Was my student being disrespectful by using shouting language in her email to me? I have a PhD in statistics and teach statistics for humanities students in a university. One week before the start of the semester I posted all the required information regarding the course textbook, as well as guidelines for how to access it (it is available online). I also explained all of this to the students verbally on the first day.
It is now the third week of teaching. At the beginning of the week I posted the first online homework. Three hours before the deadline, one of my students sent me an informal email, without a subject line or her name. She said in her email that she needed a help with accessing the book in order to do her homework.
I requested that she let me know her name and section number. She replied at 8pm with the information. I politely responded to help her with the problem. At 10pm, she sent me another email with another problem, that I also helped her with.
Then she sent me a final email a few minutes before the deadline. Her email was really informal and disrespectful. I replied saying that it is not acceptable to request help on the same day as the homework is due and that it is her responsibility to be ready for everything as we are at week 3. Then, I helped her and told her that if she needed any more help with the course book she should contact the bookstore and not me.
Then she replied with some sentences in full capital letters. For example, 'SORRY', 'THERE IS NO ACCESS CODES IN THE UNI BOOKSTORE'. Then, 'the uni must save CODES'. Then she said &quot;you try to challenge me&quot;.
I replied that I did not want to argue and that she should be careful about what she said.
Was she disrespectful in her emails? Is it acceptable to send an email in all caps? Am I wrong to deal with this point?
For a one-off or short-term rudeness, my policy is to respond with pure facts, served chilled. If you have a good instinct for delivering comebacks at just the right level, a hint (but just a hint) of sarcasm might work wonders.
Manners are important, but it's not our job to teach the students manners - and they are rarely grateful for it, especially those who would need such a lesson the most. Most certainly, I generally ignore capitalized letters as they signal inadequate acquaintance with netiquette or a really immature person.
That being said, your student is probably more in total panic and loss of control of the situation than expressly rude; this probably deserves more of your compassion than your anger. This does not preclude you to use aforementioned strategies for response and to decide how much time you are willing to allocate to help them and to enforce your decisions strictly. How they decide to communicate is their business - understanding why they do that, and what to respond are your businesses; and two separate ones, at that.
Do not use language that can be interpreted as a threat (&quot;she should be careful about what she said&quot;), a better response to a challenge (&quot;you challenge me&quot;) is to just ignore it or to ask - without any emotion -what they mean if you really cannot ignore it. Think of Spock's raised eyebrow when you do it, it will put you in the right attitude for this.