Tag Archives: Student crushes

Student Crushes #3: “affirming and redirecting” and some other thoughts

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It’s been nearly a year since I put up my two posts about student crushes. My stats tell me that next to queries about older men, younger women (my archive on that is here), nothing brings me more hits than the subject of unrequited student longing for their professors.

The two posts I’ve written on that subject said most of what I wanted to say at the time. But both posts continue to get comments, both here and at my old blog. Lots of students write in for advice. (I note, checking IP addresses, that a disproportionate number of those commenting are from the UK. Is there something about the lecturer-student relationship that seems more enticing in England than here? I’ll have to ask my brother.) Most of the question are of the general “what do I do?” sort.

This comment at my old blog is typical. Some excerpts:

I’ve been on the edge of my seat for my (married) geology professor for about two months now. I’m feeling sad that this quarter is almost over because I fear the anxiety of not being able to see him anymore. I’m so glad that I found this blog because I was starting to feel very deviant and out of the norm… i’m not even thinking about my grade, i could fail that class and still want him. i’m going crazy and i thought about just telling him how i feel, or just teasing the shit out of him. i don’t know what to do. it takes so much for me to snap back into reality and know that it’s wrong for many reasons…want him to know that I want him without having to say anything. I don’t even care if I get turned down. I just want him to know that he’s wanted.

Ten days ago, “Heartbroken” wrote:

I seriously have a problem about this whole issue…Now I’m in the middle of a crush on one lecturer, and me being the class representative, I’ve had a lot of contact with him. It’s really painful to see him everyday, and I really want to talk to him about it to make it easier to deal with. Exams are over, so there won’t be a problem with him giving me any more grades. Is it unfair of me to talk to him about this? He is married, and I am aware that i might have this crush because he’s just such a brilliant character… I really don’t know what to do, any advice will be considered.

Bold emphases are mine.

And last month, a random student wrote:

How do you know if a student has a crush on you? Im just wondering cos i’ve had the biggest crush on my teacher for months now, and I really dont want him to know…

I stand by the theory of student crushes I offered a year ago: that we tend to fall for people who embody qualities we want in ourselves. Students fall for their professors and teachers not because we are, in and of ourselves, unbearably desirable; they fall for us because we expose them to new ideas and possibilities. They love the way we make them feel, and they understandably confuse an attraction to what we do for them with an attraction to us as individuals. I’m honestly convinced that covers the vast majority of “common crushes”.

The questions above revolve around two main issues we haven’t touched on before: can professors tell when students have crushes on them? And should students, like “Heartbroken”, talk to their objects of their infatuation about the crush itself, either to see if it’s reciprocated or to get some sort of help in working through their feelings?

I can’t speak for all my colleagues around the globe, but I can say that this professor doesn’t expend a lot of energy wondering if a particular student has a crush on him or not. I know full well that an outer appearance of excitement and attentiveness can mean many things! It can be a calculated act designed to send a message that the student is listening, whether that’s true or not. (And word to my students: don’t nod appreciatively every time I make eye contact with you. It often looks forced. Once in a while is fine, but every time, it seems, well, a bit fake.) The attentiveness can mean — indeed, I always hope it means — a genuine interest in and excitement about the subject. And it can mean an excitement about the subject mixed with an attraction to the professor/teacher/lecturer himself or herself. I’ve been at this gig for just about fifteen years, and I’ll be darned if I can tell easily what’s going on inside a student’s head. In a world where so many young people have been trained to flatter, it’s difficult if not impossible to assess motive merely from a student’s smiles and body language.

Of course, this doesn’t mean I think most of my students are frauds! Far from it. I just don’t spend a great deal of time wondering what it is that my students think about me. By definition, good teachers are more concerned with what the student is learning than with whether or not their student likes ‘em or not. And on those occasions when a crush does become obvious, I always remember, as I wrote last year, that it’s not about me: it’s about an experience the student is having as a result of encountering the material I’m presenting. Even if they think it’s about me rather than the class, in the end, it’s usually about their own excited response to the material.

Bottom line is this: I don’t think most of us can tell what our students are thinking. It’s not that we don’t care, it’s that we lack the ability to discern among many different possible reasons for excitement and interest. And the wise among us know that we don’t need to know. Our students aren’t here to feed our egos.

