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

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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.

PP here. I’m working to be less like me, too. (I say as I read DCUM and read a book for work at the pool while my kid is swimming. I don’t have time to get wet myself because I have lesson materials yo prep when I get home!)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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

+1 as a teacher couldn’t co-sign this enough. Also very possible that your kids teacher wanted to answer when it was sent, emailed/escalated your request, and has been waiting for a response to share with you. Best practice would be to still acknowledge your kids email while waiting, but as the other teachers in this thread said, time is at a premium these days so I wouldn’t be too annoyed about that

[Anonymous]

Because they don’t care either

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

PP here. I’m working to be less like me, too. (I say as I read DCUM and read a book for work at the pool while my kid is swimming. I don’t have time to get wet myself because I have lesson materials yo prep when I get home!)

Yeah, I am getting up early to do mine. If it weren’t for my pride and the fact that I like the kids I teach tomorrow (they try), i would probably just do something I didn’t have to prepare for.

[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?

Yep, not going to reply to emails for a few more days! 😊

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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?

Yep, not going to reply to emails for a few more days! 😊

Lol. I am thinking I might wait until after labor day. We are in person, after all, and I should use less work hours for laptop time.

[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?

You have no idea how much this comment upset me.

It’s Sunday! Why does this teacher have to justify anything to you today? OP’s teacher should have responded earlier in the week. But I’m not expecting teachers to respond to emails over the weekend.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

PP here. I’m working to be less like me, too. (I say as I read DCUM and read a book for work at the pool while my kid is swimming. I don’t have time to get wet myself because I have lesson materials yo prep when I get home!)

Same. I spent today doing things with my family. I’m going to sit down now and check student notebooks. Then I need to figure out what I’m doing tomorrow. Between beginning of year administrative “stuff” and parent-teacher conferences (anybody else doing those?), planning for instruction hasn’t received much of my time.

[Anonymous]

I have had the same problem with my middle schooler’s teachers last year. When he emailed them they did not respond. And I don’t mean 24 hours, I mean a whole week. So, I would go ahead and email after a week and they would respond to me in less than 4 hours. It’s hard to teach my son to be independent and advocate for himself when no one responds to him.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I have had the same problem with my middle schooler’s teachers last year. When he emailed them they did not respond. And I don’t mean 24 hours, I mean a whole week. So, I would go ahead and email after a week and they would respond to me in less than 4 hours. It’s hard to teach my son to be independent and advocate for himself when no one responds to him.

+100. Same experience at ES level. This is teacher dependent. Not all teachers operate this way. But DC never was responded to via email. Only the parent.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I have had the same problem with my middle schooler’s teachers last year. When he emailed them they did not respond. And I don’t mean 24 hours, I mean a whole week. So, I would go ahead and email after a week and they would respond to me in less than 4 hours. It’s hard to teach my son to be independent and advocate for himself when no one responds to him.

+100. Same experience at ES level. This is teacher dependent. Not all teachers operate this way. But DC never was responded to via email. Only the parent.

Same for my ES kid last year. One teacher was very good at responding to his emails. The other teacher very rarely responded and my kid was too shy/anxious to ask their questions in class/office hours.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Just checked — kids say they can only email teachers’ FCPS accounts through their school email. I had DC double check anyway. They used the FCPS email addresses. So that doesn’t explain the issue for us.

-OP

For the record, teachers have two addresses

[e-mail] -use this one!!


[e-mail]- this is our gmail that gets bogged down with notifications

I know you said they used the fcps, but be sure it’s fcps.edu, not fcpsschools.net. I’ve checked this with my own kids and often it will default to fcpsschools.net.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Just checked — kids say they can only email teachers’ FCPS accounts through their school email. I had DC double check anyway. They used the FCPS email addresses. So that doesn’t explain the issue for us.

-OP

I think you're confused. They can only email the FCPSschools.net account from their own FCPSschools.net accounts, not the FCPS.edu accounts. Your child needs to email the teacher from a non-FCPS email address to their FCPS.edu account.

[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?

Not a teacher, but how much work to do you do on the weekends? I did exactly none because I do not owe my employers my weekend time. Neither do teachers. This is their job, not their life.

[Anonymous]

I think the easiest solution, OP, would be to teach your children to talk to people in real life instead of emailing them. It's faster, it's easier, they need to learn how to have real conversations. It's honestly a real problem with anyone under the age of 30 right now. I have employees who email me stuff all the time when they sit 10 feet away and could come by to talk or see me in the hallway or even ask me at the end of our team meting. My husband tells me he has the same problem.