Invasion

The phone rang at 1:23 a.m. I fumbled for the receiver, finally located it and then my ear, and said hello. A male voice started telling me he had been injured while running in front of my house, and he would be suing me for a large sum. There was giggling in the background. I hung up.  

At first I was just angry. It's bad enough to be awakened in the middle of the night, but what's worse is the terror one feels at that moment. Which of my children? Which of my parents or siblings? Who would find inflicting that kind of fear to be funny?  Then came a sick feeling as I thought of an answer: an adolescent might think it funny, especially if the target was a teacher. Perhaps a teacher he or she dislikes or, odder still, likes a lot.  The same sort of student might find it hilarious, I realized, to direct electronic purveyors of child pornography to teachers who share their home e-mail addresses with students. That would explain why I and some of my colleagues have lately found that sort of poison on our screens.

I didn't sleep well the rest of that night. It was my first exposure to this particular dark corner of teaching: the unwanted intimacy. I can't prove that the phone call or the e-porn came from a student or students, but it never happened before I became a teacher. We've all read terrible stories about teachers who prey on students - I haven't seen any about teachers being harrassed at home by students, though I suspect it happens more often than we'd like to think.

In a way, we ask for it. We want to reach out to our students, inspire them, open their eyes, change their lives. In my most grandiose moments, I imagine myself reaching out, like the figure of God on Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling, to give the reclining Adam the spark of life with the touch of my fingertip. And sometimes it happens. You literally see the light come on in a student's eyes. Their faces change. They walk out of class different people than they walked in.

But other times, it's like touching a hot stove. The gesture I intend as helpful or caring is seen as insult, interference, invasion. A child whose only defense against abuse or indifference is the conviction that nobody really cares will stubbornly, even violently defend that view of the world. What else has he or she got?