As for telling the professor about a crush of which he may or may not already be aware, I tend to think that’s generally a bad idea. (I said “generally”, not “always”.) Obviously, for a whole host of academic reasons, it’s a bad idea to broach the topic while you’re a student in his class. I note that the two professors who are the objects of student crushes in the quoted sections above are both married. Confessing a strong attraction to a married person is, I think, just about always a fundamentally selfish thing to do. Whether or not their marriage is on a firm foundation, basic decency compels us to respect the commitments that those around us have made. That applies universally. (At the risk of going off on a tangent, let me make it clear that I really dislike it when people say to each other things like “Oh, if I were single…” or “If only you weren’t married…” Just saying the words is an act of hostility towards a married person and their spouse. It’s not an excuse to protest “But I would never act on it!” Fidelity is about what we say as well as what we do, and expressing strong sexual or romantic attraction to someone who’s “taken” is low-grade adultery!)

Sometimes students tell their professors about their crushes in the apparently sincere hope that the prof will help them “work through” their feelings. This has happened to me a time or three, though less often now than in the past. While some students clearly are hoping to spark a romantic relationship, others tend to see their teacher as a resource with whom they can “process” their feelings. Of course, it’s hard if not impossible to work through a crush with the object of the crush. It sounds good in theory, but in practice, it’s nigh on impossible.

I learned to be very respectful of those students who confessed crushes to me. I don’t belittle them or tease them or berate them. At the same time, I am very good about not encouraging the crush. And that often means affirming the student’s very real and intense feelings, and then gently redirecting that student towards a counselor or a therapist (we have plenty right here on campus.) The “affirm and redirect” strategy is by far the best approach a teacher can take when faced with a love-struck student.

One of the things I’ve really come to understand about teaching: it’s a one-way street. I am here to lecture, to challenge, to provoke, to nurture, to push. I love what I do, and I love my students very much. I am committed to them, devoted to them, even when I have far less time to offer them individually than I would like. And I know that they have a wide variety of responses to me, ranging from complete apathy to outright adoration, from moderate enthusiasm to genuine hostility, from vague dislike to erotic infatuation. I can know that because I teach hundreds and hundreds every year, and the chances are damn good that some are gonna love me, some are gonna hate me, and the great majority won’t have any strong feelings at all. But in the end, my teaching isn’t conditional on my students’ feelings about me. When I was younger and more insecure, I did worry about what my students thought about me as a person, about whether they thought I was “cool”; my teaching suffered as a result. Blessedly, age and experience and transformation has changed all that.

I love that my work is a “one-way street”. Because I get my needs met elsewhere, I don’t need to bring my neediness into the office, into the classroom. I am here for my students, they are not here for me; my sense of self is grounded in my relationship with Christ, in my amazing marriage, in my family and friends and my sense that I am climbing a mountain God wants me to climb.

A follow up on student crushes: what NOT to do

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I continue to get lots of hits from people looking for information about "teacher crushes."  This March 24 post has become my second most popular post ever, trailing only the vaguely related series of posts I wrote last year on older men, younger women relationships. (One, Two, Three).

In both recent comments and e-mails, I’ve been asked to expand further on the subject of how teachers and professors ought to respond when they realize they are the object of various kinds of crushes.  (Jazz posts a troubling personal anecdote here).  In the original post, I wrote:

If we take advantage of student crushes… we make a huge mistake.  We assume that the real interest was in us rather than in how we were able to make our students feel and how we were able to make them think.   The best way to think about student crushes is to take them as a sign that you’re probably doing your job pretty damn well.

I realize I may need to be more specific.

I will say without shame that validation is one of the many reasons why I love teaching.  Yes, I love my subjects (women’s history, the rise of the West, what have you).  Yes, I believe I am serving Clio by introducing as many students as I can to her mysteries, her charms, and her joys.  But while I believe passionately in what I’m doing, I’m also aware that my own ego does get involved.  I do want my students to think I’m compelling and interesting; I want them to learn, but I also want them to enjoy learning, and to enjoy learning from me.  Part of me sees teaching as service — and another part of me teaches for validation and affirmation.  I’m careful not to pander to get the latter, but when it comes my way in various forms, I won’t deny that I feel pretty good!

But it’s one thing to feel proud and pleased when a student tells you (after you’ve turned in the grades) how much they enjoyed your class.  It’s another thing to consciously encourage the kind of crushes that I wrote about in my previous post on the subject.  While some crushes are indeed sexual or romantic in nature, most are, as I wrote before more about the student than the teacher: Students don’t get crushes on me because they want to go to bed with me or be my girlfriend or boyfriend; they get crushes on me because I’ve got a quality that they want to bring out in themselves.

