When I was a freshman in college, I went with a few friends to see Scream 3 (don’t judge!). While we were watching the movie, I noticed a man in the row in front of me. After staring for a while, I realized that it was one of my professors. When the movie ended, I started walking down the steps of the theater and called out his name. He looked up, horrified, and shouted: “Busted!”
The next time class met, he said: “You know, it really sucks when you go out…and you see one of your students!”
I started teaching college students last year when I was a graduate student myself, and now I teach full-time at a different university. I know now that he was right; it does suck.
When I taught as a graduate student, the lines were definitely blurred. I walked around campus just like any other student. I used the library, I ate on campus, I hurried to class; I crammed. As I passed my students on campus or saw them in the eateries, I felt the pretense that I tried to hold together in the classroom – the pretense that I was different from them – disappear. It all seemed like such an act. Hell, I looked just like them.
As I spent countless hours in the coffee shop across from campus, I would sometimes forget that a student might be there (which they often were), and I learned to watch what I said. Every time I went out drinking with my friends, I prayed that I wouldn’t see a student on the subway.
Lately, I’ve started running into my students a lot. I’ve had two separate students spot me on dates. I saw another in the grocery store. A student last semester ran into me in a coffee shop and told me that I “didn’t have to eat alone.” I politely declined his invitation to join him.
It’s run-ins like these that have started me thinking about this line between the school persona and the “real life” persona that I’ve created. A professor I had used to call it “being pulled out of role.”
It always feels decidedly awkward when it happens to me. When possible, I try to pretend that I don't see the student. I wonder why it bothers me so much. Is it so horrible that they would realize that I eat? I shop. I go on dates. It seems a tad silly, doesn’t it?
What is silly is the fact that when I saw the student in the grocery store, I promptly turned around so that he wouldn’t spot me. There was something about my collection of produce and toilet paper that made the items in my cart look horribly boring. I don’t suppose if I had had beer and chips I would have felt any better.
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