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4 of my 5 kids are in education. They were recently discussing the bane of their existence - parent E-mails.
One of my daughters has 700 students. A son has 55, another daughter has about 100. They send out informational packages and parents do not want to bother to read them. Instead they send one email at a time asking each questions that is in the informational package. They expect a personal response in less than 1 day. One of them got an e-mail at 10:30 on Sunday night asking when a practice was. The practice was at 5:30 Monday morning and multiple notices had gone out. This parent could not be bothered to read and track notices. They expected personal service reminding them of what they already knew. They were furious when their kid missed practice.
Parents, teachers and coaches are not your personal organization assistant. Before you send an E-mail to a teacher, think things through. Look back and see whether your question has already been answered or whether it is something you can figure out all by yourself. Try contacting another parent before you E-mail or worse yet call or visit your kids teacher or coach. IF you do send an E-mail, don't expect an immediate response. You are in line behind 20 or 100 or ever 300 other parents all of whom are expecting immediate responses. You may think it only takes a second or two to respond, but that is incorrect, it takes several minutes. When you inundate your teachers and coaches with E-mail asking for information that was already provided you are taking away their time for planning, preparing, or addressing communications that are actually critical, or taking away their personal time. Please stop. Please tell your friends to stop.
Very few teachers stay in teaching for more than five years. Most of the ones leaving say they love teaching, but it is other things that drive them out. One of those things is an army of parents who seem to feel the teachers are their personal servants.
Sorry, they do not have time for anything but incredibly critical discussions. Not providing information about when something is, what the kid needs to bring or why your kid got grade X or sent to the office or any other thing you want to try to second guess the teacher on. Sure if something is critical, get in touch with the teacher, but take some time to think about it first. Is it really critical? Is what you want to discuss so utterly important that it is worth taking time away form the teacher's teaching or coaching job? Is it worth potentially harming your and other kids because the teacher is unable to prepare or research or plan because they are too busy dealing with your E-mail? And if you are writing or calling a teacher or coach to ask something that was already sent to you, then you are the worst kind of cad.
Your kids are just venting. It seems odd that you then need to scold strangers on the internet in defense of your adult children and their chosen careers.
Yes parents can be a nightmare but, shockingly, so can teachers. I have been a teacher and am a parent and while too many emails are annoying, it is not nearly as severe a problem as teachers could have.
I hope you feel better for having gotten that off your chest.
Last edited by calgirlinnc; 09-06-2021 at 01:24 PM..
As a parent, I would be perfectly fine and actual would love an autoreply that said:
Thank you for your interest in your student and see if your student knows the answer to your question first. If not, please check out the following:
Here is a link to my syllabus that clearly explains my grading policy, classroom expectations and what supplies are needed for the class.
Here is a link to my up to date calendar, which has all assignment, test and quizzes accurately displayed on them.
All missing assignments will be marked in the gradebook as missing within 4 days, please be patient that grading may take longer. Please talk to your student about how assignments were graded first since I explained it in class.
For all other questions, please leave me a voicemail and I will get back to you at my earliest convenience.
Pretty much every teacher I've felt a need to email would never send out that sort of reply because the syllabus has no useful info in it. The calendar is at least one month out of date and the teacher is making up the actual due dates on the fly. Their website is this scattered hodgepodge of random things that the teacher thinks are interesting that makes it time consuming for you (and their admin) to track down where all the useful information is suppose to be so you'll give up first. All grading for the 6 weeks happens in 96 hours between end of marking period and when they have to turn the grades in. I long gave up emailing them because I know they are being bombarded by emails from other parents that are just as frustrated with them. The bulk of them are gone in a few years anyway. They usually burn out in a few years or get a reputation of being a teacher your student wants to avoid having, or get shuffled around from school to school by the district.