So obviously, we who teach make a disastrous mistake when we confuse a student’s infatuation with us as their professors with their longing for us as actual human beings.  As I told my friend and colleague "Darrren", students don’t get crushes on the real "Darren" — they get crushes on "Professor Smith", who is this exalted being they’ve placed on a pedestal.  If Darren acts to encourage a student crush, or allows it to become expressed in action, he is likely to find (among other things) that his own fall from the pedestal will be swift and brutal!

For most of us (let’s hope) our students don’t see us when we’re sick, whiny, tired.   Like actors on a stage, we (presumably) perform at our best most of the time, concealing the reality of our frailties and our inadequacies from those whom we are teaching. For many of us in academia who were "geeks" and "nerds" in our own younger years, the sense of power and satisfaction we can derive from holding a class spellbound is tremendous — and very, very seductive.  And as far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing wrong in deriving real pleasure from teaching well and knowing you’re admired and heard.

But there is no greater sin in our profession than to use an individual student’s crush in order to gain validation outside the classroom.  Given that we’ve established that some crushes tend to be more sexual and others more intellectual, it’s understandable that some profs may feel a tremendous curiosity about what exactly it is that a student who appears to be "crushing" really wants.  Time and again, I’ve seen professors make the dangerous mistake of subtly encouraging a crush — not because they intend to have an actual affair with a student, but because they are hungry for more and more validation.  They may hope to entice the student into sharing more about his or her feelings, all for the satisfaction of feeling more powerful and desirable.

Students don’t seem to get crushes on me as often as they used to.  Some of this is because I am older, and some of it is no doubt due to the reality that my boundaries are much better than they were a decade ago.  When I was a novice teacher, I did consciously encourage student crushes because they felt so damned good!  I loved the little notes and the "googly" eyes I would get — and I found myself enjoying the attention way too much.  It was several years into my career before I became aware of just how manipulative and unprofessional I was being; I am happy to say that I have radically changed how I interact with students.

As I wrote about in my original post, I’ve mentored a couple of younger or newer male colleagues here at PCC and elsewhere.  Now that I’ve got over a dozen years of full-time teaching under my belt, I feel as if I’ve had a healthy amount of experience on which to draw. I made a lot of mistakes in my early years in this profession, and have learned from them.  I’d like to be able to find a way — perhaps through published articles or workshops — to reach more folks in my position.  As with the older men, younger women issue, the subject of student crushes strikes a nearly universal nerve; I’m amazed at how many folks have shared their stories with me since I put up that original post.  And I’m concerned that far too many of us who teach are wholly unprepared when we find ourselves the object of these crushes, and whether intentionally or not, may do very real damage when we respond in the wrong way.

Student crushes, part two

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In a comment below last Friday’s post on student crushes, Ryan writes:

There is, also, a reciprocal phenomenon that few of us talk about: the crush on the student. Let me first explain what I mean by crush, here, because it’s almost explicitly not sexual. Lord knows that my sex life was awkward enough at that age–I certainly wouldn’t want to revisit it with a 15 years older body. But there are students with whom I become temporarily fascinated. Just as students find that there can be something intoxicating about the presence, the experience, the passion of someone at the front of the classroom, there is something similarly invigorating about the potential, the excitement, the newness of a really compelling student. I regularly develop these crushes. They’ve never grown into anything more than an occasional email correspondence after the student has gone, but the crushes do go both ways, and they more we try to divorce them from taboo sexuality (which seems to have little to do with it at all), the more we can address what they are, which is excitement about the very act of teaching and learning, personified in teachers and students who seem to embody those ideals.

An excellent idea for a follow-up post!

Like Ryan, I scrupulously avoid sexualizing my students.  (Frankly, at this point in my life, that’s not difficult to do.)  But like Ryan, I get an occasional crush on a young (or not so young) student.  Not only are these crushes not sexual or romantic, they also aren’t primarily about my ego, either.

I mentioned this topic to a colleague yesterday (I’d sent her the first post on student crushes), and she laughed at me.  "Hugo, you just like the students who soak up your every word.  You get crushes on your proteges as extensions of yourself.  You’re such a narcissist!" I was hurt, and I told her so.  Lord knows, I am relentless in my self-criticism — but after reflecting for some time on what she said, I’m convinced my colleague got it wrong.

