The best and worst idea of all time.
Providing feeback via email, which I’ve tried to do a little bit this semester, can, if your students are over the first hump of being able to identify what it is that they want to talk about how it is that they want to talk about it, work really well. However, in most cases, I find it’s actually faster and more effective to meet and talk in office hours. The article suggests that in office hours ideas can be loose and unformed while email forces them to be concise and specific: I don’t find this to be true at all. In office hours I’m able to badger the messy thinker into narrowing things down; this is much harder for me to do in an email exchange, which is spread out over time and space in a way that doesn’t allow the kind of pushing that I often find is necessary. I mean, basically, different things work for different teachers, and, importantly, for different students.
DUH.
