It’s kind of ironic to consider that we can’t enforce zero-tolerance policies on the teachers, but it’s perfectly fine for the students…
I hope no one involved reads this, but in my senior year of high school (1989-1990), one of the girls giggled that during one of our meetings, she noticed that our teacher had a hard-on.
This was a journalism class and we were all second- and third-year students. It wasn’t so much a class as a workshop (first-years had class). And so we were responsible for production. And we had roundtable meetings. And our most excellent, professional, wonderful (miss you, Mrs. Haas!) teacher was replaced with a newly graduated teacher. Yup, 21, and just as horny as I was at 21.
Even then, I’d like to think that we were mature adults (we weren’t sophomores!), and it was just a laughable situation. The girls certainly laughed about it. And of course in 1989, by today’s standards (I think) we were a bunch of uptight, sexless citizens (by American standards, certainly not world standards). This was before “what is the definition of sex?” Before “sexts.” Our newspaper was still mostly keylined and AOL (né Quantum Link) users were just nerds.
The 21-year-old’s boner was nothing! It was something we could all laugh about, but understand. I hate to think that we live in a society whereby we have to forcefully segregate people based on age.
I once attended as professional function, and one of the presenters was a young lady wearing a silk blouse, and her nipples were erect. (I remember it vividly, to this very day. Even her name, 30 years later.) Good lord, what is the world coming to? Do we have to go back to burning people at the stake in order to enforce zero tolerance for blatant sexual blasphemy?
Uh, 35+ year olds (men, especially, but also some women) aren’t any more immune to the charms of good-looking 16-18 year olds than 21-year olds are.
I suppose it could be argued that 35-year olds are going to have more impulse control, risk aversion and more to lose than 21-year olds, so they’re more likely to obey the law.
The real thing that surprises me about teacher-on-student sex in high school isn’t that it happens, it’s that it doesn’t happen more. Which is probably a testament to the fact that we have strong laws and social taboos against underage sex. In countries where these kind of issues aren’t taken as seriously (I worked in one for a while), high school teachers sleeping with students is (I’m willing to bet) much more common than it is in America.
Will there be an oral portion?
I remember what I and my friends were like in high school. I can’t understand why anyone even slightly older would have been attracted to us - unless it’s somebody who never outgrew high school emotionally, who chose a career that led back to it, and found a set of work friends who could be cliquish and catty and cruel like they were at 17.
Does that shit still go on in the teachers’ lounge? Maybe that’s how it works for some teachers - they don’t want to, or are scared to, grow up, and they want to see their students as cohorts. Or maybe it’s about wanting to feel as sexy and desirable as they wish they had been back when they still had acne and baby fat.
This is a terrible basis on which to base any policy. For anything.
Things aren’t featured on the news because they’re important, or because they’re prevalent, or because they’re indicative of a larger trend. They’re featured because they make a good story, usually because it appeals in some way to our baser instincts. Stories about teachers’ inappropriate relationships with students hits the trifecta: fear, titillation, and moral outrage.
You know, it’s really not that hard to spot people who have blurry boundaries or altogether unhealthy ideas of student-teacher interactions. In the teacher credentialing program I went through, the trainers talked about taking precautions (don’t ever meet with a student alone, always leave the door open, et cetera), setting healthy boundaries, and recognizing when you were putting yourself in a very bad place. The teachers in my program were, for the most part, very aware and very cautious. When a couple of young ladies started teasing one of the men about how he could get a date from gym class, the head of the program had a little discussion with them.
The idea is, you make sure you cover this when you cover all the other ethical boundaries that a teacher works within. There is a framework for colleagues to caution one another, to escalate concerns, and for mentors to sit down with a teacher at risk of offending and give them a Come To Jesus speech. It fails when the participants aren’t made aware of that framework, and when other teachers and the administration refuse to hold their colleagues accountable. However, the culture is in flux. Behavior that was tolerated thirty years ago is unacceptable today, and what was questionable or embarrassing thirty years ago will get a teacher fire, their credential revoked, and run a substantial chance of landing them in jail. As well it should.
This is like, “We should teach burglars not to steal.”
People who want to do something, will do it, even if they know it’s illegal. This is hardly a case of “teacher didn’t know it was inappropriate.”
Mary Letourneau on 20/20: “I didn’t know it was a felony.” = Asleep through teaching degree, teacher orientation, etc. = orange jump suit.
You mean, besides the “yes means no if it’s said by a woman under 18” laws? Then again, nothing in the subject says anything about the student being younger than 18…
Actually, imagine if it was tolerated - “well, yes, your coursework is much better than hers, but what makes you think that my giving her a college/scholarship recommendation over you has anything to do with the fact that we have been sleeping together and I may or may not have gotten her pregnant at least once - which, by the way, is none of your business?” This is different from bribing or threatening the teacher as those are illegal.
How about single sex classes taught only by homosexuals of the opposite gender? (Note this is only a joke proposal)
You’re not going to prevent it because you cannot legislate attraction. The best you can do is make the consequences sufficiently painful as to deter most teachers from following through.
P.S. I had a romantic relationship with a 23-year old substitute teacher when I was 16. We didn’t have sex, but I wasn’t sleeping with any of my boyfriends then. We broke up when another student told another teacher, who warned him off. He’d have lost his job, though at that time he wouldn’t have been listed as a sexual predator like he would have today.
Back in my HS days, we had one teacher (Mr. G) who was pretty fashionable (or what passed for fashion back then). One day, in a private conversation with him and 3 of my friends (2 female, 1 male) he mentioned a time when he was chaperoning some school trip and a female student started flirting with him and said that she was “attracted to older men” and Mr G said that he had hell of a time keeping from saying “I know what you mean, I’m attracted to older men too!” 
nm
This, exactly. Always watching and holding colleagues accountable is how to prevent unacceptable behavior.