Just Like The Old Man In That Book By Nabakov

Every so often, we cross a line between inappropriate and icky. Kelsey Peterson, a twenty-five-year-old sixth-grade math teacher and basketball coach at Lexington Middle School, was turned over to the FBI early Saturday after being arrested the night before in the border city of Mexicali for allegedly running away with a thirteen-year-old boy, taking him across the border into Mexico. The twelve years between them isn't the awful part. It's the erosion of trust between teacher and student that gnaws at me. When it is not the subject of a tawdry Lifetime Network movie, pedophilia is a word that just sounds ugly.
"Young teacher, the subject of schoolgirl fantasy. She wants him so badly, knows what she wants to be," sings former school teacher Gordon Sumner (a.k.a. Mister Stingman). "Got it bad, got it bad, got it bad, I'm hot for teacher," moans David Lee Roth(man). Elton John and Rockpile have recorded odes to the unrequited love to or from teachers. It's an old story, and I know of at least one young lady who fell for her music teacher, in college. The age of consent seems to make that story somewhat less despicable, but it still smells a little around the edges to me. The idea that a student might have a crush on his or her teacher seems like a reasonable enough possibility. The notion of a teacher looking out into a sea of young faces and finding one staring back at him or her, well, teachers are still human beings after all.
But what we're talking about here is what Jimmy Carter used to call "lust in his heart". What happens in your mind is always hypothetical, but when the barrier between teacher and student is broken, everyone loses. The National Catholic Register’s reporter Wayne Laugesen points out, a federal report said 422,000 California public-school students would be victims before graduation — a number that dwarfs the state’s entire Catholic-school enrollment of 143,000. Certainly Mister Laugesen and his publication have a particular axe to grind, but it does give one pause.
And then go back to work rebuilding that trust.