verbs - Should "Have your peer partner send you her plans" be considered a directive?


If you tell a person to have someone do something, is that considered a command?


Our boss sent an email which told us to "have your peer partner send you her plans". Should that be considered a directive?


Our union is actually filing a grievance over this language.


Our contract states that we cannot be forced to give our lesson plans to anyone. Our principal, as part of a professional development activity wrote "have your peer partner send you her plans," as opposed to "send your peer partner your plans". Since I have no means of "having" (forcing) her do this (I am not her boss), the implication to me is is that we should "request" this of our peer partners.


I think she deliberately chose "have" over "request" (in fact the union asked her to amend the email to state this was voluntary, and she refused) to confuse people into thinking she was telling them to send their plans to their partner since indeed, "have" connotes a command, but was covering herself by being able to say that she never told anybody to send their plans to the peer partner- she told us to have them send theirs to us. Since we can't "make" our peer partners do this, in this case "have" means "ask".


It seems to me that this was a way of tricking people into thinking it was a directive, but the language was chosen carefully — so if necessary, it would prove it wasn't. I think the union will lose the grievance on these grounds, unless there are provisions in the contract against deliberately using language to mislead overworked teachers who don't have time to read emails through the lens of a lawyer.




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