Well, as a teacher, let me tell you a little story…

I had a female student (I’m a male), who was rather attractive. Not gonna lie. But I would never pursue a student sexually or romantically. Apparently, that feeling was not mutual. At first, things were like they usually were with stupid young girl crushing: double entendres, very subtle comments, etc. But there’s a line, and she crossed it.

She wrote her number on an essay with a smiley face. This was not okay by any means. I immediately contacted an administrator so I wouldn’t get in any trouble. These sorts of things are taken very seriously at pretty much any grade level these days, and I’m not interested in losing my job over some girl’s hormones getting the best of her.

So a couple of days later, this administrator called a meeting with the parents. We were all in the office and the administrator was doing his spiel to the girl and her parents about appropriate behavior at school and appropriate age differences and the like (apparently this is a common enough issue that he had some training on how to have this kind of talk). She looked fairly ashamed, staring at the floor the whole time. He finished his rehearsed rant and then asked the parents if they had anything they wanted to say to the daughter.

The father was silent, but the mother spoke up. She said something about how the girl should know better and how they taught her better than this, etc. The usual parent reprimand stuff. But teenage girls can often find ways to surprise you. The mom asked her daughter, “And what did you even expect would come of something like this?” My student was quiet for a moment, looking down at the floor still, but then she turned to me, and I will never forget the way she looked at me when she said it: “About tree fiddy.” It was about this time I noticed that my student was about eight stories tall and was a crustacean from the paleozoic era. I said, “Damn it, monsta, get out of this office! I ain’t givin’ you no damn tree fiddy!”