Sorry, we’re closed
Ok stop right there, three seconds in. “I pride myself on being a teacher who’s very open about her life.”
NO!
Do not pride yourself on that. Be ashamed; very ashamed.
Your job is to teach, not to blather about yourself. Calling it “being open about your life” is just your way of trying to make grotesque vanity and self-absorption sound somehow admirable. Nobody on the planet needs you to be open about your life, and children you’re supposed to be teaching need that the least of anyone.
God I hate narcissism, especially narcissism that brags about itself. “Sit down, I’m very open about my life, so I plan to tell you all about it for the next 5 hours.” Fuck all the way off.
The next 3 seconds are even worse.
“And one of the things I’m very open about is my sexuality.”
NO no no no no no. Bad dog, leave it. Don’t be open, be closed, and be closed like Fort Knox wrapped in chains about your sexuality. Your students don’t need to know and neither does anyone else. Narcissism and self-obsession are bad, don’t you get that? Times ten in a teacher of all things.
God above. I’m trying to imagine any of my teachers “being open about their sexuality.” There aren’t enough cringes in the world.
Don’t get me started on the stupid distracting swords in the ears and baubles in the septum.
I had a professor who was open about his sexuality. He was a sociology professor, one of those classes you take because it’s required. We were all uncomfortable and wished he’d shut up, especially the winks at the females in class (funny how he knew which of us to wink at, when we’re informed it’s impossible to tell the difference). This was in college, and it was still in appropriate.
Students are there to learn a subject. They are there to learn math or English or science or Morse Code or whatever you are teaching. They don’t need to hear all about being polyamorous.
I don’t even … I don’t remember ever being interested in my teachers’ relationships when I was in high school.
Well, except for the ones I crushed on, but that’s neither here nor there.
Unless the school has a specific club/org for kids trying to figure out the whole sexuality thing, I don’t think it would ever be a good idea for a teacher and a student to discuss the teacher’s sexuality. It’s just so damned inappropriate; the teacher is not there to be a buddy or a friend, but an instructor and mentor; ‘equalizing’ the relationship by being so candid about their own life actually renders them less capable of doing that job.
Children should never know the details of the private lives of the adult professionals charged with their care and education. Having adults tell children these details opens a Pandora’s Box of opportunities to predatory individuals who are now given the all clear to groom in plain sight.
Plus it’s just generally gross. Too personal, too off topic, too much about the teacher, too beside the point, too everything.
Privacy benefits everyone. It’s not that openness is a bad thing but like sex it requires consent and when you’re stuck in a classroom with a narcissist like this consent isn’t an option. She needs to keep it (metaphorically) in her pants.
I agree that her behaviour is not that of a good teacher, but that of a narcissistic one, using her necessarily captive audience to feed her ego. Not only do the children not need to hear anything about her, they need not to hear anything about her. Nothing she could tell them about what should be her private life is remotely useful to anyone else, and positively harmful to children.
How old are these kids? What subject is supposedly being taught?
She mentions a Gay-Straight group, which just might be a venue for such talk. The idea that students are going to do classwork which involves stalkerish digging into the details of their teacher’s lives is crazy.
Her colleagues, and co-principle already know her domestic details? It’s good that they aren’t making any fuss, but it isn’t any damn’ business for the students, or their parents.
Acting like it’s strange to know details about their personal lives is mind-boggling. Day one of most of my classes was a brief mention of at least a couple personal details. I usually knew their marital status and how many children they had and maybe a mention or two of a hobby or something that people would use as a security question these days. I knew that one teacher had a collapsed lung from a car collision and later that he was hazed by having to tell jokes while sitting in a tub of ice water.
None of this means that discussing polyamory in a classroom setting is necessary or good, but how damn anti-social were your teachers?
It’s not “anti-social” for teachers to teach as opposed to chatting to the students about themselves.
Obviously they shouldn’t let it consume a lesson (and certainly not do this group therapy session Zoomer teachers seem to like, or at least the ones I hear about), but establishing a bit of rapport via icebreaking tidbits of info seems to have been pretty common in the past. Over the course of my K-12 education (featuring four different cities, two states, and at least six schools, dozens of teachers) I knew almost every teacher’s marital status and number of children, because that’s what kids learn on their first day of class.
Maybe before the year 1984 this was not the case, but it was standard when I was born.
Well, I don’t know what to tell you; that sounds extremely odd to me. With little kids I would think rapport would be better established by asking the kids for not too personal tidbits about themselves. With older ones I would think an introduction to the subject matter of the class would be the way to go.
Speaking solely from my own experience: very.
My schooldays were over long before then and I am not exaggerating when I say that the most personal details we knew about the vast majority of our teachers were their surnames and initial letters of their forenames, and in the case of female teachers their marital status because we addressed them as Miss or Mrs. In the rare instances that we knew their forenames it wasn’t because the information had been given voluntarily, it was usually because another teacher had called them by their name within earshot of a student; the norm was for them to address each other formally in front of the pupils.
Anyway, going back to Ms. Over share, either she’s confused or I am, because she says that her students know her gender and sexuality and is fretting over how to come out to them as polyamorous, but I thought that polyamorous is a sexuality. Am I missing something?
Which of the two is more likely to be confused?
Case closed.
I don’t know what is “official”, but I don’t think I’d consider “polyamorous” a sexuality. This could be a heterosexual woman with no interest in same-sex relationships, but perhaps she maintains a relationship with two men, perhaps these two men even live in the same household with her. The two men may or may not have sexual relations with each other. All three would be “polyamorous” by virtue of their open and mutually consensual non-monagamous relationship arrangements.
Perhaps you were thinking of “pansexual”, the oh-so-up-to-date gender-inclusive way of saying “bisexual”.
Sackbut, I was thinking of poly as a sexuality rather than an extension (?) of a sexuality.
I”ve just looked for a definition of poly and discovered that it even has its own Pride flag. Well, I say ‘flag’ but there are actually at least three different ‘official’ flag designs, which is kind of ironic.