[wakegirl]

up until about a week ago i thought that teachers who had relationships with their students were a breed of person i would never relate to. recent events have made me question that rationale. i dated a guy whose cousin was in prison for a sexual assualt of a minor by a person in a position of trust, and at family gatherings i would always end up talking to her for a few minutes. from the outside she appeared very normal (or as normal as a stranger can seem) but the more she talked the more i could tell that there was something different in the way she interpreted things. for instance when she talked about the relationship it often sounded like a teenager talking about their first boyfriend/girlfriend. it was as if the morals and ethics that make people good community members were missing or that she almost felt like she could justify the relationship. dont get me wrong as someone who spent time in the realm of law enforcement i understand that their are people out there who cannot follow the rules of society and their attemps to justify those actions just provide more evidence of the strange beliefs that exist within some.
about a week ago a kid i went to high school with, a kid i was a senior buddy to when he was a freshman was arrested for having a sexual relationship with a student. this kid was a good kid, a little shy maybe, but my parents were friends with his parents so we spent a fair amount of time together and he always seemed so normal. he married his highschool girl friend (the only girl he has ever dated), had 2 kids. the random or even more random aspect to the story is that he went to college and studied theology, and then attended the seminary. he was teaching bible studies at a christian school.
i keep thinking back to all of the time i spent with him and cant think of anything that should have raised alarms (not for this behavior specificly, but anything that made him stand out). i just cant imagine how this great kid who had done so well in the early stages of adult life could have gone so wrong.
it is no wonder why so many parents are choosing to home school their children. i know there are problem personalities in every profession but it seems like at this point in time, in the wake of the priest scandels that caused so much damage, teaching seems to have fallen into the same frightening hole.
if anyone on the site is in the teaching profession or has a loved on in the profession please dont take offense it is not my point to paint everyone within a profession with the same brush, there are good and bad in every work environment, i am just baffled by the current trend. the fact that if i had children this kid i grew up with would have been my first choice as a teacher or coach (and for many kids in his classroom their parents felt the exact same way) is truly frightening.
sorry i just needed to vent this behavior is disturbing from a distance but it hurts far more when it is so close to home