An anonymous student in an anonymous course writes, “I won’t be able to make class today. I was wondering if I will be missing anything.” Now if you’ve been teaching for any amount of time, chances are you’ve seen some variant of this pop up in your own inbox. My response was genial enough, directing the student online to access the notes from the missed lecture. What I wanted to say, though, was this:
“Jeez, you’re not coming? I’d better not put a lecture together, then, if you’re not going to be there. So no, you won’t be missing anything. Nothing important. We’ll likely just sit around and talk about our weekend, and maybe gab about the last episode of Lost for a while. Don’t worry about getting in touch with your classmates, or stopping by office hours to catch up on what you missed. This simple 2 liner email will do just fine. Oh, and when I mentioned on the first day of class that you should always put the course number in the subject of the email so that your note doesn’t get marked as spam? I was kidding about that. Since you didn’t do it, I guess you got the joke.”
Sheesh. Someone needs to read this posting.
