Why don’t teachers respond to student emails in a timely manner or not at all?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

When did he email the teacher(s)? If it was anytime after 2:45PM on Friday, it is perfectly reasonable that the teachers haven't responded.

I am a teacher who has not checked my email since Friday afternoon because I had a family commitment this weekend. I will check email again tomorrow morning. It is unusual for me to go this long without checking email, but it’s also unusual for me to put my family first, which is unhealthy. I am trying to do better this school year by putting my family first.

Soooo, no time to check email, but you have time for DCUM?

It is a weekend. The teacher will check work email on Monday.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Because it’s impossible to keep up for some disciplines and ages. Impossible. We have to focus on planning lessons, being great teachers when the class is actually happening, participating in meetings during our planning times, completing required documentation (like IEP’s), responding to paperwork for which there are hard deadlines, assessing student work, responding to emails from our colleagues and administration, and THEN there is email from students. If you teach secondary or you’re a specialist in ES, you have over a hundred or many hundreds of students. Do you know what that volume of email is like, especially when a lot of it is tech support?

There are student and parent tech support lines. Try there first, please, for the tech one. Many times teachers have no idea how to fix things either, and we wait to reply while we ask our SBTS for help, who is also inundated and buried in incoming requests.

Parents often compare our email response times to their emails from an office job. I’ve worked in the software industry and in politics and it doesn’t remotely compare to the pace of teaching. There are kids at you EVERY SECOND when they are in the room. Then you have a couple of minutes transition between classes, maybe. (as a specialist this year, I have none.) There is no time to check email during the day. No time. When I finally get to my inbox after school, it’s triage: who are the bleeders? Who need replies immediately? Which replies will take more work than I have time to do right now? Those get flagged for answer later. I do what I can in the time I have, but I have to focus on getting ready for all my classes tomorrow. I have to be prepared for ALL of them with materials and lessons. If that means emails go unanswered, it is what is is. I have a lot do classes coming in tomorrow. The damage to them is much worse if I am unprepared than the harm of not replying to a single non urgent student email.

The problem is, there are more tomorrow, and more the next day. And there is no catch up day. There is no day they stop coming. So some…I just have to let go of. I can’t work 24/7. I work at least 11 hour days plus 8 or so on the weekend. It’s enough.

If it’s been a few days, and it’s urgent, the kid thing to do would be to send it again to the teacher’s @fcps.edu address from the student’s @fcpsschools.net email. Please be kind. We are doing our best.

Btw, for the Google Form, click to sign it while your are signed in under your child’s FCPS Google account. It’s probably set to only be open to FCPS users. It’s a setting you can ask the teacher to change but it’s easier for you to just log in to Google as your kid than stew here waiting for a reply.

(I’m a mom of an FCPS kid, too.)

I am learning to be less like you. The pay is the same and you don’t risk a nervous breakdown. Look at this board. It’s not like parents appreciate that you make an extra effort just to *meet* their expectations. They just think it was what you were supposed to do.

[Anonymous]

Teachers don’t typically respond to emails where they have already answered the question 100 times.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

When did he email the teacher(s)? If it was anytime after 2:45PM on Friday, it is perfectly reasonable that the teachers haven't responded.

I am a teacher who has not checked my email since Friday afternoon because I had a family commitment this weekend. I will check email again tomorrow morning. It is unusual for me to go this long without checking email, but it’s also unusual for me to put my family first, which is unhealthy. I am trying to do better this school year by putting my family first.

Soooo, no time to check email, but you have time for DCUM?

It is a weekend. The teacher will check work email on Monday.

+1
At my school we aren’t supposed to check or reply to emails during the student day. One problem that arises is I receive so many emails from various people it gets difficult to stay on top of.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:One MS DC has a form I need to sign online. In order to get to said form I must scan a QR code, which I did, but I get a message that I’m not authorized to open the page. I’m the only email on student contact forms. DC emailed the teacher right away and has heard crickets.

Other MS DC has class/homework through a math program, but must notify teacher through schoology that it is complete. Unfortunately he doesn’t seem able to do this without an attachment, which there is none. He’s tried leaving a comment with the assignment in Schoology, and still can’t get the submit/complete button (I forget the name) to enable. He emailed his teacher about and crickets there too.

I’m encouraging them to speak up before or during class but they say the teachers have no time to answer IRL. I am encouraging them to be more persistent this week. In any event, if these teachers want kids to self advocate and communicate with them, they need to step up on their response times.

Maybe because it is the weekend?

