E-mail?

I just figured out something about a generational difference.

My students will often e-mail me and get really frustrated when I don't receive it and respond to it within an hour. I'm doing conferences and this morning a student was really upset that I didn't do anything about her e-mail yesterday that said she was sick and couldn't make her appointment yesterday. This kind of thing keeps happening.

So here's the generational thing. I will check my business e-mail maybe once a day. I've got five different active e-mail accounts, and only one of them is constantly on my Apple desktop. And that's the way I like it. University accounts spit out something like 200 messages a week, 199 of which are pointless.

Watching my students (and watching Jared very closely), it's obvious, though, that today's teenagers consider five minutes away from e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, and text messaging to be a REAL problem. Any message is worth an instant reply. Any. Certainly the reply is usually two or three letters, but it's there.

I've got other things to do with my time. If I'm in the middle of a conversation with a student, I'm not going to e-mail someone. And that causes my kids to get upset.