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It was a news week even Portnoy couldn’t complain about.
Between James Madison High School teacher Erin Sayar getting busted for her alleged tryst with a 16-year-old pupil, and the 18-year-old male student at Manhattan Theatre Lab High School who seduced history teacher Julie Warning to win a bet, one imagines pimply, adolescent boys citywide high-fiving each other and cheering. Teachers Gone Wild!
In other reports from the student booty this past month, two North Jersey high-school teachers were arrested for sex with underage male students. In Los Angeles, a 42-year-old Spanish teacher was accused of having sex with two underage students. In Tampa, a 29-year-old social studies teacher resigned before she could be fired for becoming involved with an 18-year-old student. In Tucson, a 33-year-old art teacher was accused of having sex with four underage students. And in Minneapolis, a 26-year-old student teacher was caught sending naked pictures of herself to a 17-year-old pupil. All of these teachers were women.
Call it the “Glee”-ification of our schools: Between that show and others like it — in which teens act like adults and vice versa — and the mass migration of grownups onto social-media sites like Facebook and Twitter, any semblance of authority, or indeed adulthood, has eroded.
New York’s Department of Education is trying to combat the downward spiral, putting out new guidelines mandating that teachers not “friend” students online, although they can maintain a professional page the kids can subscribe to. But clearly not everyone’s following those marching orders.
Once a student friends a teacher, or vice versa, there’s an automatic power dynamic shift. Popular wisdom in the professional arena advises against employees friending their bosses, and similar logic should apply to teen students and adult teachers — but when did “logic” and “teenagers” ever appear in the same sentence?
Many adults now dress more like younger people. Informal is the catchword, as is first-name basis conversation, and “here’s my cellphone number” accessibility.
That’s how a grown woman ends up sending an ill-advised FB message, as in the case of Sayar, who allegedly responded to her teen paramour’s declaration of love with, “Oh no, I’m not putting myself out there again. I made that mistake last night and you couldn’t handle it.”
This is “Gossip Girl”-level dialogue, and wouldn’t you know it, life imitates art: That show featured one of its male leads, Dan Humphrey, getting hot and heavy with his high-school English teacher, leading to her bailing on her job.
The current ABC show “Pretty Little Liars” also has a prominent storyline in which one of its female high schoolers gets involved with a handsome young teacher. And Fox’s “Glee” has featured more than one inappropriate moment between students and teachers, although, perhaps tellingly, it was only the one between a teen boy — Mark Salling’s Puckerman — and a grown woman, Broadway actress Idina Menzel guest-starring as a substitute, that was actually consummated (not to mention celebrated: Salling performed a rendition of the original teacher-lust anthem, Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher,” prior to the seduction).
In contrast, when Lea Michele’s Rachel Berry went through a brief phase of lusting after Matthew Morrison’s glee-club teacher, he gently and nobly discouraged her. (That doesn’t stop him from singing and dancing with the students onstage, though, as if he was just another one of the kids).
There’s a double standard here, obviously. When a male teacher is caught with a female student, it’s almost universally seen as creepy and outright wrong (to wit, the recent “Dr. Phil” appearance of a middle-aged California teacher who abandoned his wife and children to shack up with a student was greeted with lusty derision by the crowd).
When a woman seduces a teen boy, though, it’s viewed as kind of hot. Think back to last summer’s “Bad Teacher,” the movie in which Cameron Diaz’s high-school teacher soaped up a car in tiny Daisy Dukes, much to the delight of her pubescent charges.
Or see Coed Magazine, a men’s website that recently published a slideshow titled “America’s 18 Sexiest Sex Offenders,” crowing over the photos (mostly mug shots) of women who’d been busted for sex with students.
“The media still call these boys lucky,” says Curtis St. John, spokesman for the site MaleSurvivor.org, which counsels men who have been sexually victimized.
He says young men who are sexually taken advantage of may suffer adverse effects later on but are encouraged to outwardly portray it as a victory and a conquest no matter what.
This confusing situation will come back to haunt the victims later on. “When they’re on their second divorce and trying to figure out their drinking problem, they never really figure out why. They grow up with the same symptoms as boys who are abused by males, but it’s very difficult for them to make the association.”
There’s a push to make teacher-student relationships illegal in either gender incarnation, and even when they’re with a teen who’s of age. Californian Tammie Powers, mother of the “Dr. Phil” teen girl who ran off with her teacher, is lobbying for a bill in that state to match those already in existence in 23 other states (New York is not one of them).
But even if teacher-student hookups are officially outlawed, doesn’t that kind of make them more appealing — especially if you’re stuck in an adolescent mindset? After all, nobody ever got hot for teacher (or student) because the rulebook said it was allowed.
What we really need to do is the impossible — to outlaw immaturity.