Have you ever offered sex to a teacher for a better grade?
Have you ever been offered sex in return for a better grade?
Is this seriously something that happens this often?
It is if these 15 stories are to be believed:
1. Anything?! Really?
I had a girl say she’d “do anything” for extra credit. Her intention was clear. I made a joke of it by responding “Anything? Would you kill a guy?” I think she was embarrassed I didn’t go for it. She dropped my class not long after.
2. “Poor boy…”
When I was in graduate school, I had a student who, once he found out I was gay, started to flirt with me a lot. He was ridiculously good looking. He did stuff like come up to me after class to show me his pierced nipples (which involved, of course, lifting his shirt and showing me his perfect abs, too).
He never actually made an offer of sex for grades; he might have just been offering me sex. Or he might have just enjoyed flirting with his teacher because he got off on being hot.
Poor boy got the lowest grade in the class; he was pretty, but not too bright.
3. Terrible
I taught for a few semesters at a rather large university. My classes had between 30 and 70 students.
In the class with 70 students, one girl that was just terrible tried something. Until then, I couldn’t understand how she made it to her junior year. She couldn’t even write a complete sentence. One day during the middle of a 3-hour-class break, she comes up to the podium to discuss her grades; she was bombing the course with a strong F. She says, “I want to know how I can improve my grade?” and immediately gets closer to seemingly look at the computer screen propping her [breasts] on my arm like an eagle on a perch while smiling. This was in front of the entire 70-student class.
I pulled back, told her that her writing needs lots of work, and she should go to the tutoring center. I went straight to the grad-student lab and wrote an email to the program head detailing what just happened. Fuck that.
Additionally, I feel bad for her because the poor girl had no hopes. She was a terrible student and couldn’t even propose sex-for-grades properly. She had nothing going for her.
4. What?!
I’m an art teacher and, when I was teaching middle school, I had a 7th grader ask me, in the middle of class, to suck his dick. Not in a mean way, but in a “will you please?” kind of way. They go to lunch, the kid leaves the lunchroom, comes to my room and asks again. He’s 12 years old, mind you. I kept trying to get him to leave the room and he was saying, “There aren’t any cameras in here, no one will know if you don’t tell,” and then he tried to pull his pants down just so I could see his penis. I just got to the door to leave myself, when another student showed up and the other kid ran off. I reported it, wrote a referral and the school made me press sexual harassment charges. The kicker is that, after he came back from being suspended, the school didn’t remove him from my room and I had to teach him for the next 3 months. Ugh.
5. “Dumbass”
After one exam one of the students emailed me saying that she knew she had done poorly and she was willing to do anything to get her grade up. Didn’t even see it sexually at all until I casually mentioned it to my family at sunday lunch. My mom said something like “Dumbass, that’s a sex offer” I was like “Really??”. My wife just rolled her eyes at me. Didn’t mention it again, neither did she.
6. Peace Out
I actually had to change careers because of how often it was happening. I said no every time, as I wouldn’t risk losing my career, but then my wife left me after 10 years of marriage. I became fairly lonely, and didn’t think I could say no when a very attractive student became overly friendly with me. For both our protection, I ended up quitting and becoming an author full time.
7. The Gender Gap
When I was a graduate student, there were a couple of female faculty who would sleep with their male students, but the academic culture has changed so much in the last twenty years that that’s more rare or at least more hidden.
When I first started teaching, I used to get hit on quite a lot. I have had male students bring me coffee, cookies, and gifts from their travels. Male college students are never aggressively sexual, just needy and crushy.
I learned to deal with the attention by being either highly intellectual (so distant) or highly maternal (thus gross).
As someone who chaired a department, I must say that female students are extremely aggressive sexually with male professors. I have had to deal with the most blatantly aggressive female students outright harassing male faculty. Male students don’t have anywhere near that level of confidence when it comes to hitting on professors. Maybe there is a longer history of male profs sleeping with their students, so maybe that’s why female students feel so comfortable hitting on their profs?
The female ones are also rather shameless. They will hang out the prof’s office, leave notes, call, and just signal to the world that they are interested, which seems crass to me when a 22-year-old is acting like a 13-year-old at a Justin Bieber concert. Older faculty said that this more sexually aggressive female students is somewhat new, like in the past twenty years.
I think colleges/universities should teach professional behavior to students, honestly. Do the students realize what kind of job recommendation a chair might give a student who has spent her years in college flirting with faculty?