41-year-old teacher snags teen; I don't know what to think

Last month a 41-year-old male high school teacher in Modesto, a depressed central California city, quit his job and left his family to move in with an 18-year-old girl who had been his student. The couple, pictured above, announced their relationship publicly this week with excruciating appearances on television.

For some reason I'm having a hard time getting my mind around this story. To give some context: I have been a high school teacher. I never was attracted to one of my students and never had any kind of inappropriate relationship with any of them, but I can relate at least to the extent of having been a high school teacher. Second thing: I've also been a pornographer. And situations like this are pretty much in the porn sweet spot.

So you might have thought I'd experience some kind of thrill when I saw this, but instead I reacted like any decent person would have: "Oh no. Oh you poor fools."

Then the second-guessing began. I thought: Well, okay, she's of age. No crime here; only stupidity. She'll probably recover from this mistake, especially if they don't have kids. He never will, but he's an adult and should be prepared to suffer the consequences of his actions.

But then I thought: But wait, isn't he simply doing what millions of men have fantasized doing? He's not unlike Roger Sterling on "Mad Men," who dumped his respectable middle-aged wife to marry his gorgeous 20-year-old secretary, despite his best friend telling him he was acting like a fool. This lumpish fellow has none of the suavité of Roger Sterling, and probably none of the money, but whatever he has he'll have less of it once his soon-to-be ex-wife gets through with him. And that's as it should be.

The point is: Isn't this monumental dope simply doing what the culture tells him to do, namely follow his dream, pursue his passion, and all the other self-actualization advice people have been force-fed for the last forty years? And especially in this case! He's only accepting the invitation, or mandate, he's bombarded with every hour of every day -- the one which goes Young nubile female sexuality is the greatest thing in the world, and possessing it should be your goal in life.

No, we turn around and mock and condemn him for actually achieving this goal. Because that's America. We use sex to sell everything, and then when someone actually takes these messages to their logical conclusion, they are deemed utter scum.

A tiny part of me -- a part which exists perhaps in others (perhaps more in some people) -- wanted to say "Dude, you go! You turned your life upside down for some American trim! Today you are the envy of every man who's ever fantasized about it, thought about it, tried disastrously and failed to do it. You actually did it. Rock on." But that part in me really is tiny. Mostly I just shake my head and feel a little sick.

But the second-guessing continues. What kind of non-conformist am I anyway? Shouldn't I stand with this man, perhaps not because he has managed to obtain every man's fantasy for an American teenager, but because by tearing apart his whole life for something he's passionate about, he has somehow struck a blow against conformity, in favor of Gauguin-like self-actualization and bohemia?

I guess it just doesn't read that way to me. It reads like the opening scene of Act II of a tragedy. By the end of Act II their relationship is over. In Act III he's alone, hounded by authorities, can't get another job and rebuild his life, and winds up either killing himself or, at best, in the gutter.

I hope it turns out better than that; I hope he loses 50 pounds and becomes the surfing champion he's always wanted to be, while the girl ("Jordan Powers," a name right out of a Young Adult novel) goes on to law school and a six-figure job. Somehow I have the feeling that's not in the cards.

You can see by my outfit that I'm a cowboy too

My friend VonCookie, who is in her first or eighth year teaching at UC Berkeley, depending on how you count it, writes of how she dresses professionally now that she's a PhD. Reading that reminded me of this bit of dialogue from my days as a high school teacher, a time when I wore a shirt and tie, slacks and dress shoes to class every day:

Student: Mr. Pritchard, why do you wear those black leather shoes every day?

Me (archly): If I didn't, you guys wouldn't respect me.

Student: Aw, yes we would!

Aw. Actually the main reason I dressed like that was because even though I was 28 years old I looked much younger, and I had to have something that distinguished me from the kids I was teaching. At that age I was still wondering "Am I an adult?" and I realized that if I wavered on that point, my classroom would be a catastrophe. So when I answered that student, even though I was sort of kidding, I also wasn't kidding.

That said, VonCookie is ten times the teacher I was, so her students would probably pay attention no matter what she wore.

New/old story: 'Relativity'

More than twenty years ago I lived in Japan for almost two years, teaching English in a provincial city, Niigata. After several months, my present wife Cris -- whom I had just met and fallen in love with the year before, and who was broken-hearted when I left to teach in Japan -- came out to join me, and we've been together ever since. But before Cris came to Niigata, Seiko, one of my students, a cheerful shopgirl who was enamored of everything American or British and who claimed to hate Japan, got a big crush on me. She flirted with me in her very subtle way, and one summer night during a local festival she came over to my apartment half-drunk. It would have been easy for me to take advantage of her, but something about the situation didn't feel right, and besides, Cris was about to arrive on vacation to see me for the first time in months. Instead of kissing Seiko, I just listened to some music with her and then let her go home. And I never did go to bed with a Japanese girl, much as I would have liked to; it was too hard for me to understand how to overcome the difficulties in communication.

The next year a new teacher came out to work in our school. He was in his late 30s, rather cheerless, balding and not very attractive, but not more than ten days after arriving, he had snagged a gorgeous girl, a staff person at a local gym, and was sleeping with her. Whatever compunctions I had that made it hard for me to get close to a girl who could hardly talk to me -- he had no such compunctions.

To understand this dynamic, and to illustrate some of the other confusing cultural norms I encountered in my sojourn in the Japanese city, I wrote a short story, Relativity. I don't claim it's a very good short story, but it does try to illustrate the ambivalence I felt then about taking advantage of someone.

technorati: Japan

Whining for dollars

When I wrote up a little piece on whining writers for The Rumpus, there was one article I couldn't find that I wanted to link to. In today's listing of deals on Publisher's Marketplace, I got reminded:

Professor X's IN THE BASEMENT OF THE IVORY TOWER, about the vagaries of teaching English 101 and 102 at a college of last resort -- based on a popular Atlantic Monthly piece chosen by David Brooks for a Stanley Award, to Joy de Menil at Viking Penguin, for publication in March 2011...

Yeah... that was in The Atlantic last year. Pretty much a gloss on Lynn Fried's infamous 2005 piece in Harpers, Doing Time: My Years in the Creative Writing Gulag, only about teaching freshman English instead of creative writing, the Atlantic piece was another in the parade of whining by people who consider themselves above their jobs and the students (or readers) who are their audience.

I wonder why they are taking two full years to bring out the book, though.

technorati: teaching, complaining, whining