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The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics

ISSN: 2472-7318

A Passive Aggressive Email Exchange in the Time of Covid

Nicole L. Hancock

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Keywords: emails, dealing with admin, parenting

Categories: Creatively Caring for Self, Others, and Place; Reflecting on Academic (Over)work and/or Precarity; Somewhere in Between: Grad Student Perspectives


This brief piece is based on an actual email conversation that transpired in Spring 2020 when Nicole, a full time tenured community college professor, was required to teach her base load of face-to-face classes in the classroom unless quarantined. Faculty were responsible for splitting their classes so no more than half of the class could attend in person, while the other half attended synchronously online, and class was recorded in case any students needed to attend asynchronously.

 

Dear Nicole,

I have an opportunity that I would like to discuss with you.  Would you be available to meet today or tomorrow to chat?  Please let me know.

Thanks,
Director of Recently Created Admin Area

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Dear Director of Recently Created Admin Area,

I am unavailable.

Thanks,
Nicole

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Nicole,

Okay. If you are open to it, I would like to collaborate with you on some exciting initiatives. The purpose of our chat would be to get your feedback on what you might be interested in and to what extent. I don’t mean to be enigmatic. It’s just meeting would be easier than explaining by email.

Director of Recently Created Admin Area

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Director,

I am in quarantine and not on campus. Between the committees I’m already serving and the work I’m doing on my dissertation, I had 4 remote meetings this week, so I am afraid that I do not have time in an ongoing pandemic to meet to discuss an opportunity that sounds like it would add more work to my already full semester.

Nicole

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Nicole,

I can empathize with how busy you are. I am offering a potential course release for next semester, depending on which initiatives you would like to pursue. I set up a video meeting for 10 a.m. as I need to know by 3:30 p.m. today.

Thanks,
Director of Recently Created Admin Are

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Not only am I in quarantine, but I now have fever and body aches from the vaccine. I had to video conference with 13 students today, including throughout the office hour you felt was at your disposal for a meeting.

If this opportunity cannot be defined in an email, then the answer is already a no. The answer is likely a no anyway, as I do not think you are hearing me on the “I have a dissertation to write and 3 kids to keep alive while also being forced to teach five classes each in 3 different ways during a pandemic.”

Nicole

**End of communication**

Nicole remains ABD.

 


Bio

Nicole L. Hancock has been teaching at a community college for around twenty years. She started as an adjunct and then was hired full-time at the same institution. She is very proud of the work she does with community college students and is usually open to serving the college in a number of ways. In addition to usual committee work, Nicole had previously received course release time to manage the departmental computer labs and assist professors with their multimodal pedagogy and then later had release time to study placement reform at the college, a research interest she is still pursuing. At the time this piece was written, Nicole had two kids in high school and one in junior high, andwith the help of her spouse—was juggling parenting, teaching, and being a graduate student. Her ABD period was already going to be lengthened by her part-time graduate student status before the pandemic started. She never received a clear response about what the release time opportunity was supposed to be but has not once regretted saying “no” to it. 

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