I don't know how much of this applies to your kids, but in my experience disorganized teachers seem to love to place all the responsibility on the parents and the students. "It's on my website or I sent out an email" is a convenient excuse for them to give us parents and their admin. I suspect "I get 100 plus emails a day from parents that I have to respond" is likely an excuse they give their admin on why they are so behind in their grading. I know there are entitled parents out there, but there are also teachers out there that really love teaching, but don't have the executive function to handle the administrative side of the job.
If they are getting 300 or 100 or even 20 emails from parents asking g the same wuestions then they probably are not communicating as clearly as they thought.
If they are getting 300 or 100 or even 20 emails from parents asking g the same wuestions then they probably are not communicating as clearly as they thought.
I am a retired teacher. I'll give a concrete example. Whenever my elementary school had a day off, for staff in-service or parent-teacher conferences, several children would just be dropped off by their parents or parents would call to complain that the school bus never arrived that morning. When informed that there was no school that day, these parents would generally say "No one told us." This would happen again and again and again.
It got so problematic that the office would put together a list of when the school calendar went home, to let the parents know that they were informed. In my elementary school (in a middle class suburb), the yearly calendar went home in June with each student, sent to each family by mail with the final report card, sent by mail from the bus company (with the bus schedule) about two weeks before school starts and another paper copy the first day of school. In addition, my school would send out a monthly calendar, with the monthly newsletter AND a note about the upcoming weekly calendar in the weekly packet. Oops, I forgot about the school district annual report sent to each and every address in the school district mid summer.
Even with at least six or seven written calendars, every non-school weekday during the school year, several (if not many) parents would claim "We had no idea that there wasn't school today. Why weren't we notified?"
I am a retired teacher. I'll give a concrete example. Whenever my elementary school had a day off, for staff in-service or parent-teacher conferences, several children would just be dropped off by their parents or parents would call to complain that the school bus never arrived that morning. When informed that there was no school that day, these parents would generally say "No one told us." This would happen again and again and again.
It got so problematic that the office would put together a list of when the school calendar went home, to let the parents know that they were informed. In my elementary school (in a middle class suburb), the yearly calendar went home in June with each student, sent to each family by mail with the final report card, sent by mail from the bus company (with the bus schedule) about two weeks before school starts and another paper copy the first day of school. In addition, my school would send out a monthly calendar, with the monthly newsletter AND a note about the upcoming weekly calendar in the weekly packet. Oops, I forgot about the school district annual report sent to each and every address in the school district mid summer.
Even with at least six or seven written calendars, every non-school weekday during the school year, several (if not many) parents would claim "We had no idea that there wasn't school today. Why weren't we notified?"
There will always be parents that can't be bothered to keep track of these things regardless of what the school does. Treating every parent like they are in that group isn't at all helpful. If 20% or more of the students are showing up on days when school isn't being held, there is a communication problem. Huge communication problem if it is 50%+ parents. It sounds like it was actually a very small percentage at your school, but the school was annoyed about it. I actually think your school's solution of send 6-7 written calendars probably made the situation worse rather than better. As a parent, if I get 1 calendar for the year at the start of school, that is going in a safe spot. If the school starts sending me calendars 3 months before school starts, important upcoming days are going to get marked down on the family calendar & it's going in the trash. I'll check for upcoming changes once they send out their new calendar a few months later. This process of mailing 6+ calendars is sending a message that the dates are very fluid and the school will keep me posted of changes. I suspect that's an easy way for in-service days to fall through the cracks. Parents responding "No one told us," seems to me like what the school was setting themselves up for here with
One of my concrete examples, my son's 8th grade Algebra teacher spent 30+ minutes of day keeping her classroom website & calendar up to date even though she was aware that it wasn't registering any hits. All her parents would call or email about things that was on this website, but it never occurred to her to ask why they didn't look there first. At the very end of the school year when she was really frustrated and put out by her parents and their inability to check a website, she learned that the school had never linked her website to their website. She wasn't even listed as a teacher in the school's directory, which the bulk of us parents knew & thought she knew also. This could of been easily caught and corrected at the beginning of the year if she was willing to consider that her parents were capable of looking up their own answers from the info she was putting out there. She could have put out an inquiry about why that wasn't happening or tried and look it up herself up on the school's website, but she didn't. She probably added an extra 2-3 hours of work to her day every day because of this, and she wasn't brand new to teaching.
