District emails--Bales busy work vampires sucks all district planning time from elementary teachers

Did you ever wonder why you have to spend twenty to thirty minutes a day sorting through and answering district email every day? Or why your precious minutes of prep time should be spent on such uselessness instead of what it was meant for, preparing for teaching?

Why can't Bales get a spam filter for email? How are you expected to check your email several times a day when you are teaching class and preparing for class?

All good questions. Sadly no good answers except that Bales et. al. have no idea of how much time email takes, how inefficient it is at reaching everyone in a timely fashion and probably no concern for either as long as their backsides are covered by their multiple email missives.

Elementary teachers are supposed to have some planning time. It is good educational policy to give teachers time to get ready for their classes. Teaching is more effective when teachers have this time to prepare.

In the old days all this district and school office important notices 'crapola' came in our mail boxes. We had sheets of paper that could be gone through in two to five minutes at most. Look--throw away. Look--throw away. Look--save. Boom boom boom, it was done in at most a few minutes with only seconds needed for most notices as most of them have nothing to do with any particular teacher. It was a fast and efficient system.

The current snail slow email system only comes up one at a time. The same info that could be easily dealt with in seconds in paper form takes twenty to thirty minutes of processing when it arrives via district email. Why because we have waiting for the email message to open, dealing with it by answering or eliminating and then checking the next message, etc., etc ad nauseum. Each message taking the better part of a minute to deal with rather than a second or two like a piece of paper would. With twenty to forty email messages that is the better part of an hour lost to district email on most days. Does any one at the district office ask for what good teaching purpose are teachers being forced to waste all this time. Or questions like is this time wasting of benefit to our students? No, no one at the district office ever thinks to ask those questions.

Why does Joyce Bales keep adding more and more busy work like this "check email" requirement to district school teachers already frantically busy days?

Technology can be helpful and a boon to teaching for instance being able to project the information on a single computer screen unto a whole classroom projection screen or technology can damage teacher effectiveness. Bales several times a day "check email" time vampire is the latter.