Crossing the Line

Last summer I was working on a book about my first year as a teacher, and I told the story of how my favorite high school teacher, Mr. Teunis, drowned trying to save a student, one of several who were visiting him at his weekend place on the Shenandoah River.

Twenty-three years ago I was shocked to hear of his death. Today we would be shocked to hear that a single male teacher was entertaining a mixed group of high school students at a cabin many miles from the school and their homes. In fairness, I don't know whether there were parents or other adults present. It was 1970, so I suspect there weren't. I further suspect that nobody much cared about it.

Nowadays, teachers are routinely warned never to be alone in a classroom, much less a cabin, with a student, regardless of gender. Nowadays, teachers are reprimanded, and even fired, for 'crossing the line' -- getting too personally involved with students.

But the line is fuzzy. How close is too close? So much depends on the circumstances. Is it appropriate, for example, for a teacher to offer a student a ride home from school? Suppose the student is hitchhiking in the rain? How about lending a student a dollar to buy a snack? How about five dollars for dinner? Should a teacher allow students to use his or her first name in the classroom? How about after school? Should a teacher hug a student? Should a teacher allow a student to hug her or him?

Last summer, my wife and I took in a student whose parents were working away from home in two different states. We've known her parents for years, it solved a problem for them, and it was no problem for us. She lived at our house for a few weeks. Was that inappropriate? The question never occurred to me. It does now, and it's chilling.

We've all heard horror stories about teachers, male and female, getting involved sexually with their students. That's clearly wrong, and those teachers deserve to lose their jobs.

We've also heard about teachers being unjustly accused by troubled or malicious students. A friend of mine who teaches college weathered such an accusation, fought back, and eventually his accuser admitted she was lying. But the damage had been done. He will carry the shadow of that accusation forever.

But it's not just jobs and reputations that are lost. What's also threatened by this growing atmosphere of fear and distrust is just the kind of relationship that made Mr. Teunis so important to my life. I never visited his cabin, but I spent hours in his office alone with him, talking about books, movies, politics, college -- all the stuff I needed to talk about with an adult who wasn't my parent. It was in that office, as much as in the classroom or on the stage where he directed me in plays, that Mr. Teunis taught me how big and complex and scary and astonishing a world I lived in, and how reading Shakespeare and Hemingway and J.D. Salinger could help me love its beauty and cope with its cruelty.

I didn't become a teacher so I could have the summers off to write books. I became a teacher to give that same gift to my students. I think most of us became teachers for that reason. Take it away, and what's left?