What I mean by a crush on a student is this: every once in a while, no more than once or twice a year, I will have a young man or a young woman in one of my classes whose life and ideas and personal growth becoming powerfully interesting to me. I can’t always tell who it’s going to be, mind you!  It’s not automatically the "best and the brightest", and it certainly (I can’t stress this enough these days) has damn all to do with physical attractiveness.  It can happen equally often with men or women.  But suddenly, often out of the blue, I will find myself caring desperately about that one particular student’s development.  I daydream about that student, and look forward eagerly to their office visits and to their emailed questions and the stories they tell about their lives.

I know lots of my students read this blog, so let me be clear about something: you are all precious to me. I rejoice when you do well, I agonize when you don’t (and I wonder what I can do to help you do better.)  I think about you more than you realize, and even though you surely imagine that you are just a sea of faces and names to me, please know that you are far more than that.  I take seriously my obligation to teach all of you, to challenge you, to stimulate you.  And I worry, more often than you know, that I am failing you.

But my overall concern for all my students doesn’t mean that one or two don’t get under my skin.  And I think Ryan is right when he says that these "crushes" are all about recognizing potential.  With such students, there’s a sudden realization of just what kind of extraordinary human being this person is on the verge of becoming.   And with that realization, there comes an intense curiosity to see how it will all develop.  With some students more than others, I become emotionally invested in their success, not because their success reflects pleasantly on me as a teacher,  but because they have stolen my heart.  When I become not merely a teacher, but also a mentor (as I do with quite a few of my students), I feel incredibly privileged and excited.  I’ve stayed in touch with many of these "mentees" (again, folks, of both sexes) for years and years.  Some of these crushes last a long, long time.

When I graduated from high school in 1985, my favorite English teacher (Mr. R) wrote something in my yearbook that I still treasure.  It was a simple poem with a straightforward rhyme scheme, and here’s how it  finished  here’s the whole thing:

Of all the kids that I have taught
for lo these thirty years
a couple I consider naught
and others bore to tears

And some I shall remember
long after they depart;
and one or two a very few
have filched this fellow’s heart

But though I really love them all
and have a spot for each,
you ought to know before you go,
you’re why I love to teach.

Mr. R was in his late fifties; I was barely 18.  I loved him, and I felt loved by him.  He signed lots of yearbooks that final day in class, and I confess I found ways to sneak peeks at my classmates’, just to make sure that he hadn’t written the same thing in each one.  He wrote nice things to all his students, but I was the only one (or so I tell myself) who got those lines. I can’t tell you how much they’ve meant to me over the years, and the thought that he cared especially for Hugo still touches me today.

Did Mr. R have a crush on me?  Given the sexual and romantic connotation of that word, I suspect he wouldn’t have said so.  But in the broader sense, I believe he did — and it was mutual. I wanted to be near him (I ate lunch in his room more times than I can count).  I lived for his approval, and he seemed so genuinely interested in me. I recognize Mr. R in myself with certain "kids" today.  I’m not ashamed to say I "crush" on some of them, especially given the literal meaning of the word.  To have a crush, in one sense, means to give the object of your crush the power to break your heart. I’ve had my heart broken more than once by a student.  I’ve been to a funeral or two, and taken a call or two from county jail. I’ve watched bipolar students go off their meds and tumble into pits of despair.  And some of these students I’ve loved more than others, and their setbacks have, in a very real emotional sense, crushed me; their triumphs, on the other hand, have sent my spirits soaring.

Every once in a while, I think about stealing Mr. R’s poem and giving it to a special student who has "filched this fellow’s heart."   I haven’t done it yet.  But I think about it. 

Some thoughts on teaching and student crushes

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I’m thinking this morning about students and crushes.  (Actually, I’m also thinking about UCLA basketball, my boxing footwork, pacifism, the health of one of my youth group teens, my wife’s smile, and my chinchilla, but those are not subjects for the blog today.  Oh, and I still want a diet Coke very badly.  Is Lent half over yet?)

Recently, I heard from one of my former students, "Darren."  He took my class back when I was a new prof, in the mid-1990s.  He eventually finished his degree, got his master’s, and is now himself an adjunct at several Los Angeles-area community colleges (PCC is not one of them).  Darren and I email every once in a while, and I got a note from him a couple of weeks ago that’s been on my mind.  Here’s some of what he wrote, which I’ve edited a wee bit:

Hugo, I love teaching, and I really believe I am supposed to be doing this.  But I’m becoming aware of a problem I have, and I think it may be one you had too: student crushes.  I’ve got a few women in a few of my classes who have crushes on me, and one or two of them have been flirting with me pretty heavily.  I try and have good boundaries with them, because I’m only an adjunct. I don’t want to lose my job, and besides, I do very much want to be a professional in and out of the classroom.  But it’s so hard, because outside of the classroom I’m so shy with women.  Inside the classroom, I feel so desirable and powerful. 

