Just when you think you've seen it all
in terms of student behavior, you can get an e-mail from a very recently former student (as in grades were submitted last week) asking you out. To badminton. Or dinner. With a glamour shot attached. (This is LA, after all.) Oy. If it had arrived today I would have thought it was an April Fool's joke, but apparently not...
posted by Pangea at 3:56 PM
6 Comments:
So, are you going out with him? Enquiring minds!
Nancy W.
What, are you kidding? You are kidding, aren't you? Even if I *were* the slightest bit tempted by this guy, which I am not, I wouldn't be tempted at all. If you know what I mean. There was a certain student jock in Chicago who grew up nearby, who spent 2 hours writing his final exam because it was so filled with flirtatious jokes (and poetry), and I thought that if I ran into after graduation maybe, *maybe* something could happen. But here? While still an undergrad? No way. (The glamour shot is kind of 80s boy band, btw. Possibly dates from them, since he's about my age.)
Badminton???
Is this something that happens to all female college instructors below a certain age, or only the ones as charismatic/attractive as you? I'm genuinely curious on this point. Nothing like that has ever happened to me. Is that because I'm male, or because I'm unattractive? (I ask all of these questions with complete neutrality and curiosity, no ego at stake here. Also, because I am writing under an assumed identity.)
Lance, I'm actually surprised to hear this, since you are more than good looking enough to have students thinking somewhat inappropriate thoughts about you. Reasons they might not act on them include: 1) you've worn a wedding ring most of your teaching career, 2) I suspect you mostly teach not very large classes, so your n is smaller than when people teach 200 at a time, 3) men get it a bit less, and when they do, just from anecdotal examples, it seems to be more "I'd do ANYTHING to fix this grade." I think women get more appearance comments on student evaluations -- the place where I'm teaching now doesn't filter at all, I'll get the actual handwritten forms, which I have to say, I don't really want to read. The actual hitting on is, I think for most of us, really quite infrequent.
The old "I'd do ANYTHING to fix this grade" situation sounds so exciting in theory, yet on those occasions when I've actually had sex with students and given them A's, I've felt surprisingly empty afterwards.
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