Two Eight Five: Pedagogy

Someone told me once in passing that a certain kind of erotic linkage underlay all education. They were talking about Plato and the Symposium, but I understood what they meant--- that the desire for knowledge and erotic desire are often hard to separate one from the other. Falling in love with a certain kind of knowledge is easily transmuted into desire for the person with the knowledge. Having one means having the other. Or so any number of French coming-of-age novels and any number of films about teacher-student affairs tell us.

Back a while ago I wrote this about my friend in New Zealand:

My lovely, long-legged, posh blonde friend down in the Land of the Long White Cloud wrote me once upon a time to answer questions about her adventures in her teens. Her life as a posh bad girl has always fascinated me, and I did send her a master list of questions about the things she did when she was a self-described wicked schoolgirl.

I asked her the obvious question about encounters and adventures with teachers--- something that's the stuff of any number of coming-of-age films (right now I'm thinking of Mischa Barton and her teacher in "The O in Ohio" or Kat Dennings in "Daydream Nation").

This was her response to my question about whether she'd ever had sex with one of her teachers back at her posh private school in Lower Hutt:

I slept with a teacher a few times...but he was sort of a family acquaintance. But he was also my science teacher, so it totally counts! (I was sixth form, so 16 when I did it)  

She also wrote me to say that:

At 15, i sucked a maori trainee-teacher's cock behind the school gym... just sucked him that one time...i would have loved to fuck him though!


I'm wild to know all the backstory for each encounter--- how it happened, what she thought and felt during and after, if she discussed doing either thing with her circle of close female friends. I'd love to know if she was ever discovered--- by parents or staff ---doing schoolgirl-teacher things.  Those questions do matter to me. She was I think thirty or thirty-one when she answered those questions, and I do wonder how she sees her fifteen or sixteen year old self, and if she has any regrets.

I think I noted before, too, that I've come to suspect that not all the stories she's told me over the years have been true. So while I'd very much like those stories to be true, I just can't be sure. It's sad and disturbing that I can't just believe her outright these days, and all the more so since for years I've known that I'd run off and live with her or marry her for the asking.

But let's assume it's true. Let's assume that she did have sex with her science teacher. And that she gave head to a Maori teacher-trainee behind the gym. Those are great stories, and I can add them to my list of teacher-student stories from girls I've known.

Liberty of course slept with her coastal ecology instructor when she was at university. From all I understand, the environmental sciences department (regarded as a haven for hippies) was notorious for things like that happening. I do love the idea of the sleeping bag and the dock (see my earlier entry), and I'd like to know if she slept with him again after the field trip. I suppose it's possible that it was only that the rules are suspended on field trips, but it's something I wish I knew. And if she was ever jealous that the instructor (oh, obviously and inevitably) slept with other co-eds in his classes.

Levin told  me once that she'd slept with one of her art professors. In some ways the affair had been a perfect art school cliche--- she'd even modeled for him. She was rather proud that he'd painted and sketched nudes of her. She had one framed in her bedroom. She was proud of being his muse, proud of being painted. The affair (and it lasted for a while) was art school cliche and filled with art school drama. Levin discovered that the professor had also slept with a boy she'd dated her freshman year...and who was now living with a girl Levin had once had a fling with. I nearly fell off her bed laughing and applauding.  She agreed with me that it was funny, although it made her feel that  art school was far, far too claustrophobic and incestuous.  I'll note here that I found that whole round robin thing far easier to believe than some of my New Zealand friend's stories, if only because I'd spent enough time around art school undergraduates and faculty in my clubland days. Art school always seemed to me to be a mix of indie mumblecore movies and Arthur Schnitzler's Reigen.

I will say, too, that the framed nude she had in her bedroom was very, very good. Very evocative, very powerful, very alluring. I did envy her art professor's skills, and I envied him for seeing all the things in Levin that he'd put on canvas.

Marsha told me once that she'd  had a thing with someone who was almost her teacher. She was in geometry in Grade 10 and he was a student teacher doing his required couple of weeks of classroom teaching. She ran into him away from school the next semester (memory says at a pizza place) and he remembered her. All the stories I've told here about Marsha involved cars--- the vintage MG in Thessaloniki, the Triumph along the river road here, the police car on the  levee ---and so does this one. They first had sex in a parked car here, though I'm unclear whether it was around the lakes by the university or atop the levee along the river road. I do remember her telling me that the car was a battered old hatchback, and that he had an ice chest with beer (dark beer, she remembered-- Heineken Dark?)  in the back. She got her skirt up and rode him in the car, and of course there was road head.  They may have done it at his parents' house a few times, and once she made him park at night in the school parking lot and do her with the seats lowered. He'd have been maybe twenty-two. His people, she told me, were "wild Hungarians", and his name was distinctively Magyar. Memory says that he went to Colorado, and of course in some perfect world (or at least a rom-com world) she'd have met him again when she was as the Colorado School of Mines. That didn't happen, but it should have. She told me the story just before she and I went to her senior prom together, possibly to make me just jealous enough to be competitive. After all, he was older and almost her teacher.

Teacher-student affairs do intrigue me. Or maybe it's that I'm interested in how girls see them a decade on. My NZ friend, Levin, Liberty, and Marsha all seem to have taken the encounters in stride. None of them was (or thought she was) in love, none of them felt 'groomed' (or at least felt that that was a bad thing), and all of them liked having the stories to tell later. Levin and Liberty certainly saw their academic affairs as just part of their lists of adventures, and certainly not as anything traumatic. My friend in NZ saw her affairs as competitive markers amongst her friends, who were notorious posh bad girls.

If any of you out there reading this have experiences that you've turned into stories, do tell me about your own academic encounters. Tell me how they happened, and what you thought while they were happening. Tell me how the memories feel to you now, some years on.