FTR, I’ve seen this done. With practice, you can spread yourself out across the nails such that you get nary a scratch.
Oh I know, like I said, I’m quite positive he would have done it and been totally fine. Never forgave the rest of my classmates for not turning in their homework on time…because, uh, mine was all perfectly on time and not an assignment missed! Yeah…
And… the “French Kiss” teacher wasn’t?
-FrL-
My grade 1 teacher told me that I was “going to hell” because I was not able to tie my shoe laces. My parents bought me some loafers, and had a conversation with the principal.
The same teacher then put me from grade 1 back to kindergarten because she thought that I could not spell my name correctly. Since I spelled my name the same way my family had been spelling it for the last seven hundred years, my parents had another conversation with the principal, and had the teacher fired.
In grade 3, the bright kids were placed into a joint class with violent, maladjusted kids who had been sent back from grade 4. My parents did not bother with any more conversations with the principal, and simply had him fired.
by grade 5, my parents moved me from the public system to a private school, and all was well with the world.
No, just super hot. I know it’s the height of evil to suggest that in some cases high school boys enjoy the idea of having an inappropriate relationship with their teachers, and even fantasize about it, but his post certainly didn’t leave the impression that he was traumatized or that abuse took place. Sounded more like a way to take the “forbidden fruit” aspect away from student-on-student field trip action, by turning a relatively benign form of it into a school-sanctioned activity. (And nobody wants to extend a school-sanctioned activity to something further, even a fun one.)
I dunno. Maybe I’m off the mark here–after all, the post didn’t say whether or not the students ended up having sex. But it sounded like a Penthouse Forum scenario without the sweat and semen. Worse things probably swim through the average high school kid’s head (and teacher’s, especially the younger ones) on a daily basis.
ETA: Muffin, how did your parents have that teacher fired without talking to the principal about it?
Was gonna say–if ever there were a motivation for doing all your homework…Sigh.
ETA: It makes the time we got to make silver bottles in chemistry class and then watch “The Year Without a Santa Claus” seem awfully dull!
I read that as Muffin’s parents got fed up and got the principal fired after that.
They spoke with the principal to get the principal to fire the teacher. They spoke with the school board trustees to get the principal fired.
This was in the mid-60s in a high end community in which this sort of behaviour by educators simply was not tolerated.
His name wasn’t Mr. Piper, was it?
No, no one thinks its evil to suggest that boys fantasize about their teachers sometimes. This is a patently obviously true statement.
I was implying that the female teacher’s actions were as good evidence that she’s a pervert as the male teacher’s actions.
The post certainly left the impression that abuse took place. It all but asserts this fact. And the poster himself may not have been traumatized, but as it was implied this was something the teacher did every year, it is absolutely a certain bet that several children were traumatized by her actions.
Knowing myself at that age, I certainly would have been deeply traumatized.
The damage that could be caused by the confliciting psychological pressures that would be created in the minds of kids in this situation, (and I mean both the boys and the girls,) make the teacher’s actions wholly unjustifiable.
Here’s another consideration: What if some of those kids were gay? How is pressuring them in the way the teacher did substantively different than it would have been had she pressured straight kids to engage in homosexual activities?
To be clear, I can envision, and have no necessary moral problem with, the idea of a society in which sex acts between young adults are not considered “forbidden fruit.” But in the real world, as things actually stand, sex acts between young adults are considered this way and treated as such. This creates very real psychological realities in the minds of children which we can’t just ignore in some fit of idealistic fantasy.
Anyway, I had the impression from reading the post in question that the teacher taught the two boys using the time honored technique of "learning by doing. Is that not what he meant?
-FrL-
Heh. My version isn’t as exciting, but my 7th grade history/SS teacher, Mr. Temple, quit a few weeks into the year. He was one of those grumpy guys–I thought he was great–but he was actually a volunteer teacher (!) and would dictate what kids he would accept into his class, since he didn’t get paid or anything. A few extra kids he didn’t like got put in his class…so he quit. Which was a bummer, since he was a really good and interesting teacher.
In his place we got the worst sub ever, and it was like throwing her to the sharks. She had no idea how to teach Greek mythology, which was our major study for the semester, and showed us Jason and the Argonauts, complete with claymation skeletons. I just know that if Jason had had sex with a nymph on screen, she would have done exactly the same thing! We despised and tormented her, and one day we threw live worms onto her desk during class.
Not in the least! 
I guess it comes down to willingness of the participants. I will admit that I do have a double standard about this. I would now have a problem with a 23 year old male teacher kissing a 15 year old student; not as big a problem with a female teacher and a student. I do remember that at the time, the general consensus among students was that Mr. C who was having the affair was not a pervert because it was consensual. The physics teacher was a pervert because of the way the girls felt about it.
As fetus suggests, no one was traumatized. And no sex was involved either in the class with the “French Kiss” teacher (excluding my 15 yo fantasies). The experience does temper my attitude towards news reports of teachers having affairs with students. I can’t build up the outrage that the average American does. I will agree that it is wrong, but this is a case where my mileage varies.
Why would you agree with that?
-FrL-
Frylock – sorry, I missed your post #230. I didn’t mean to ignore you.
Maybe this is a case where it was a matter of different times, different attitudes. The class was very close knit group and, as a result, I know with certainty that participation was voluntary, very willing and no one who chose to participate was traumatized. I honestly never thought of any of this as “abuse” and still can’t assign that word to this situation. Given the time, the environment, the limited extent and how it was all handled, I would categorize it as surreal or unusual, which is why I felt it was topical for this thread.
