Answering Unpleasant Emails Students send emails that can hurt our feelings or offend our sensibilities. While many of us agree that the tone and level of disagreement rarely happens in a campus-based classroom, we need to remember that communicating over the Internet via email and discussion boards isn’t something everyone is proficient at. Sometimes students can be quicker to act before they think on email, or may be having personal or professional problems of their own that we don’t know about and having little to do with our performance as faculty. Either way, we must not respond to aggressive emails in an aggressive manner. It is easy to ignore an unpleasant email and hope that "it goes away." Typically a failure to responds to an emotion-charged email fuels the fire and often ends up escalating the situation so many layers of administration are involved. If you answer an angry email in an angry way, you will convey a bad attitude, which reflects poorly on us all. You may come off as rude, prideful or just nasty. Most upset student emails stem from frustration. By addressing students in an uplifting and forward-thinking manner, the student's attitude can be neutralized