So you've decided to email your professor ....

First, let me say this is a great decision! Too many students think that they have to suffer in silence rather than ask for help. So emailing your professor is a smart move, but it’s also one that has some built-in pitfalls for the unaware.

Okay, this is weird, but let’s start by talking about a TV show that began a long, long time ago on a TV station once famous for airing what were then known as “music videos.” The show was MTV’s The Real World, and it still might be on MTV — I have no idea whether or not it is because I am very old and quite honestly do not know if MTV is still a thing that exists in our world.

However (stay with me!), the reason The Real World is important to your questions is because it always began with the same tagline: “This is the true story of seven strangers picked to live in a house and have their lives taped to find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real.”

I mean, look at these guys!

This, I think all future historians will agree, is where the idea of politeness suddenly became the antithesis of authenticity. Or, to put it another way, this is when we as a culture began to think that the only people who would bother with politeness were smarmy little cardboard simulacra of humanity with either 1) something to sell or 2) their eyes on our wallets.

Either way, to be polite was seen as the same as to be false … pretentious even! Real dudes didn’t bother being polite because authenticity, man.

What does all this have to do with emailing your sociology professor?

There are still some spaces and interactions that demand a certain amount of grace. It turns out, emailing someone with whom you have a friendly professional-yet-not-personal relationship is one of them. Clients, colleagues and bosses — potential and actual — all fall into this category. So do (most) professors.

What’s more, emailing professors has its own set of weird formalities. The professor-student relationship goes way the heck back in time to the middle ages (even if email doesn’t), which is where our ideas about college and higher education began. So there’s this built-in formality to the relationship that many (but not all!) professors expect.

The only problem? No one ever thinks to tell the students. (Except Eve Ewing because she is awesome.)



All college students and many grad students need to read this. Check yourself before you wreck yourself. https://t.co/GcbNXjCri1

— wikipedia brown ||| abolish ICE. (@eveewing) March 6, 2017

Let’s change that. Here are some good ideas for emailing your professors.

1. Use a greeting

Quaint? Yes. But greeting are markers of a certain level of formalness in written communication, and one thing that you need to understand about emailing your professor is that it is (at least at first) a formal communication. Jumping into a question or though without so much as a “Hi!” is fine in other kinds of writing, especially text messages, but you want to make sure that you begin with a certain formalness with your professor.

“Dear Professor SoAndSo” can sound a little too formal sometimes (though there are those who appreciate it). “Hi” or “Hello” work just as well.

“Hey Professor SoAndSo” is a greeting landmine, however. Some instructors find it too familiar. Better to stick with the others.

AND BY THE WAY … “Professor” is a perfectly fine title. “Mr.” is okay, I guess, but you’re getting into murky waters with “Mrs.” and “Miss.” Play it safe. Use “Professor.”

ALSO … Use your professor’s last name (at least until they tell you to do otherwise). Bonus points for spelling it correctly in the email! (Just kidding, you should always spell it correctly, bonus points or no.)

2. Use a subject line

While you might only have 3 to 5 professors, your professors could potentially have between 100 to 120 students. That’s a lot of emails! Make sure your professor can see what the email is about when they are wading through their inbox late at night. Make your email stand out!

3. Identify yourself

Because your professor might have more than 100 students, it’s a good idea to identify yourself and the class you’re in. It’s easy! If you begin the email by saying “This is Joan Jett from your 1pm ENG 112 class …” that makes it much easier for the professor to help you.

4. Use Standard Written English

Remember, this email is more formal that a lot of your communications, so it’s important that you use capitalization, full punctuation, correct spelling, and, for the most part, avoid overly cutesy emojis, smiley faces, cat memes, etc. Remember, this is a sort of business communication. There is a certain amount of formalness and politeness that is required.

Besides, “yo i just woke up lolz did we do anythink in class important please send notes k thanks” is not the greatest look coming from a student. Keep it simple, state your business, and make it look like you care.

5. Sign Off Politely

Again, this might seem like an overly formal move, but you’ll want to sign your name and maybe even include a closely (“Sincerely,” “Thanks,” “Best,” etc.).

Want a little more info on emailing your professors in college? This is a pretty good resource, if a little, uh, dated (“Netiquette?” really?), though this one is a little better (if more profane).

