Being friends comes at a price

¨What´s a blow job?¨

That´s just one of many questions that echoes down the hallways at IOM when I wander past.

My students seem to latch onto any bad English word they learn and are persistent at coaxing the meaning out of me. I´ll leave them to figure out questions such as that.

I´m starting to realize there is a fine balance between being on good terms with my students and being equal friends with them. I am only three-years-older than the seniors after all. But those three years make the difference between being high-school educated and university educated.

Yesterday, two girls asked me to let them into la sala de ingles so that they could crawl out the window and escape from the confines of the colegio.

I´m happy that they feel I´m their pal; someone to help them out with problems they might not ask one of the older, more conventional teachers. But I´m still a teacher and my role remains so at the risk of losing my job otherwise.

The lines between teacher and student are definitely more blurred here. One of the teachers at Kathryn´s colegio openly and repeatedly asserts her strong attraction for one of her students. And our director did tell us stories upon getting here of teachers falling in love with and later ending up with their students. Can you spell S-C-A-N-D-A-L?

Or so you´d think. Bruce, our director, was sharing this with us as one of the ´warm fuzzies´ about being a young teacher at a colegio.

I´ll believe it when I see it ... however, I think that even if I was attracted to one of my students (and yes, some of them will make great future boyfriends and husbands for lucky girls), I would stop myself upon grounds of moral boundaries. And the fact that I always go for guys several years my senior. A cougar I am not.

I´ll keep you posted on if any of my fellow profes prance off into the sunset with their beloved alumnos...