Then, somewhere in the l980s (maybe a touch earlier, or later), I began to receive more email missives than face-to-face office visits.  Students would send me their field hockey schedules and tell me which classes they'd have to miss for away games; I got questions about assignments and questions about when such assignments were due.  I got testimonies about my prowess as a teacher (this a week or so before the semester was over) and bitter complaints about certain grades -- a day or two after they had been posted -- being unacceptable.

The good thing, of course, is that emails replaced late night calls about the dog, the ski trip, or the assignment.  Still, emails could be (and often were) annoying, so I concocted yet another sentence to add to my syllabi: "Professor Pinsker considers email from students to be an invasion of my computer privacy."  That, I thought, would do the trick, but it didn't.  Students didn’t care about "computer privacy" (a term I made up), nor much about any brand of privacy.  The point, for them, was that the computers date- and time stamped every communication.  So, if they wrote me about why they would be missing class the next day, they could always claim -- correctly as it turns out -- that I had been "informed."

Let me hasten to add that I was not the only faculty member who had troubles with e-mail.  In the early days of our college server, one poor fellow fired off an angry email to a friend, outlining in great detail just why he thought so-and-so was a jerk (his words was much stronger).  Unfortunately, he hit the wrong "send" key and his angry missive was fired off to everyone.  He apologized for his unintentional error but I didn't really believe him.  Some "mistakes," as Freud pointed out long ago, are not really  "mistakes."

For two or three years after I retired, certain students would email me about needing a recommendation for graduate school.  Nothing by way of specifics other than that my recommendation was due in a week's time.  After dashing off a couple of letters, putting them in my envelope and affixing my stamp, I said enough -- in a form email that told students requesting recommendations that I needed a proper letter, outlining what they had been doing since graduation and why they wanted to go to graduate school, along  with a self-addressed.  stamped envelope.

But if student email slowed to a trickle after my retirement, the same thing was not true as the campus-wide server.  At the beginning I would get emails about early dismissals for snow emergencies or whole days cancelled in the face of  an upcoming blizzard -- this while I was living in south Florida.  To say that I really didn't want to know anything about this would be an understatement.  To say that I couldn't block such stuff from my "in box" spoke both to my ineptitude and to the sheer power of the internet.

At a time when far too many  politicians enjoy bashing teachers, some emails from students have been gratifying.  Not all students are thoughtless and annoying; some of them write to me about how much they enjoyed studying with me, and even better, some tell me that they are now  reading novels by an author they met in one of my contemporary literature classes.

You're probably thinking that nothing, absolutely nothing, could be better than this.  Actually, there is something -- a proper letter from a student that I could read, and then save.  By contrast, email floats into my "old mail" box and then, after a time, magically disappears.  I've never been a fan of email.  True, it is fast and, yes, it is convenient, but, for me, nothing beats carefully crafted words in a proper letter that I can hold in my hands.