My comment “I would agree that it is wrong” was referring to teachers having affairs with student in present day America. I’m older with fewer hormones coursing through my veins, a full fledged sexual affair is technically illegal, and situations where a person is engaged in sex with a person under their authority should be looked at for coercion. The legality issue and question of willingness makes me now view teacher-student affairs as wrong which is, I believe, the general US attitude nowadays. I just do not feel as outraged by them as the average person does.
It doesn’t matter whether any of the students were traumatized. They probably would have been thrilled if she had bought them all beer too. It was still wrong, and as an adult, she should have known that. A woman in her twenties who wants to make out with high school boys has something seriously wrong with her in the first place, and violating her position of authority is doubly gross.
In 9th grade, our English Teacher, Mr. Hunt, was awesome. And weird.
At the beginning of every week, he would pick a girl to be the teachers pet that week. On Friday, they didn’t have to take the vocab test, he would bring them twinkies and a soda.
During tests, he would smash the window opener (a long metal rod) against his desk, making a hell of a ruckus, in order to “loosen the tension”.
He died about halfway through the school year, in a hunting accident.
There was a teacher in Jr. High, I never had her, but she was alleged to be nuts. Like, get up on her desk and bark like a dog nuts. If even sven went to the same jr. high I did, she may know who I’m talking about.
In High School, we had a class called California Studies, which we should have called history and morality 101. Half the semester was history,and the other half was moral and ethical issues facing California. Taught by the son of the famous Sam Barris (designed and built the original Batmobile, amongst others) he had some great tales. He had a big bowl of candy on his desk, and everytime he mentioned Chico, the first person to yell out “World’s Greatest Place” got a piece of candy.
He was heavily involved with the teachers union, and came into class one day just furious. He ranted and raved about how the school could afford a junket trip for the administrators, but instead of a raise they were giving out mugs to the teachers this year.
He threw his mug onto the floor and stomped it to pieces.
Why Chico? Did you live there? Did he go to college there? Did someone believe the Playboy list of party colleges?
Glad to see this thread resurrected!
I just thought about another funny (not really surreal) moment. Eighth grade English. We had just finished watching My Fair Lady and we had another half hour left in the class. One of the boys in the class asked if he could put a tape in. He said it would be “educational”. As this boy was one of the trouble-makers, it’s surprising that the teacher gave him permission.
For the rest of the period, we watched an old episode of Saturday Night Live, complete with Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood and the sketch where Eddie Murphy exposes what white people do when black people leave the room. Halfway into the video, the teacher looked up from her grading and said, “This isn’t EDUCATIONAL!” I still don’t know if she was serious or not, but the memory is funnier if I assume she was.
That’s the impression I got. I certainly believe you when you say that you would not have handled this well at 14 or 15, although to be completely honest it doesn’t sound like a common reaction to me. I remember when I was 14 or 15 I would’ve done anything to kiss a girl, and I would’ve settled for a hot young teacher. And when I was 17 I met my share of incoming freshman girls of age 14 or 15 who were not particularly shy about kissing, either. As for the question of whether there’s abuse, well, it certainly fits a common objective definition of abuse, I suppose, but I saw it as more subjective in this particular case. Firstly, it didn’t sound forced, especially considering the words “arranged for the girls who were willing” (or whatever it was). Secondly, it didn’t sound like anyone involved thought it was a particularly bad idea. Now, if these kids were 6 or even 10 or 12, that might be different. But by the time a child is 14, s/he is a teenager and is able to make his/her own sexual and romantic decisions. I’m not asserting that as an objective fact–it just comes from my memory of being 14, and the milieux of my peer group at the time. But if that’s true, I don’t see this particular case as being all that worrisome.
As to the question of whether it proves that that teacher was a pervert, well, that means different things to different people and in different contexts. If “pervert” means that some dark corner in the mind of someone under 26 or so entertains thoughts about 14- and 15-year-olds as sexual beings, I’d say the vast majority of the under-26 crowd are probably perverts. That’s how humans are wired–after all, it hasn’t been that long since it was normal for 14-year-olds to start families; Romeo and Juliet were about 14 years old IIRC. It hasn’t been as long as that since it was normal for 12-year-olds to perform intense labor to support their families. Sexual activity in that age group may have become taboo as longer life expectancies have given people more time to develop themselves before entering into romantic commitments, but puberty has been happening earlier and earlier; I believe that the extent to which we’ve (thankfully) rendered ourselves unable to sexually fantasize about 14-year-olds (and younger) is more a success of society than neurobiology.
All I’m saying is that, while I sympathize with children who are sexually taken advantage of by their teachers, and I’m normally not the type to look at a Mary Kay Letorneau-type case and say “OMG so hot!!! I wish I were that kid!!!1”, that’s frankly the response I have to this story. I can certainly understand that you wouldn’t share that view, and I wouldn’t defend it if I thought that the story as we’ve heard it so far were one of abuse. It smacks of a young teacher remembering what it was like to be 14, who wished that she could have a school-sanctioned noncommittal hormonefest with her classmates.
FTR, I wouldn’t have when I was 14. I know I wasn’t the only kid who abstained, even though I went to school in an area chock full of hippies.
My 7th grade geography teacher couldn’t keep control of the class. And he would get so mad! He’d yell and yell until his face was red and he had a vein popping out of his forehead. We always wondered how long he was going to make it. Then one day he got so mad that he threw one of those big three-ring hole punch things at a kid. It didn’t hit him, but it was so loud when it landed. Instead of cowering in fear we all died laughing.
I always felt sorry for that guy.