Was my teacher's behaviour inappropriate, or just typical for the late 1990s?

[WhatTheHellsGoingOn]

Not sure if this is the right topic but felt weird putting in ‘relationships’.

When I was taking GCSES 25+ years ago I had a male teacher who acted strangely with me and I realised there may have been something beyond just oddness going on.

Neither of these scenarios would fly now due to current protocol and safeguarding but I wondered if it was him acting in a weird way, or in an inappropriate way.

Two situations sprang to mind last night - one where he asked me to stay behind /come see him at lunchtime and he proceeded to stare at me intently and say nothing when we were alone. It made me feel really uncomfortable and I’m not sure whether it was designed to illicit a confession or something, but I actually asked if there was something on my face bc of the way he was scrutinising me. He told me he’d noticed I’d missed several of his classes recently and wanted to know why. I explained that I’d been on several school trips with my other classes, and that quite a few other people in that same class had been there with me for some, if not all of them. I was puzzled and annoyed that I’d been singled out and I wasn’t sure he believed me, but there was no further discussion.

Another occasion was before taking mock exams - he’d told my mum he was concerned that I’d missed some work due to illness and offered to see me at the wknd/during half term at school to go over things with me. My mum thought it was kind of him to offer and took me - met him briefly to drop me off, then I went in and had a 1:1 ‘lesson’(?) which I don’t recall many of the details of I’m annoyed to say. I don’t remember him acting inappropriately but it was just the two of us, unsupervised largely, though I think there was a member of staff floating around, catching up with work.

He may well have done this for other students but I never heard it mentioned, and the older I get the more bizarre I think it was. For context, I was a shy, self-conscious 15-16 year old and he was a largely stern and serious early-to-mid 30’s year old.

I felt singled out on several other occasions but these were the main ones that stick in my memory.

Was it odd, or not for the time? (Late 90’s)

That’s it? YABU.

That sounds nice, it’s a shame students don’t have the opportunity to experience this level of extra tuition coming from a positive place, but I guess it’s a minefield. If my teacher had been older I guess I’d feel differently. He was a slightly odd figure, in that he was objectively young and good looking, but was very icy and kept his cards close to his chest if that makes sense, and never let his guard down - I guess he was being professional and not personable, though the two can mix obviously.

We weren’t scared of him, as I said, but he was intimidating. Which is why his behaviour was odd to me. He also dressed very smartly for work but when he came in at the wknd he was dressed rather eccentrically - not at all what I would have expected given his austere persona - so that threw me slightly as it seemed incongruous seeing him at school with no other students there, in his alternative civvies and was just weird as we didn’t really have a mentor/pupil dynamic going on before this where he took an interest in me. I think impressed him with a short presentation I did once at the start of the year, but I just got an uncanny vibe off him. He may well have had ASD, as I said previously, I strongly suspect I do.

That’s really interesting, and rings true, or at least similar, in my situation, thanks for sharing that

Yeah, as I said I couldn’t think which other topic to choose for this, chat maybe?

I agree with you about losing something, definitely. It’s a shame, but today everything is such a mess and teachers need to protect themselves as much as students I guess. It’s sad it’s ended up this way, but there were also a lot of awful b’stards who took advantage of the power imbalance as we know.

No, he didn’t mention me by name. The class was composed mainly of girls, altho it wasn’t a female-oriented subject. It was a type of look the heroine had which I also have - though we look nothing like each other if that makes sense. I was the only one who looked that way in my year group so it always chimed with me when someone mentioned it I guess

Seems like you want posters to say he was grooming or about to molest you. It was quite normal for teachers to help out pupils in their own time back then. I remember my R.E teacher had students round quite often (I was friends with his daughter so I was also at his house quite a lot). Why are you dwelling on this so much after such a long time, when nothing untoward happened?

I had a male teacher back in the early 90s who took a keen interest in how I was, he let me sit in the what is now known as ASN unit rather then be the n class or skive and he put a lot of effort into helping me. Looking back at it there was a lot going on that could have easily been misconstrued but he was genuine in wanting to help. He saw something no one else did. He didn’t see a bad kid, he saw a troubled kid. He was the only teacher who bothered to wonder why I was acting as I did rather than label me a problem. I was deeply unhappy. I was struggling, turns out I am autistic and have ADHD and was going through some horrendous neglect on every level at home. He did a lot for me and I will never forget him, I would hate the idea anyone saw this as wrong, but in today’s life it definitely would have been. I think sometimes people are just decent

Not above average, I was shy and introverted but I enjoyed the subject and I think he was impressed by a short presentation we all had to give. He maybe saw something in me he didn’t expect. I got an A in the end for the GCSE but I was in no way exceptional - other students got A* lol

@chonain

'I think sometimes people are just decent'

and i think that is the comment of this thread, I agree.

