You either hate your teachers or love your teachers. And sometimes, you love one of your teachers a little too much. Don’t worry, having feelings for a teacher is completely normal. In fact, it might as well be a rite of passage.
After all, you see your teachers every day. You admire their wisdom, guidance, and compassion. It’s not hard to believe that can turn into a tiny, innocent, little crush. When the crush gets a little bigger, that’s when trouble starts and teachers need to put their foot down. An AskReddit thread posed the question: Have you ever noticed a student’s crush on you and how did you deal with it? Their stories are hilariously awkward.
1.
“Music teacher here. I started giving one of my students private piano lessons a while back and I’m not too sure if she had a thing for me for a while but it was certainly made evident during those sessions. I take my job very seriously and I have seen a lot of male teachers get f*cked over in the past so I made it abundantly clear that I would have to contact her parents if she didn’t stop telling me that she thought she would probably sound better blowing on a flute.”
2.
“I teach high school English and I had one student who would always come to my classroom during his lunch period to talk. At first he would just come for ‘help’ on an assignment, but he eventually started coming just to hang out. I was fine with it. I didn’t have a class and he was a good kid. One day he revealed to me that he didn’t come to my class for help, but he just liked being around me. I thought it was sweet. It didn’t really cross my mind that it could be a crush. He didn’t have a lot of friends and I gave him a chance to just be himself in my classroom. He talked about things that would probably make other people tell him to shut up. I listened to him and he liked that. That’s all I thought it was until he told me that if he was older, he would ask me out on a date. I joked around and told him that I don’t think my husband would appreciate that very much. He just sighed and said something along the lines of, ‘Maybe in a different universe then.’ I told him I was flattered, but that there is a line that can’t be crossed. Teacher-Student relationships are professional. I then assured him that he will find someone his own age who thinks he is funny and amazing. Chasing after teachers could get both people in trouble, and I made that clear to him. I still allowed him to come to my class during lunch, but he didn’t bring up his feelings anymore. This was two years ago and he now has a girlfriend in his grade. I see them around school often.”
3.
“Not me but one of the students in my masters program teaches an introductory level class. A freshman in his class took a picture of him with a heart around his name and put it on Snapchat. One of the other masters students followed her on Snapchat and showed the teacher. He started his next lecture with ‘before we start today we are going to talk about how what we put on the internet can be seen by almost anyone’ apparently she turned bright f*cking red.”
4.
“I teach some college classes, and my first semester of teaching, there was a boy who would always come to my office hours. Mark never had any questions, he just wanted be to go over the material with him again. I didn’t really think anything of it until my boyfriend called me once when Mark was there, and we ended the quick phone call with the typical ‘Love you/Love you too’ responses. Mark seemed a little taken aback and asked ‘Who was that, your mom?’ And I explained that no, it was my boyfriend.
Mark wasn’t at all deterred by the fact that I already had a boyfriend, and he started hanging around the classroom as I packed up after class, but the problem was that my boyfriend would often pick me up from my classroom at the end of the day. So I’m packing up, erasing the chalkboard, and doing my typical thing, when my boyfriend walks into the room to wait for me. Mark is there too and decides that this is the time to voice his feelings. I have my back turned to him as I’m erasing the board, and he says, ‘I like your curves.’
Boyfriend flexes, I stop erasing, and everything goes still as I try to process what’s happening. But apparently Mark got cold feet because he quickly recovers with ‘…the curves on the quizzes are great.’ I didn’t even curve their quizzes.”
5.
“I was a teacher and actually quit partially because of this. I had a student fall for me (she was 18, about to graduate. I was 22, first year teaching) and she tried it on one day. She actually said ‘We could maybe hang out at your place and I won’t tell anyone, or we could not and I will tell people we did’
Luckily my younger brother was her age and she didn’t know we were related (I went to school internationally and we have different moms so don’t look alike) and I messaged him and nothing more came of it.
It was when I realized my whole career can be destroyed by a teenager with a crush I decided to get out. I quit at the end of that school year and moved to a finance profession. Am enjoying my job now but it’s a shame how scared males need to be in the private school system.”
6.
“Astronomer here, who has taught a ton at university during grad school- this is super common. Particularly because I have mainly taught physics and astronomy, where there aren’t that many women, and frankly a lot of teenage guys straight out of high school think ‘she’s talking to me – she must like me!’ even if we are just talking about the coursework (which I can get enthusiastic about) and I’m answering their questions about it. But honestly it’s not that hard to deal with, you just stick to professional topics and you’re unlikely to really see the student again.
The only time it became a bit of an issue was one student who I’d never talked to about non-physics things suddenly started sending me a ton of emails and FB messages – like, several a day, then getting upset during the course of the day that I wasn’t immediately responding to them. So I basically just sent him an email that his behavior was inappropriate, and made me uncomfortable, so to stop contacting me in this manner. Dude promptly freaked out as it turns out a girl in his dorm had reported him for harassment (keep in mind, the freshmen were maybe a month into classes max at that point), and he was worried I would too, so stopped talking to me altogether. Hope that kid had a good talk with someone about what acceptable boundaries are when you have a crush, as he clearly hadn’t picked up on it.
As for the reverse, I’ve never really had a crush on a student- beyond inappropriate, by this point I have at least 10 years on them and as we women say in physics, ‘the odds are good, but the goods are odd.'”
7.
“I coach youth basketball, both boys and girls. I’ve only had a couple girls develop a crush, but one in stood out. She was by far the best player on the team, and she knew it. She would always show up early to practice, volunteer to lead off all the drills, and stay late to get some extra work in. Just a coach’s dream really. I first noticed she had a crush when I was the only coach she gave a Valentine’s Day card too. It was harmless and cute until I took her out of a game once to get some other kids playing time and she stomped over to the bench, sat down and started crying.
When I asked her what was wrong she yelled, ‘I thought we were in love, why did you take me out!’ Luckily for me I was in a small gym and everyone could hear her, including her terrifyingly large dad. I mean this guy was massive, he never really played basketball but he was a defensive lineman for a D1 school. I’m a fairly tall guy, but this guy was just massive in every sense of the word. After the game he came up to me stone faced, got right up into my face, and asked if there was anything he should know about. Before I could stammer out an answer he just started laughing and told me he would talk to his daughter about the difference between a crush and love. I’m glad he thought it was funny because I sharted in my pants.”
8.
“I worked in an after-school program during college. One of the fifth grade boys had a crush on me, which I first noticed when he’d follow me around and offer his help. It was confirmed when he asked me out on a date: ‘Miss, what are you doing tonight? We could go to my house and play Pokemon, then my mom can take us to Pizza Hut!'”
9.
“One time I was wearing a button-down shirt and I heard a student asking another student if he could ‘see anything’ (this was in Korean, but they don’t know I can understand it). I assume the student was talking about seeing a sliver of my bra through the peephole that two of the buttons made. I stared at the student who said that until he looked really uncomfortable, and asked him, ‘see what?’ the student said, ‘…I was asking if he could see the clock’ and I just pointed to the clock that was behind him and said, ‘the clock is that way.’ That’s the only time I confronted a student about something inappropriate.”
10.
“I teach high school seniors. It usually happens at least once a year, but it passes. I just really have to watch out that I’m not sending any signals and it usually goes away pretty quick. I’m bubbly and playful with the kids. I like to mix playful teasing with emotional support, kinda big sister-like. I’m older than a lot of their parents, but I look young so occasionally one gets a little too attached. I try to remind them that I have a son older than them and just be a little more distant and professional. They have short romantic attention spans.”
How would you have manage the situation, if you were a teacher?
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