Thursday, July 09, 2009

I Would Not Do This

Periodically I'm asked how I handle being a teacher, especially when some students are just hot hot hot. Fortunately I have one of those switches in my brain that turns off any thoughts of my students as sexual beings; I can recognize that some of them are attractive without feeling attracted to them at all. Sadly, not all teachers have this switch:

British teacher Leonora Rustamova says she had the best interests of the boys in class in mind when she wrote a racy novel to encourage them to read...

Leonora Rustamova, a teacher in West Yorkshire, said she was only trying to motivate disaffected boys when she wrote a racy book that featured the boys in her class lusting after her.

The novel - Stop! Don’t Read This! - includes underage drinking, hints of drug use and “pupil fantasies”.

When I was in high school, one of my teachers discovered that a particular girl and I were having sex. Sometimes he would ask us about it, or would make a comment about it in class. It never occurred to us to complain to school administration--that's not how we did things back then--but it certainly made us feel uncomfortable. Our attitude was: those who knew, knew; those who didn't know, didn't need to. It wasn't a teacher's business what we were doing. However he found out, he should have kept that knowledge to himself.

I don't want to see my students as sexual creatures. Even those who are probably having sex, I do not--cannot--acknowledge it, even to myself. To me they're students, they're children. It's not what I want to think about.

It's bad enough that the teacher in the linked story above thought about students' having the hots for her. But to go that one extra step and write stories about it? Eww.

Hat tip to Joanne for this story.

2 comments:

Ellen K said...

Some young teachers have problems compartmentalizing their social lives. In both cases at our school, the female teacher involved were young and had been the sort of young women highly sought on campus for companionship. They simply didn't seem able to disconnect from the social web of the school. I have known of students who were seriously involved, but I have never commented. There are simply some things that should be off limits.

Eowyn said...

I'm with you; my students are all virgins. Even the ones who are nine month's pregnant, and shortly thereafter bring in their babies.

Virgins.