Cynthia Prescott, Department of History, University of North Dakota
While I appreciate Bill Caraher‘s passion for creating learning communities any way that we can (see The New Future of Teaching: Social Networks and the 24/7 Professor), I wonder whether we risk reinforcing an assumption that seems to exist among some students that faculty exist only to meet their individual needs (and perhaps cease to exist outside of class time, unless such needs present themselves). Millennial students prefer professors they perceive as “informal” and accessible (see Christy Price, “Why Don’t My Students Think I’m Groovy?” The Teaching Professor Vol. 23, no. 7, 7-8). While I sincerely desire to engage with my students as individuals, I sometimes wonder whether my efforts at informality and accessibility discourage students from recognizing that (a) I am an authority figure (after all, I do control their grades, and need some degree of control over what happens in the classroom), and (b) I have other responsibilities beyond meeting their individual needs. How can we be accessible and even “groovy” without introducing chaos into our classrooms or our daily lives?
As summer turns to fall, my dreams of engaging classroom activities and heart-to-heart chats with each of my individual students are replaced with a yearning for some golden age when students had manners and respected boundaries between themselves and their professors. Should we develop some basic guidelines for these interactions? Aside from my distaste for devoting class time to preaching a list of rules for behavior, I wonder whether we as faculty could ever agree on what those rules should be.
Were I to create a list of rules, here are some things I’d want to include:
1) I will respond to emails and other special requests as soon as time permits. (I, like Bret Weber, find that it is sometimes convenient for me to respond quickly, but this is not always the case.)
2) Any email to me should begin with a courteous greeting (call me Doctor or Professor, if that’s what I have requested), and should provide your first and last name and the course and class meeting time (or section number) in which you are enrolled.
3) If you email me a question or concern (particularly overnight or on weekends), check your email account for my response before approaching me at the beginning of class to ask whether I received your email. Do not assume that I will remember the topic of your email, particularly in large classes where I do not know everyone’s name.
4) The purpose of office hours is for me to be accessible. If you are not available during my posted office hours, please make a separate appointment. Whether or not you arrive during office hours, knock and wait for permission before entering.
What “rules” (if any) would you include? Would students (and faculty) benefit from having these expectations clearly defined? Or would this stifle student-faculty interaction? Would distributing a set of behavioral guidelines prevent me from being a “groovy” professor? Should I even be striving to have my students like me?
Teaching Thursdays 