Email Rulz

Thanks to careful investigative journalism akin to that which proved the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the New York Times has discovered that college teachers get lots of inappropriate email from students. Well, duh. That's as obvious as the towering uselessness of my dissertation. Having received no small number of idiotic emails from students, I chalk them up to a basic misunderstanding of communication methods, rather than a silly notion that "students no longer deferred to their professors, perhaps because they realized that professors' expertise could rapidly become outdated," which is what Christopher J. Dede, at some diploma mill in Massachusetts, thinks.

Huh? The fact that I know more about World War II than they do has nothing to do with the fact that just this morning, I got an email that started, "I am so P.O.'ed about the answer to question 1 on the quiz!" Just to make the point clearer, the abbreviation was reformatted in a bold 18-point font.

And geez - if I had a nickel for every time I got an email that opened with something like, "Hey, Chris," I wouldn't have to rob grandmothers for lotto money and kleenex. My all-time favorite email, the one I wish I'd saved forever and ever, was the one in which a student asked to retake her exam because she'd been at the health clinic all Monday, waiting to see if she had gotten pregnant or contracted an STD on Saturday night. She told me this, and more! I pledge to you, readers, that I had nothing to do with the crisis. (As I remember, she retook the test and bombed it.)