Pictured above is a screenshot from a course syllabus produced by Dr. Spring-Serenity Duvall, a professor of media and gender studies at Salem College in North Carolina. During the Spring semster of 2014, she prohibited students from emailing her unless they were requesting an appointment to speak with her face-to-face.
Dr. Duvall is no Luddite. She's simply tired of students asking her questions that she already answered in class or in the syllabus, or addressing her in an overly familiar manner. She explains what she changed:
In a fit of self-preservation, I decided: no more. This is where I make my stand! In my senior-level gender and media course, I instituted a no-email policy and (here’s the hard part) stuck to it religiously. I explained to my students that there were a few very solid reasons for this policy:
1. They needed to read and know the syllabus and pay attention in class, rather than use email as a crutch to ask superficial questions. Taking these small yet seemingly impossible steps would make them more aware and engaged in the class.
2. Reading assignment instructions carefully and asking questions about the assignments in class or in office hours would force them to begin working on papers early, thus eliminating last-minute emails about instructions.
3. More of our conversations would take place in person – whether in my office or in class – rather than via email, thus allowing us to get to know each other better and fostering a more collegial atmosphere.
Did it work? Yes!
I am happy to report it was an unqualified success. It’s difficult to convey just how wonderful it was for students to stop by office hours more often, to ask questions about assignments in the class periods leading up to due dates, and to have students rise to the expectation that they know the syllabus. Their papers were better, they were more prepared for class time than I’ve ever experienced.
It is also difficult to tally the time I saved by not answering hundreds of brief, inconsequential emails throughout the semester. I can say that the difference in my inbox traffic was noticeable and welcome.
(Photo: eristerra)
In an interview, Dr. Duvall explains that, like many professors, she suffers from "syllabus creep." That's "where the syllabus just gets longer and longer and you try to account for everything." The longer a syllabus gets, the less likely a student is to read the whole thing.
And course syllabi are getting a lot longer. Slate's Rebecca Shuman offers an explanation of why syllabi are now often 20 or more pages long:
First, the helicopter generation—raised on both suffocating parental pressure and the teach-to-the-test mandates of No Child Left Behind—started coming to college. Everyone needed A’s, and everyone needed to know exactly what needed to be done to get one. When that wasn’t abundantly clear, that made schools vulnerable to lawsuits.
Second, syllabi went from print to online, thus freeing the entire professoriate to capitulate to the aforementioned demands for everything from grading rubrics to the day-by-day breakdown of late assignment policies, without worrying about sacrificing trees or intimidating the class with a first-day handout they could barely lift, much less peruse in a mere 75 minutes.
Third, the skyrocketing percentage of hired-gun adjuncts—as opposed to tenure-track faculty, who have both a modicum of security and a minuscule say in university governance—meant that a substantial number of instructors were taking on courses a matter of weeks (sometimes days) before they began. Thus, they relied heavily on extensive syllabi already in existence.
Comments (7)
- text messages are fast, much much faster than voice mails. My cellphone message pretty much says : no voice mail + text me + emergency number! (and then my voice mail is blocked)
- email are detailed and they leave a trail, especially with the increase of un-responsible business behaviors. Every email is a registered mail, is a contract!
- they allow me to work contacts outside regular hours
- I don't put a limit on those contacts on the provider side of my business, but I'm quite cautious with the customers, to keep it "human" ; but they welcome it :after all... I'm their provider!
The world is changing, I don't know if it's for good, but meh...
I will give you that I should not have linked it to vanity, that was very poor form, to hold the position she does she is likely an excellent teacher. Still, that this has worked for a tiny classroom in a tiny college is not an indicator that it is a good practice. Nor should the other commitments of being a college professor justify its need.
The idea that teachers spend 45 minutes in a class and then sit around eating bonbons the rest of the time is not only wrong, it's damaging to our future generations.
http://www.salon.com/2012/04/26/joseph_mccarthy_reborn/
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150685937090986&l=b5d605b39b
The famed then 87-year-old Kazan's unforgivable crime was to have truthfully told the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities in 1952 that he and eight of his friends had been fellow members of the communist party, from which he had resigned in disgust. Some of these men later admitted that Kazan told the truth. Nevertheless, until his death in 2003 at the age of 94 Kazan remained a political leper among Hollywood's politically correct.
These are same people who in October 1997 streamed into the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences in Berverly Hills to see Hollywood Remembers the Blacklist, a film glorifying unrepentant Stalinists who wanted to turn the US into another Gulag. Needless to say, these are also same celluloid intellectuals who support cop-killers and murderous dictators – but only so long as they are socialists." -- "Hollywood leftists, their blacklist and their treason", Gerard Jackson
Amazing. The leftists who have wrested control of our colleges and universities are, next to Hollywood, the greatest blacklisters of all time. They have ideologically cleansed the faculties of these institutions of conservatives while ironically making a fetish of "diversity". How utterly hypocritical for any left-wing academic to complain about "McCarthyism" and "targeting".
Gee, I wonder what would give hime that idea.
Dem. Socialists of America claim 70 Democrat congressmen as members?:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/35733956/DSA-Members-American-Socialist-Voter-Democratic-Socialists-of-America-10-1-09
Wake up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona_project
Start there and then read the books:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Haunted-Wood-Espionage-Paperbacks/dp/0375755365/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335282353&sr=1-7
http://www.amazon.com/Venona-Decoding-Soviet-Espionage-America/dp/0300084625/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335282353&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/In-Denial-Historians-Communism-Espionage/dp/159403088X/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335282353&sr=1-3
McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy were right, the communists had infiltrated our cultural institutions and had gained access to the highest levels of our government.
How sad that the apologists for the "red fascists", as George Orwell called them, continue to push the ahistorical garbage contained in this post.
Here's a protip: McCarthy was a piece of garbage who was willing to make innocent people suffer to further his own political career.
Still, the Venona papers which were released in the early 90s, while not justifying all tactics used to track down Soviet spies, do prove that there were Communist spies deep inside the US government.
http://www.nsa.gov/about/_files/cryptologic_heritage/publications/coldwar/venona_story.pdf