[T-post Tom]

Originally Posted by Rain Man

I definitely agree in theory that you have to keep a distance, but I've always wondered about teachers' situations and how difficult it is over the course of a career. More so at the college level, but I guess at the upper high school level as well.

You're a teacher who teaches 3 courses, and there are 10 females in each course. You get to know them over the course of 16 weeks or so. Now multiply this by 3 semesters a year over the course of a 30-year teaching career.

You've now gotten the opportunity to meet and know almost 3,000 young women. If you ascribe to the theory that there's not just one woman in the world for every man and that (for example) 1 percent of women are good marriage material for you, the odds are pretty good that you'll see 30 women over the course of that career that you fall in love with during those 16 weeks. It doesn't seem infeasible that sparks could ignite.

The numbers are different for high school, but the theory's the same. I wonder how many high school teachers and college professors, if being completely honest, would tell you that they've had a crush on X number of students in their career, even if the majority never act on it.

In my grad school, two professors ended up marrying students in my class, plus or minus a year. It was minorly scandalous, particularly since one of them had been married, but life went on for them.

cdcox, what say you?