View results below: I asked this b/c I had an onslaught of emails from students this week that started w/ “I’m so sorry to bother you” “not to be an inconvenience” ect. I ran a poll w/ my students asking if they ever felt bad emailing a professor. The results were interesting 1/? https://twitter.com/francesabs/status/1303862956401197056

Likely unsurprisingly, (N= 84) 87.4% said they had felt bad emailing a professor before. Of that 87.4% almost all the respondents where female. Additionally, not a response category but many messages me and said that being first gen students they felt uncomfortable emailing. 2/?

Granted, I work at a Uni with a high pop of first gen, but this is interesting. The ONLY no responses were from males. In response to this, I did post an announcement about how students are not bothering me. 3/?

But I found this fascinating likely b/c I’m 3rd gen, I’ve never had a problem emailing a professor. I’ve always just assumed that’s part of their job- which is how I view it now as a faculty member. Then all your responses yesterday really intrigued me to think about why...4/?

This feeling of burdensomeness happens. I think it’s likely a lack of transparency that emailing falls into like office hours. Many of us would be thrilled to have a student show up to office hours for formal or informal interaction- yet rarely do we have this happen. 5/?

I’ve seen a lot of progress personally and on twitter with “rebranding” office hours, student hours. I wonder if the same concept was applied to emails, students would email w/ less concern of being a hinderance. I am going to try next term by having intros via emailing me 5/?

Lastly, imagine if students felt comfortable reaching out via email to us, we potentially could stop a lot of dropped classes, or failed classes, through simple interaction. I know I’m jumping to a conclusion (shame on me!) but it’s an interesting thought. 7/? Fin.

(Also note, I am making gendered decisions based purely on what I have available. Gender is not binary- forgive that for this inquiry please. In a perfect world, I would obviously ask more detailed questions!)