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Close personal attention Teacher's PetBy Rick Horowitz
I know: When you first think about it, it sounds totally sick and twisted. You've got a 42-year-old woman -- a French teacher at a suburban high school -- with the hots for a 16-year-old boy -- one of her students! She propositions him. He turns her down. She propositions him some more. She sends him all sorts of notes and impassioned letters. She uses lipstick and "Silly String" to write sexy messages on his car. She even signs him out of someone else's class so she can drive him to her house and try to convince him face to face to have sex with her. And the kid -- he's no prize either. He doesn't just turn her down for the sex. He makes fun of her and curses her out in class and toilet-papers her house on Halloween. And -- here's the beauty part -- he threatens to squeal on her unless she gives him "A"s. Which she does. All of which, as you might imagine, was front-page news in the local paper recently, with the release of police reports detailing this high point in faculty-student relations. Not to mention the news that the teacher, who had already resigned after school officials learned of the incidents in question (which took place in 1999 and 2000), had only that week pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor charge of contributing to the boy's truancy. Truancy? Is that was this was about? You're appalled seven different ways. Of course, there's another way to look at this whole thing, to look at what the student and the teacher went through together. Think of it as: educational enrichment. It all depends on how you read the facts. For instance: According to those police reports, the teacher first got interested in the kid when he wrote a Valentine's Day poem about women's breasts. Now, most teenaged boys think poems are for sissies. But by responding the way she did, she was encouraging his interest in a whole range of literary forms. She was stimulating his...creative juices. Isn't that what a teacher is supposed to do? And the letters she sent him -- 11 pages, one of them was. Lots of high-school kids are psyched out by long writing assignments. You ask them to do a 10-page paper, they freak. She was showing him that it's perfectly doable, that longer can be better, and meanwhile, she was exposing him to good persuasive writing. Anything else? Plenty else. She asked him in that 11-pager whether he had a moral problem having an affair with her because she was married. So now she's giving him a quickie course in philosophy and ethics. Kind of an independent-study thing. When she got him in her house that one time, she told the police, the only thing that would have stopped her from having sex with him (if he was interested) was if he didn't have a condom. In my book, that's sex education. Foreign languages? She had that covered, too -- remember the lipstick and the "Silly String" and those sexually explicit messages on his car? But she wrote them in French! If he wanted to grasp her meaning, he had to be able to conjugate his verbs. Including the irregular ones. At some point, meanwhile, the kid was probably thinking to himself: "Let's see, she's 42 and I'm 16 -- she's more than twice as old as I am. How long will it be before she's only 50 percent older than I am?" So she even had him doing algebra! You know, it's so easy these days to criticize our schools. When you finally come across a teacher who's committed to giving even one of her students a well-rounded, broad-based, in-depth education, you really should... You're right: Totally sick and twisted. Posted 8/21/01. Fresh
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Rick Horowitz
