Tomorrow my Algebra II students are going to take their final exam. The year has come to a close. I’ve taken stock of the year in a number of ways. Here’s another summary of my year (a la my SmartBoard notes data).

In order to keep myself organized throughout the year, I make a separate email folder for each student. All emails to, from, or about that student (e.g. with parents, with deans, with their adviser) get archived in this folder. I compiled the data and saw that I’ve done a lot of individualized emailing. To be precise, 2,270 individual emails. I teach only 43 students, so this comes to about 53 emails per student. Most aren’t extensive emails — sometimes it’s just them asking me a quick question, or trying to schedule a time to meet, or me asking them if anything was up. The picture of how these 2,270 emails were distributed is below.

The number of students is on the left, the email range is on the bottom.

I don’t really have many conclusions.  I just wanted to see what the data would look like. The students on the right — who I emailed a lot lot lot with — were the ones I was trying to reach the most. So it’s nice that there was a correspondence between this data and that.

I do spend a lot of my time on email. As for whether it is worth it, well, that’s still up in the air. I think it is.