Teaching Email
Families and students meet you far more often in writing than in a room. The ordinary message, sent between classes and rarely thought about, quietly does the work of building or e
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Families and students meet you far more often in writing than in a room. The ordinary message, sent between classes and rarely thought about, quietly does the work of building or eroding trust.
Think about the proportion. A family might see you twice a year in person, for ten minutes each time, in a hall with a queue behind them. In the same year they may receive forty or fifty written messages from you or your institution: reminders, results, absence queries, excursion details, a note about a piece of work that was not handed in, a note about a piece of work that was outstanding. The relationship is not built at the interview. It is built in the inbox, one short message at a time, and it is built by accumulation rather than by any single sentence.
That is uncomfortable, because correspondence is the part of the role nobody trained you for. You were prepared to plan, to explain, to assess and to manage a room. Nobody sat you down and taught you how to write two hundred words that a tired parent will read correctly on a phone at the end of a shift. So most educators learn it by accident, from the messages that went badly, and the lesson arrives late and expensive.
A softened opening does not reduce the blow, it only delays and distorts it.
Correspondence is a substantial part of the job and is rarely counted as one.
Readers stop early, so anything that must be done should arrive before they do.