Perspectives: 2018-2019, Issue 4

“Students can be friendly with teachers but I don’t think students can be friends with teachers. With my Euro teacher I sometimes send him blue hearts in his Remind messages, and he might bring it up on a tangent in class and laugh about it and go back on with the lesson. Like, cynically it can be very beneficial [to be friends] with teachers because they will tend to be more lenient with you and understanding, and it can also help you develop connections and have a better rapport with them. They know you better and they better understand your personality.” —junior Ryan Sharp

“Yes, I think it’s possible to be friends with a teacher. [One of my teachers] and I are pretty close [as] I also dog-sit for her sometimes. It’s fun to talk to her outside of class too.” —senior Heidi Heuerman

“Yes. Friendship doesn’t really have an age limit. You can be vastly different ages and if you still have the same interests and get along, you can call yourselves friends. I consider my [Community School] teachers my friends. Especially [my language arts CS teacher]. My friends and I are really comfortable talking to her. We tell her a lot of stuff that’s happening in our lives. I still go back and visit my middle school teachers [from Jones] too.” —junior Chloe Miller

“To a certain extent, you can have a good relationship with your teacher but to the point where it’s not disrespectful to them. You should keep things between academics and should remember that you’re still their student and they have actual authority over you. Teachers should care for their students and vice versa, but there should still be a boundary.” —freshman Nora Dimitrov

“Yes, you’ll be more successful at school if you’re friends with teachers. With [my physical science teacher] we relate about a bunch of things: [mostly] baseball… More specifically the Cleveland Indians. We used to talk about baseball a lot and now it’s more about science, but we still talk about who the Indians played and team statistics.” —freshman Mitchell McConnell

“I’d call teachers my friends but not close friends. With my history teacher, it’s just 13 of us in the class. We talk about how he’s reading Harry Potter for the first time and somebody spoiled the ending for him. I care about my teachers and they care about me. I think you can be a friend of a teacher but it’d be weird to hang out outside of school unless you’ve graduated. Like my mom is a professor at OSU and she’s really close friends with a lot of her former students now. They come over for tea.” —junior Oliver Jonaus

“Some teachers are cool and students want to be friends with them. [We can joke about] anything that comes up, literally anything. I was friends with a teacher and I aced his class. You just learn better when you like your teacher.” —sophomore Aislinn Matthews

“My history teacher this year was always very nice. He was a great teacher, definitely someone I can get along with. But I wouldn’t consider teachers friends. I don’t see it as a friend relationship. I just see it as a studentteacher relationship, which is almost the same as being friends, just don’t put the ‘friends’ on it. Friends are usually people you hang out with. I don’t see myself doing that with a teacher.” —sophomore Cameron Koffel

“Yes. A teacher’s main job is to help students learn, so I think a way to be a good teacher is to be friends with your students rather than just people you see once a day. —senior Zack Stabile