At some point, if a teacher is having a serious problem with communication with lots of parents, they need to consider what their part in the miscommunication is.
So parents are supposed to know that "in service" = no school today? How would a parent know that? Funny thing about communications from school. When the school needs a parent to work a concession stand, or needs to sell wrapping paper/magazines/candy/whatever, or needs some money to buy something, or something else the school needs, they manage to find a way to communicate that quite well.
So parents are supposed to know that "in service" = no school today? How would a parent know that? Funny thing about communications from school. When the school needs a parent to work a concession stand, or needs to sell wrapping paper/magazines/candy/whatever, or needs some money to buy something, or something else the school needs, they manage to find a way to communicate that quite well.
Our calendars said specifically, "No School - Teacher In-service", or "No School - Winter Break", or "No School - Parent-teacher Conferences." In general, the parents who ignored the "No School" days were usually the same parents who never participated in school fundraisers or school activities such as holiday celebrations or book fairs.
(snips) This process of mailing 6+ calendars is sending a message that the dates are very fluid and the school will keep me posted of changes. I suspect that's an easy way for in-service days to fall through the cracks. Parents responding "No one told us," seems to me like what the school was setting themselves up for here.
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I'm not sure how your school district sets up their calendar, but our district's calendar is typically "set in stone" at least a full year before the start of school. In my 30 years of teaching in that district, only once was the school calendar changed, and that was "finalized" about eight months before the start of school. This is typical for schools in my state.
The only "fluid" days are an occasional blizzard/freezing rain/Polar Vortex/dangerous weather day. And, specific "make-up days" are clearly noted in the calendar that is set a year in advance. Perhaps, other school districts/other states have more "fluid" calendars".
So parents are supposed to know that "in service" = no school today? How would a parent know that? Funny thing about communications from school. When the school needs a parent to work a concession stand, or needs to sell wrapping paper/magazines/candy/whatever, or needs some money to buy something, or something else the school needs, they manage to find a way to communicate that quite well.
Google maybe. That is the point - make some kind of effort first. No communication in English is gong to be perfect, but parents need to understand that they are not the center of the teacher's universe. Teachers do nto have time for personal communication with every parent. Parents need to start making more effort to further their kids education. Classroom volunteering is way down and the demands on teacher's time for things other than teaching is escalating rapidly. This is not about being lazy. Teachers cannot reply to the volume of E-mail they receive. Most of it is frivolous. This prevents them form being able to address E-mail that is actually important. Thoughtless parents are taking away from parents and students who have an actual issue.
An auto reply is a good idea and may help in the long terms. However it does not reduce the E-mail load. The teacher still has to read the hundreds of parent E-mails and decide whether it needs a further reply. In most cases assuming the auto reply addressed the question and just moving on to the next E-mail is going to have the same result as if the teacher did not have an auto reply and simply ignored the E-mail. Long term, it may help some parents to realize they are being lazy and harming their kids and other kids education.
What am I trying to accomplish? Make a few people realize how detrimental they are being to their kids education. Maybe get a few of them to think for themselves before sending a teacher an E-mail. It is all about awareness.
Obviously I struck a nerve with a few people who have been sending frivolous e-mail to teachers. They decided to lash out defensively and attack me in their embarrassment. Maybe they will think before they do it again.
Our society is driving people out of teaching in unprecedented numbers. Teacher experience level is dropping at alarming rates. Most of the hordes of teachers leaving, love teaching. It is the administration, the politics and the parents sense of entitlement that is driving them away. It is getting rare that anyone stays in the profession for more than 5 years.
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