the weekly posted materials either. I hope you know that these are available online, and made available every week. I put a lot of effort into the titles of these documents, and I thought you might have examined the one that was called Assignment Instructions. When I look at your profile, I can see that you haven’t, nor have you interacted with most of the other course content.

Interestingly, Asher, I noticed that you had downloaded the syllabus. It was there that you would have found, on the front page and not buried in the document, details about my office hours. I’ve highlighted them, put a link to the online platform and bolded the text corresponding to the date and time. Because you are not the first student to ask me about office hours, I also put them on the ‘announcements’ page of my online course shell, under the title Office Hours for Students. It’s the first post.

Now I will give you credit. Your email is professionally written, which I appreciate, and you do appear to be both honest and genuine in your request. You could have tried to sell me a sob story that your grandmother died, or you were on death’s door with the flu, or one of the many other responses I’ve heard this term. Now granted, some of these things do happen, but more of them seem to crop up specifically before the assignment is due, even though you’ve had 2 months to complete it and you indicate you haven’t started yet. By the way, yes, you can have an extension…troubling times are upon us…etc.

So back your email, Asher, how do I respond? What I really want to tell you is, it’s in the syllabus and posted online, but I won’t be that direct. Instead, I’ll send you a link to my office hours (the one on the syllabus) along with the date and time you can show up at. If you do show up, I’ll patiently take you through the steps of the assignment, sharing my screen with you so that you can actually see the assignment instructions we worked through. I’ll mention that all this material is available online to ensure that you feel fully supported.

I’ll kick myself later for my failure to highlight to you the issues with your email or the reasons why it has put me on edge. I’ll reflect on how my lack of engagement with your email is doing you a disservice for later in life when your boss is going to yell at you because you haven’t followed the instructions. I’m making these decisions, Asher, because at the end of the term I am going to ask you to give me a positive course evaluation. I’m going to ask you to rate me five stars so that I can show that I am an awesome professor, who the students love. It is your positive comments that help me get ahead. So, in my own self interest, thanks for your email Asher. I am happy to help.