Why I do not want to help students anymore

Every semester I try my level best to help my students. I was a student before and I always wanted to do well and when I see them looking for help I remember my student time and I help. A lot of times I may not be able to help as much as I wished, but I try.

I do not expect any thank you note for that, but what I got today's mail was a wake up call for me. Here is the mail [minus the names]

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From: student 1 <xxxx@yahoo.com>
Date: Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 2:22 AM
Subject: Urgent.Emergency(unity);
To: avijit.paul@mmu.edu.my

Dear my beloved Sir, We’re having problems with our unity. The submission is due on next Monday. We’re running out of time. We don’t want to fail this course. Please, please, please help us.  We are so desperate. This is not fair, we have tried our best. We give all our heart and soul to this project. Everyone else got interaction. But we don’t even know how to publish our work. Which selection to choose, ya? Is it the OSX standalone? What is OSX? With this email we attach our unity file. Please do the third person controller with hovering, floating effect. Then the user can boost the speed of the character after collecting stuff. Please do all nicely. We don’t have enough time to do this assignment because we want to watch anime and play games. Please ya! You are my only hope. Then put extra FX to make our environment fantastic and beautiful for bonus marks. I really really need this. We know nothing about unity, so please do everything for us, ya! You are the nicest lecturer we know. After you finish, please burn in CD and design the cover for us. Remember to use the thin jewel case. Please remember ya, this is very important! We don’t want to fail this course. We don’t want to waste our parents’ money. Finally, submit the CD to [lecturer 1] on Monday between 2-4pm. Please don’t be late. We can’t go submit on Monday because we will be at Singapore “jalan-jalan cari makan”(please google this) I really really hope you’ll understand our situation. Please don’t tell Mr. Mazlan that you do all our Unity stuff. Keep it secret, till death do us part. Please please, we don’t want to fail this course. That’s all for this sem. We’ll be back to ask you to do our assign for FYP. PS:  Oh btw, how to export Max to Unity? Sincerely, Student 1 and student 2 PSS: Please take this with a bit of sarcasm. Don’t take this seriously. This is the joke of the semester! =======================================================  I replied =======================================================  Thanks for writing this mail, although both of you probably have crossed the line by miles, but it was a good realization mail.  Even though it makes me sad to read this email as I really believed [student 3] needed help on the unity part so I tried to help as much as I could even though I did not get to help much. But after your reading your email I understand my mistake. I was trying too hard to help and most probably I am not going to help anyone ever and will show the email [minus the names] as a reference why I dont want to help.  =======================================================  Anyone who is reading it might think why cant I just take a sarcastic email? After all it is a joke and they have exaggerated a bit too much and it is probably a good fun. The problem is that,  recently I took a lot of criticism from a number of faculty members for helping too much. I digested all of it thinking I am trying to do a greater good as the students probably really need help.  It takes a lot of my time and effort to find ways to solve problems. I spend a good number of hours trying to solve this technical issues that I could have used for my own work. I still did because I believed it will help.  But after this, please dont bother asking for help.  The door has been shut, at least for the rest of my time in MMU.