News: Student/teacher relationships: learning curves

So the whole "if there is grass on the field, play ball" has no legal merit.

 

Not sure if the age should matter, the power disparity Demosthenes talked about in her post would still apply to this case.

 

Yes and no. Agreed that age alone is insufficient. There's nothing magical about the difference between 17 years and 364 days and 18 years. An authority figure who manipulates a vulnerable young person doesn't go from 100% culpable to 100% acceptable when the clock strikes midnight. But for legal purposes age has the advantage of being able to be measured precisely, and power disparity not so.

 

"This one time, at band camp..."

 

I say no. I'm wary about criminalizing adult sex with high school juniors or seniors, maybe but I also think this might be social norms masquerading as psychology. But I don't think that sort of relationship should exist between a teacher at a school and a student, from the perspective of professionalism. It breaks down barriers between the roles of teacher and student that should exist. There should be some barriers; they are different things.

 

The woman got fired from her job because she had legal sex while an adult years before she ever took the job.

Sigh. Jackass school boards under the sway of jackass parents. Sigh.

 

I think they got their pics mixed up. That looks like the high school boy to me

 

When I was 16 or 17, I would have been happy to have one of several female teachers "victimize" me.

 

now you're just not taking this seriously enough.
you have no idea of the emotional trauma you would have suffered thereby for the rest of your life.
you would never have been able to look at educators the same way again.
your innocence taken away from you so early.
like a lily, plucked before its time.

 

When I was in 7th grade, a classmate said that I have stripped naked, she would too. It's quite the fond memory. Ah coming of age. Too bad we can't do it more than once.

Maybe it's screwed up by having adults involved, though. I wouldn't know, despite my crush on my HS German teacher nothing like that happened with me.

 

That's you.You apparently had hot teachers.Me?Not so much.

In any event ,here we're talking about a 16 year old who may be functioning at a level much lower than that.

 

I'm pretty sure that by middle school age if a teacher was hitting on me that I wasn't interested in I would of just walked the other way.

There would of had to be some level of attraction on my end to let myself get caught in the web.

 

I agree. Like I said earlier, there were rumors at my high school about a teacher and a football player. Then, there was the hot art teacher in junior high who got caught in flagrante delicto with a janitor in the art closet.

 

I doubt that many janitors get hot tail. The man done his profession proud.

 

The problem isn't lack of professionalism, it's the potential for coercion. I don't know why this is so hard for people to acknowledge.

There are two quite separate issues here. One is age, the other is potential coercion. A teacher who seduces a student may be using his/her position of authority to coerce the student. An employee and employer may have a totally consensual affair, but an employer can also use threat of firing to pressure the employee into sex. It can be hard to define exactly when pressure & coercion become sexual assault, but most people can agree that an abuse of power like that is more than unprofessional. The same goes for students and teachers. Except that in the case of high school students, they may be minors, which makes the abuse (if indeed abuse occurred) even worse.

It's easy, as adults, to say "I would of [sic] just walked the other way." But it might not be that easy for every teen, many of whom worry about grades, graduation, college, etc.

It's also easy to be flippant about it like minerva, and laugh at the idea of boys having sexual innocence or being emotionally traumatized by sex. But that's exactly the attitude I mentioned earlier, the same attitude that makes it almost impossible for male victims of sexual assault to be taken seriously. It's almost as if some men think that if they admit that all men & boys don't always want sex all the time, it will make them appear less virile. I have no idea why masculinity needs so strongly to self-identify as perpetually sexually voracious, but the effect is to take away men's real agency in sexual situations. Men should be allowed to say no.

 

Hmmm I think that's what I implied. What we call "professionalism" is a code of behavior that among other things is intended to prevent coercion.

Well at least that was clear to me, if not to anybody else. Anyway, I fully agree with what you wrote.

 

I see what you mean. "Professionalism" can encompass a lot of things. To me "unprofessional" connotes being work-inappropriate, which could be something as harmless as dressing too casually or showing up late. So it's not my favorite term for this discussion. But I see that's not how you meant it.

 

Coercion is the better term.

So by the logic, I assume that we should forbid student/teacher relationships at university. Which I guess is the norm these days. But such relationships are not criminalized, and a university professor who cavorts with a student won't need to wear a Scarlet A if caught. So it seems to me that of the two items that you mention, coercion and age, that age is considered to be the greater sin in the high school setting. It is the one associated with the steepest penalty.

 

My son's too young to realize he has some very attractive elementary teachers who are mostly under 35 and are super-nice with the kids. When I tell him I had what appeared to be a string of 65 yr. old battleaxes who were the civilian version of nuns, he can't believe it. Then I break out my class pictures to prove it. It was the 70s and they were probably at the tail end of the post WWII teachers.