The High Price of Love -- by Anne Shier

If you had the choice of falling in love with whomever you wanted, who would that person be?  Would he be someone who works in a professional field, like medicine or law or dentistry?  Would he be someone you’d met while you were working in a similar professional capacity?  Specifically, what would the repercussions be if you were a teacher and the person you’d met was a student that you’d found attractive?  Because, any way you look at it, anything is possible.  Life is a crapshoot, after all.  We never really know what we’re going to end up doing for a living, where we’re going to be doing it and who we’re going to meet along the way.  If the person you’ve just met happens to be a very attractive student and he, likewise, finds you to be a very attractive teacher, what are you supposed to do about it?  Pretend he doesn’t exist?  Read him the riot act and warn him that romantic relationships between teachers and students are strictly forbidden?  It’s not an easy question to answer.

The Ontario College of Teachers (OCT), which is the governing body for all public school teachers in Ontario forbids such relationships because of the fact that a teacher is always regarded as an authority figure over students and a student is always regarded as someone who is subject to the authority of teachers.  Even a teacher who doesn’t have direct authority over a particular student is still discouraged from any such liaison with that student.  It doesn’t matter if the student is 18 years of age or older; the same rules apply.  The thing is – we’re all human beings and, regardless of whether a person is a teacher or a student, people in these positions sometimes do get together, fall in love, and even marry each other.  This kind of gossip inevitably tends to make it into the lunchroom at school.  Some of my colleagues even knew teachers to whom this very thing happened.  And, depending on when the incident happened, a teacher could be severely reprimanded for such a relationship if discovered by the OCT; but, most likely, these days, he/she would have his/her teaching licence revoked for such behaviour and, thus, would never be able to teach in a publicly-funded school again.

Once upon a time, I met an attractive young man, aged 16, who was a student at the same school where I worked as an LTO (Long Term Occasional) teacher.  Although he was not my student, per se, he and I happened to meet one day, accidently, in the school gym where a “study hall” was located, temporarily, for that period of the schedule.  I saw him playing a guitar and singing softly to a group of students in the corner of the gym.  At the end of the period, I went up to him and introduced myself as Ms. Sophie Zenkman.  I wanted to express my admiration of his guitar-playing and his singing.  That’s when he told me his name, Adam, and we struck up a conversation during which he invited me to come to a performance of his rock band, called “Young Blood”, at the time.  He said they played on a regular basis downtown at a place on Queen Street West, and that, if I could make it over there to see them play one evening on the weekend, he would be delighted to have me there and would introduce me to his band. 

Did I find him attractive?  Yes.  Did I want to get involved with him?  No, not romantically; I just wanted him as a friend.  I realized at the time, that despite my feelings of attraction to him, I should not do anything stupid like jeopardizing my position as a teacher.  I regard being a teacher as being in a “special” profession.  Perhaps most teachers feel this way about their chosen profession; teaching is something I feel is for people who really want to make a difference in the world, or at least in their students’ lives.  Yet, I could not help thinking that this young man seemed to display a lot of musical talent and I wanted to see more of it.  I ended up not only going to see one performance of his band, I saw several performances over a period of a year or more, and the band members and I all became good friends.  Today, even though I no longer see him, I continue to have a soft spot in my heart for him and hope that he is happy doing all the things that he wants to do in his life.

The stories I used to hear in the lunchroom at school had more to do with teachers who were at least 30 years old marrying their students after they’d graduated, of course – students who were 17, 18 or 19 at the time that the relationship was blossoming.  Somehow, I don’t believe that there were any hard-and-fast rules at the time about teacher-student relationships then.  There was no censorship of such relationships, and no way to stop them from happening.   The OCT didn’t exist then; it only came into being in the mid-to-late 1990’s.  The reason the OCT was created was that the Ontario government wanted to create a self-governing body, like those that exist in medicine and dentistry, to make teachers accountable for their breaches of professional conduct.  Teachers now have to pay a yearly licensing fee to be allowed to teach in any public school in Ontario.  This was the state of affairs when I became an LTO teacher and later a full time, contract teacher in Ontario.

Still, I have to ask myself from a strictly logical point of view:  what exactly is wrong with a teacher falling in love with a student (or vice-versa) provided the teacher does not have direct authority over the student at any time during the student’s high school career?  And, I couldn’t really come up with a satisfactory answer.  It just seemed to me that it’s something that should be discouraged from happening, yet it was happening and probably still is.

I’m sure you’ve heard random things about legal clients falling for their lawyers and a sexual relationship happening between them.  No one ever said to me that lawyers and their clients couldn’t be romantically involved with each other.  However, it would probably be considered a “breach of conduct” on the part of the lawyer.  Could it be true that lawyers can be disbarred for sleeping with their clients?  That is a question to which I do not have the answer.

Remember that notorious story of the married female elementary school teacher in the U.S. who got involved with one of her male child students and was later prosecuted for such behaviour?  Her name was Mary Kay Letourneau. She went to jail for her illicit behaviour, but even after she got out on parole, she continued to see the child even though the courts had specifically forbidden them to have any contact with each other.  As a result, she ended up having her parole revoked and finishing her sentence in jail.  Yet, none of that made any difference to her and the young man.  They had a child, got married and were very happy together.  Of course, her now-ex-husband, thoroughly mortified, disgusted and embarrassed by the whole affair and the fact that she’d gotten pregnant with the boy’s child, lost no time in divorcing her and moving far away from her with their 2 kids.  Understandably, he did not want his kids to be adversely affected by this strange relationship in which their mother was so ardently involved.

It seemed that nobody could keep Mary Kay and her child lover apart – not the courts, or the child’s mother, or Mary Kay’s employer, or her now-ex-husband.  None of that mattered to them when it came to being together as a couple.  To be sure, it was a strange couple, most people would say.  I believe she was in her late 20s or early 30s and he was just a child of perhaps 12 when it all started.  There was at least a 15 year difference between them.  Later on, when she had finally finished her stint in jail, he was still barely a teenager and they continued on together despite everything negative that was still happening around them.  I believe they’re still together to this day, married with children - at least one, anyway.  These two people would absolutely insist that their relationship was “meant to be” and they would be together no matter what.

My question now remains:  who does have the right to say who you can love and who you can’t love?  The government or the court system?  This is like saying relationships must be legalized even before they can begin.  The only exceptions I can think of that make any sense to me are relationships that are incestuous, that is, sex between family members, and sex between people in which one of them is a minor.  The story I just told you about Mary Kay and her child lover would definitely qualify in that realm.  Other than that, who’s to say what is right and what is wrong when it comes to romantic relationships?

copyright - Anne Shier, 2013, all rights reserved, published by Authorhouse, Bloomington, Indiana, USA