Our wells of cruelty

I’m listening again to Lawerence Wright’s God Save Texas, his 2016 book about his home state, a place I too once, albeit briefly, called home. While listening, sometimes it is nearly impossible to square Wright’s painting of Texas — grand in the literal sense of the word, open if cautious to outsiders, large-hearted despite obvious flaws — with the horrors of the concentration camps currently operating along the border.

Other times in the book, it is not at all difficult to think about Texas as ground zero for the camps, their human rights abuses, the rising of a 21st-century American facism. 

Recently, the American Academy of Pediatrics released photos of drawings created by children locked in the board camps. Those drawings, colorful markers on white paper, show the children’s world: frowning stick figures in cages, smiling guards outside the cages wearing guns on hips. 

“No amount of time spent in these facilities is safe for children,” Dr. Sara Goza of the AAP told NBC News. 

As the number of people trapped in camps climbed to 54,000 this month, an all-time high, Jewish activists and allies shut down the Washington, D.C. headquarters of ICE in protest, prohibiting ICE employees from entering the building. That same week, Vice President Mike Pence walked through an overcrowded McAllen, TX, camp, only to use it as a rhetorical cudgel to “end the flow of families that are coming north from Central America to our border.”

Every day we see staggering acts of cruelty. It’s easy to ask ourselves where this well of cruelty came from and, now that it’s tapped, just how deep its reserves go. 

Coming back to Wright’s book, it struck me that this cruelty and its companion indifference is not such a stretch in Texas, specifically. 

In the chapter “Sausage Makers,” Wright says, “Children have also faced heartless treatment in Texas.” He’s referring to a federal lawsuit in which Judge Janice Jack ruled that Texas violated the 14th Amendment rights of foster children by exposing them to unreasonable risk of harm while in state’s custody.

Texas’s Child Protective Services and its foster care system is and has been a dysfunctional mess for many years. I used to work for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, the massive state agency that oversees CPS and foster care. I was only there for little over a year as a training and communication specialist in headquarters in Austin. It took me months to learn and understand all the competing acronyms, the byzatine bureaucracy responsible for protecting those Texans who, as the agency’s informal motto when, were unable to protect themselves.

My boss had been with CPS for more than 20 years and had come up through the agency’s ranks. One day during my first few months, she was walking me through a whole new set of alphabet organizations and procedures, trying to explain the process of one of the worst outcomes of a CPS case: child removal. I kept writing down three- and four-letter acronyms, drawing flow-chart arrows among the different sets of letters, each another abstract step toward a terrible outcome. 

“So what happens when they’re done with TMC?” I asked. TMC meant “temporary managing conservatorship” — when a child is removed from their home and placed with another family member or a “certified caregiver.”

I still remember the face my boss made before she answered, a mix of pity, exhaustion, fear, and failure. “Most of them,” she sighed, “go to PMC.”

“P” stood for permanent. The kids essentially became a ward of the state. My boss’s reaction to my question made it clear that this outcome came with its own stomach-churning terrors. 

New to the job, my own child just weeks away from being born, I didn’t have the courage to ask any more. 

According to Judge Jacks, “As the system currently stands, foster children often age out of care more damaged than when they entered.”

The state’s solution to this? To subcontract vendors to provide foster care, essentially outsourcing the job to the private sector. All along the way, Texas fought having any body, federal or otherwise, take any kind of role in reforming its broken system. It seems that it would rather continue violating the Constitutional rights of is most vulnerable than cede any authority. 

When it came down to it, state power trumped the rights of the state’s citizens. It was never a contest.  

If it seems like almost every morning we wake up to country we suddenly don’t recognize, it’s only because we’ve forgotten all the other mornings in which we’ve risen to the same sickening feeling. If the government of Texas couldn’t be bothered to protect the rights of its most vulnerable citizens for the last decade, why are we surprised when it becomes home to concentration camps violating the human rights of those it deems unworthy of citizenship? 

It is 2019, and it feels like that within the last year the nation has passed some point of no return, has degenerated into something so ugly that the possibility of redemption is now out of reach. Perhaps it is. But reading Wright reminded me that we have lived within our nation’s slow march toward such a new-age cruelty, to the rocket’s red glare of American No-Knowing Facism. Of course it’s been with us since the beginning. But it was put into practice more slowly than many of us suspected.