Teacher + Livejournal = Followup
It's all settled down quite a bit, now. I've had two long talks and a number of emails with him, about the nature of teaching, and whether we are 'friends' or not. Clearly, we have a lot in common (games, game design, computers, logic/math puzzles, and much more) and we get along well, but it's not like I'd go hang out as his house on the weekends. His view of the matter, which I quite like, is that while I'm in school we are 'proto-friends', a sincere enough relationship but one that does not go much further than the school day, and which is not quite as open or reciprocal as a normal friendship would be. After I graduate, I become a possible regular friend, and we see how things go from there.
It is nice but rather odd to discuss one's friendship with an adult with that adult. One usually doesn't even discuss the nature of one's friendships even with one's closest friends, but it's even weirder when it's your teacher. This is probably a testament to just how repressed our society has become. I am happy that I live in a place and time where such boundaries can be and are broken.
The one rather sad thing to come of this is that a girl who I showed the Livejournal to has left our advisory group, in part because she no longer feels comfortable around that teacher, with whom she used to be quite close. Her leaving is also in large part due to some things he said to her before and after her Senior Speech (Everyone has to give one, of about five minutes' duration, about something they care about. Most are cheesy as crap, others are great. Hers was about determinism, and was, unfortunately, quite silly. Not only did she ignore Heisenberg et al, she drew some really quite absurd conclusions, or rather presented some absurd notions, about the nature of punishment in a deterministic universe. She is really quite intelligent, though. I was somewhat surprised.) bet you don't remember what I was in the middle of before that li'l parenthetical note, eh? So I'll break all grammatical conventions and start over. Her leaving was also in large part due to some things (not the least of which was about Heisenberg) that he said to her before and after her speech which were certainly not meant as harmful, but which she took rather badly. So it's not all my fault. But I still feel crappy about my part in it.
It is nice but rather odd to discuss one's friendship with an adult with that adult. One usually doesn't even discuss the nature of one's friendships even with one's closest friends, but it's even weirder when it's your teacher. This is probably a testament to just how repressed our society has become. I am happy that I live in a place and time where such boundaries can be and are broken.
The one rather sad thing to come of this is that a girl who I showed the Livejournal to has left our advisory group, in part because she no longer feels comfortable around that teacher, with whom she used to be quite close. Her leaving is also in large part due to some things he said to her before and after her Senior Speech (Everyone has to give one, of about five minutes' duration, about something they care about. Most are cheesy as crap, others are great. Hers was about determinism, and was, unfortunately, quite silly. Not only did she ignore Heisenberg et al, she drew some really quite absurd conclusions, or rather presented some absurd notions, about the nature of punishment in a deterministic universe. She is really quite intelligent, though. I was somewhat surprised.) bet you don't remember what I was in the middle of before that li'l parenthetical note, eh? So I'll break all grammatical conventions and start over. Her leaving was also in large part due to some things (not the least of which was about Heisenberg) that he said to her before and after her speech which were certainly not meant as harmful, but which she took rather badly. So it's not all my fault. But I still feel crappy about my part in it.
posted by Personman at 11:39 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home