My question is this, Hugo: how did you or do you keep this from going to your head?  How do you keep yourself from paying special attention to the ones who make it so obvious that they like you/want you?  Any advice you can give me would be awesome.

I have Darren’s permission to address this on the blog. (Also, let me add three things: Darren is 31,single, and his name isn’t really Darren.)

I’ve already emailed Darren back, and I didn’t save what I wrote.  But he’s had me thinking about how it is that we who teach can best think about the crushes our students will get on us.

First off, before this starts to sound like a narcissistic rant about how "crushable" a teacher I am, let me be very clear that I’ve rarely met a genuinely talented prof of either sex who wasn’t the object of desire from at least a few students.   A truly effective teacher will often be the object of desire, regardless of what he or she looks like.  Student crushes, I am convinced, are less about the physical attractiveness of the professor and more about that professor’s passion, certainty, and competence.  Those three attributes are, for lack of a better word, intensely sexy for many people!

When I was an undergrad at Cal, I had a crush on a fellow student named Tiffany.  Tiffany saw me as just a friend, however, in one of those all-too-common scenarios that most of us know plenty about.  But Tiffany had a massive crush on one of her anthropology professors.  He was in his late forties, and while he was reasonably fit for his age, no one would mistake him for a sex symbol.  He wore earth tones (which didn’t suit him); he was balding and perhaps 5’6".  But I was in his class too, and I have to admit, he was mesmerizing.   He had passion for his subject, he was a gifted lecturer, he had a sense of humor, and he struck the perfect balance between self-deprecation and arrogance.  (I’ve always thought that’s a tough needle to thread, and I find myself striving for it often.)  Tiffany was in love with Professor P, and I eventually admitted I could see why.  I asked her one day what she wanted from him, and she told me:

It’s not about sex, really.  It’s that I want to be inside his head. I want to be near him, I want him to talk to me for hours, I want him to focus just on me and I want to sit next to him and soak up everything about him.

"Oh", I said.  I didn’t get it.

But after thirteen years of teaching, I get it.  Students get crushes on me from time to time, just as they do on "Darren" and "Professor P."  Occasionally, some of those crushes have a specific romantic agenda.  When I was single, I sometimes (not often) got asked out at the end of the semester or received other signs of clear interest in pursuing a relationship of some sort.  But the vast majority of crushes were not and are not about actual sexual or romantic desire.  Most are like Tiffany’s crush on Professor P.

If we’re doing our job right, we have the power to change the way a student thinks about himself or herself.  At our best, those of us who love to teach are practiced seducers, Casanovas of the classroom.  But my agenda isn’t about sexual conquest, it’s about creating an interest and a passion where none previously existed. It’s about getting students to want something they didn’t know they wanted!  And when a student has a crush on me, I told Darren, it’s more often than not like Tiffany’s crush on Professor P.  Though some students may sexualize their crushes, what they really want is to continue to feel the way you make them feel: excited, energized, provoked, challenged. 

If we take advantage of student crushes, I told Darren, we make a huge mistake.  We assume that the real interest was in us rather than in how we were able to make our students feel and how we were able to make them think.   The best way, I told Darren, to think about student crushes is to take them as a sign that you’re probably doing your job pretty damn well.  And while age and perceived physical attractiveness may play a small part in encouraging these crushes, the real precipitator is enthusiasm, talent, and an obvious commitment to your students.

There’s an old axiom in pop psychology: we don’t just get crushes on people whom we want, we get crushes on people whom we want to be like!   Students don’t get crushes on me because they want to go to bed with me or be my girlfriend or boyfriend; they get crushes on me because I’ve got a quality that they want to bring out in themselves.  They’re externalizing all of their hopes for themselves.  And rather than encourage the crush to feed my ego, my job is to turn the focus back on to the student, encouraging him or her to take their new-found curiosity or enthusiasm or passion and use it, run with it, indulge it, let it take them places! That’s what student crushes mean to me.

After I wrote some of this to Darren, he wrote back:

"Hugo, thanks.  But honestly, I’m a little bit crestfallen.  I did want it to be about me! I did want my students to want me, even though I know that that seems so selfish and manipulative.  At the same time, I’m glad to know that you think there’s a healthy function for these things.  Still, I’m a bit chagrined."

I told him I knew how he felt.