Just Another E-mail

One semester I was in a class where we regularly had to attend events and then write short papers on each of them. The professor warned us to plan ahead to make sure that we would be able to get enough in by the end of the semester. She said to make sure that we had a plan B for every event.

Toward the end of the semester, I had one event left to go to with both a plan A and B, but somehow both fell through. So, I e-mailed my professor to see if she knew of any alternatives. When I got a response about a day later, I was shocked by a sort of irritated response that accused me of trying to make excuses and telling me that I should've had a back-up plan.

At first, I was offended that she would think that I hadn't listened to her warning and that I would try to make excuses. Then, during the next class period, I overheard some people talking about how they didn't get to enough of the events and TAs confronting students about papers being done incorrectly. Before class, the professor ended up making a little bit of an annoyed announcement about a few extra events that could count and clarified how the papers were supposed to be done.

I ended up completing the conversation over e-mail and everything got cleared up, but I realized that I should have considered the fact that I wasn’t the only one who would be e-mailing her about the assignment. Although my situation was because of circumstances out of my control, the fact that I was just another e-mail about an assignment that she had already thoroughly explained, she received my response with the preconceived idea that I was trying to avoid responsibility for not paying attention. My approach probably would’ve been more effective if I had waited until after she addressed the issue in class and then approached her in person about my unique case.