A year and a half later, I receive an email from Dora’s second grade teacher. The email breaks many unspoken rules of email etiquette.

For starters, an email titled, “Hi! Quick Check-in!”should be able to be scanned and digested between meetings, or even during a meeting.  It should contain a few sentences, and each sentence should be dipped in goodwill and breaded with cheer.

An email with that title should especially not be used as a Trojan Horse for a teacher to express, through three, extended-play-length paragraphs, her “serious concern” about how “intensely challenging” it is to “convince Dora to write more than a few sentences at a time!”

Personally, I find the final exclamation point rude and unnecessary, a rotten cherry on a melted sundae. Perhaps this is why Dora does not want to write for her. Read More