If you can’t remember when your assignment is due, you may want to rethink emailing your instructor to find out.
Spring-Serenity Duvall, an associate professor in the department of communications at Salem College, North Carolina, banned students from emailing her for help.
“For years, student emails have been an assault on professors,” Duvall wrote in a blog post. “Often, student emails are a waste of everyone’s time because the questions are so basic that the answers are truly on the syllabus.”
Duvall enforced her no-email policy on her gender and media class because she wanted more student engagement and more in-person conversations.
“I am not opposed to email in general and I am one of the most plugged-in people I know,” she said.
Duvall said the policy was an “unqualified success.” Students were more prepared for class and their quality of work improved.
The policy helped her students explore media habits and led to more productive conversations, according to Duvall.
“It’s difficult to convey just how wonderful it was for students to stop by office hours more often,” she wrote.
Benjamin Woo, a professor in the department of communications at Carleton University, disagreed.
“This seems to me like a drastic and unhelpful response,” Woo said. “If a student is feeling anxious . . . about my class or about other things going on in their life, and they’ve taken the time to write to me, they deserve a response, even if it’s only to acknowledge their email and say, ‘please come see me in office hours’,” Woo said.
Irena Knezevic, another professor at Carleton, said that “quality and helpfulness are much more about professor’s commitment than their mode of communication.”