What a good teacher. I would have loved some teachers to have noticed I was struggling in their classes! So much apathetic resignation in teachers usually, not that I blame them!

op, you were lucky. Congrats.

The time I had off due to school trips were 2 day trips and a residential, within the same term - which, as I mentioned, at least 6 or 7+ other students were also on. If he’d checked the register it would have been down as an authorised absence or he could have checked with the office. It seemed a strange encounter, and the staring was so odd. He wasn’t gathering his thoughts, he was staring intensely at me so I grew self conscious and it could have been intimidatory, hoping I’d start confessing to skiving, or gauging any possible interest I may have for him. It sounds weird writing that but we all know relationships between students and teachers existed back then in higher numbers than they do now, thankfully.

The illness was a chest infection so I had a week off school but that was months after the school trips, possibly in my 2nd year of the subject, not weeks on end off altogether or anything like that.

I was up late last night as I sleep badly and it just came into my head. Maybe bc when I’ve mentioned it to other ppl their immediate reaction was 😳 and suspected some illicit motivation on his part. Even my mum thinks it was strange years later.

I did pass my GCSE’s yes 😄

Grooming usually involves nibbling away at your boundaries to open the way to taking advantage later - Im not seeing any of that nibbling here. Although Im generally a great believer in listening to your gut, if you were very introverted could it be possible that you were just uncomfortable with being singlad out? I was very shy as a teen and hated it when teachers noticed me in any way, even if just to praise something Id done.

I agree with others you are over thinking this, and your last post looks like you are trying to twist the narrative.
how do you know he was trying to gauge your interest in him?

One of my friends was at a school in the sixth form where she was being nailed by her art teacher. She thought he was in love with her. Turns out he was nailing half the class!

honestly, helping you with your homework is just a good teacher!

Difficult to say, my brother had some help from his science teacher to get grades for medical school. He did talk to my parents and it was all above board, he was a nice teacher! I guess that if the extra classes weee in school then at least it was possible appropriate place … if extra lessons were allowable one to one

Doesn't sound particularly dodgy to me. One of our PE teachers used to shag the 6th form girls. The head teacher called him "the luckiest man in the World".

Bloody hell!!!

This. Nothing happened, op, why is this still on your mind?

All sounds pretty innocent to me. I think maybe as you say you are introverted and suspect you are on the spectrum you have misread the situation. You felt he was staring at you, you noticed him telling you off for talking more. I think that his behaviour was normal and you are now trying to turn it into something it wasn't.

Yes, I doubt even my mum would have agreed to dropping me off round a single 30 somethings house, teacher or not. Whether or not his intentions were pure I would have been like a lamb to the slaughter, as I was seriously inexperienced and lacked any form of confidence to get myself out of difficult situations

But that’s about you! And is not something that happened! Why are you determined to be seen as a hapless victim to a predatory male teacher who you seem to want to be seen as obsessed with you? a lamb to the slaughter?! 😵‍💫

Im not trying to twist anything. I didn’t say I knew he was trying to gauge my interest. If you read what I said, that was option 3 of 3 possible explanations?

That’s called hyperbole. Illustrating how green I was. And when I say green I don’t mean I made a point of going to Homebase and buying a tin of willow valley and pouring it over my head for shits and giggles 👀 yeesh. It was to show I wasn’t a street wise teenager who was used to interpreting older men’s level of interest in them. And there were a lot of girls in my year going out with guys in their 20’s and 30’s, so it wasn’t that uncommon at the time.

I started writing the post at 3 in the morning bc I was awake and thinking about the situation. Unwisely I posted it later in the cold light of day. It’s not something I relive every day. Thankfully I was not sexually molested by him. It was a few weird encounters - and I wanted to gauge how odd the weekend ‘tuition’ was - but by the sounds of it it was common practise, but at these ppls’ homes.

Interestingly it seems to be predominantly male teachers homes

Sometimes teachers are just nice people! But they are influential in our lives and so the memory of them tends to remain. I still think about Mr Bradbury who was a trainee teacher in my last year of primary school. He read something I had written and told me that I was a very good writer.

I'm now a multi-published author. I don't think he was 'after' me, I think he was just spotting some talent in a child who didn't get much praise otherwise and his words in some small way helped me to stick to my ambition.

He was staring at me. Making eye contact with someone from barely a metre away for more than 10 seconds is definitely staring. And not speaking is even stranger behaviour. Isn’t it?

I was teaching in the 1990s and think it was odd and unwise behaviour but it would seem that nothing actionable took place, unless your memory comes back and says otherwise.

Around the same time, I asked for my concerns about a school governor's behaviour to be minuted when the H/T wanted to dismiss my unease.
The governor had taken to visiting the families of some of our female pupils, without any official reason ( which there could never be). He came into the school, to offer extra support to pupils.

I insisted that he should never be alone with any child.
Eventually the H/T decided to advise him not to visit pupils' homes but schools were certainly not as hot on Safeguarding as they are now.