[Anonymous]

I once got an email from a HS student while they sat in front of me. I didn't see it until the end of the school day. Really wanted to respond "bruh". Got a good laugh at least.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

When did he email the teacher(s)? If it was anytime after 2:45PM on Friday, it is perfectly reasonable that the teachers haven't responded.

I am a teacher who has not checked my email since Friday afternoon because I had a family commitment this weekend. I will check email again tomorrow morning. It is unusual for me to go this long without checking email, but it’s also unusual for me to put my family first, which is unhealthy. I am trying to do better this school year by putting my family first.

Soooo, no time to check email, but you have time for DCUM?

Comments such as this one (the "No time for email, but time for DCUM" comment, that is) are indicative of the problem with parents expecting teachers to be available 24/7.

If a teacher chooses not to check email over the weekend in order to establish boundaries, that is their right. If that same teacher chooses to "waste" their weekend time on DCUM, TikTok, Twitter, etc., that is their right. No one should be judging how a teacher chooses to spend their time over the weekend. It is THEIR time.

[Anonymous]

Why is everyone fixated on student sending an email on weekend? The emails were sent on Tuesday and Wednesday.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:How do teachers have no time to answer? Don’t they have office hours?

They must be busy eating hamburgers in the lounge.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Why is everyone fixated on student sending an email on weekend? The emails were sent on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Who cares? Why respond to student emails at all? To be a good person and a good teacher? It doesn’t matter what you do. It is never enough. I have responded to student emails because I care about them. That’s why. It is possible to stop caring when you are burnt out though. A lot of teachers are approaching that so maybe it would be best to keep your expectations low.

[Anonymous]

Two more things to check...

There's another teacher in the county with the exact same name as me. I got emails from her students allllll the time last year. I always wrote back to them to tell them I was not the right person. Several of them continued to email me. LOL! So make sure that they are using the correct email (i.e. one can be [e-mail] but the other could be [e-mail]).

Also, when I logged in to schoology at the start of this year, I saw some message notifications from kids that were sent over the summer. I'm not their teacher. I don't know who they are. But they were asking me questions about their grades. I don't even know if messages that get sent through schoology get sent to me somewhere else or if I can only see them in schoology. So that's another option.

If your child is in person, I'd tell them to ask the teacher tomorrow if he/she received the emails and go from there.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How do teachers have no time to answer? Don’t they have office hours?

They must be busy eating hamburgers in the lounge.

Lol. The more comments I read on this forum, the more I realize that that is exactly what I should be doing. I make myself miserable for what?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Two more things to check...

There's another teacher in the county with the exact same name as me. I got emails from her students allllll the time last year. I always wrote back to them to tell them I was not the right person. Several of them continued to email me. LOL! So make sure that they are using the correct email (i.e. one can be [e-mail] but the other could be [e-mail]).

Also, when I logged in to schoology at the start of this year, I saw some message notifications from kids that were sent over the summer. I'm not their teacher. I don't know who they are. But they were asking me questions about their grades. I don't even know if messages that get sent through schoology get sent to me somewhere else or if I can only see them in schoology. So that's another option.

If your child is in person, I'd tell them to ask the teacher tomorrow if he/she received the emails and go from there.

Seriously, what happened to the importance of in person learning? Maybe you should encourage your child to try it - communicating in person.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Why is everyone fixated on student sending an email on weekend? The emails were sent on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Right. So the teacher worked 10 hours on Tuesday with more urgent issues than the child’s email and responded to the 15 emails she could get to before she had to make dinner for her family, get back to grading more papers, and then out her child to bed. The next day she arrived to school to an inbox with 15 more emails from overnight. She taught her 8 hours, got to her desk after school, finished what she could to get ready for tomorrow, and faced 30 more emails plus the ones she didn’t get to last night. She triaged among those 50 emails and answered those that were the most urgent or were from admin. Lather, rinse, repeat.

There is no catching up with that kind of volume plus teaching a full day. The email was not that urgent. If it is, please send again. If you’re halfway decent, maybe say, “Dear Mrs. Smith, I know you are super busy and I’ve tried to figure this out by calling the student help desk but they couldn’t help me, and I asked a couple of friends and they didn’t know either. Could you please take a look at my email from Tuesday? I haven’t been able to figure it out yet. Thanks so much and I hope you had a good weekend!
All the best,
Appreciative Kid

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How do teachers have no time to answer? Don’t they have office hours?

They must be busy eating hamburgers in the lounge.

Lol. The more comments I read on this forum, the more I realize that that is exactly what I should be doing. I make myself miserable for what?

We have lounges with hamburgers??? Ours is just filled with discarded trash from teachers’ classrooms. What have I been doing wrong all these years?