Dear Colleagues,
What happens when your principal emails the staff at 7 PM one evening about an unplanned assembly the next day? You get an email over the weekend about an IEP meeting for Monday and are told what you need to do to prepare for it. At 9:15 in the morning a list goes out in email of students who are to be sent to the office if you have them in class. We get so many emails that we are expected to read, understand, and act upon it is hard to keep track. And when do people read their school email? My guess is that most teachers read them during lunch and at home. The problem is that there is an increasing expectation that last minute communication is acceptable even if it burdens teachers unreasonably.
The big question is “can I get in trouble for not acting upon or responding to an email that is sent outside of my normal working hours?” My response is that there should be no expectation that teachers are checking email 24 hours a day. Some members don’t look at school email at all outside of school – this is probably a smart practice. All of us work outside of the normal work hours, the difference with the insidious emails is that we are quickly losing the choice to ignore them. People who are connected to work 24/7 have a lot more stress than those who separate work from home. It is just not healthy to be answering emails in the middle of the night – worried whether you are going to miss the latest testing date or dictate about how to hang posters in the building.
Back when email was less common there was a certain amount of pre-planning and thought that had to be put into making school happen. Sure, email is great for all sorts of things (like getting amusing emails from your Union President), but it is so overused in our district that it has become annoying. Before email (yes I was employed by the district) I absolutely never checked my mailbox in the evening or on the weekends.
Try it. This weekend, don’t check your school email. Let’s see if the world is still around on Tuesday.
Fraternally,
Ari Klein
CHTU President