Did I commit adultery?

[SlightlySceptic]

Hi, I’m an 18 year old female, and I’m going to say right off the bat that I’ve never had any kind of sex or even kiss anyone. I have masturbated, but not really for pleasure, more so I could be ready so if I marry someday it won’t be painful or awkward.

Anyway, when I was in high school, not like underage or anything, I had this teacher who was young and who I thought was attractive. He was married and had a young child, and I didn’t really think of him in that way, but I ended up with a private study because I was basically the only one in the class, and I used to spend a ton of time just the two of us in his classroom. Sometimes, there was a bit of a working lunch.

We did joke around a bit and talk kind of personal. Never anything sexual, but sometimes I would talk about stuff that worried me and about college or life goals or things like that. Sometimes we would talk about intellectual topics, technology, or cars. I would sometimes ask him how his wife and baby were doing.

I guess we were a little “friendly” but I really thought of it as more of a mentor/student thing at the time, but I kind of got freaked out because he ended up moving my grade from an F to a B- which I thought was weird. Also, I remember when I was in gym with some of my girlfriends, he was there with his wife and I remember thinking that she wasn’t as pretty as me (she was heavy and had bad skin) and the thought crossed my mind like “what is he doing/what does he see in her” and I felt super guilty at the time just for thinking that.

I had kind of forgotten about the whole thing until recently, and it’s been bugging me. Any thoughts?

 

[EasterJoy]

No, you did not commit adultery. You flirted with the 9th Commandment, though.

First off: If a teacher-student relationship gets to be inappropriate, that is the teacher’s issue. The teacher is the one with the duty to keep the boundaries appropriate, because the teacher is the adult and has the power in the relationship. If you are a high school student, then from the professional standpoint of a K-12 teacher, you are underage and off-limits for romance. The teacher should also discourage crushes or infatuations. Even if those are not acted upon, the teacher would be indulging his pride at the student’s expense if he let that kind of infatuation grow unchecked.

The relationship you are describing is something that on its surface could have been fine. On the outside, you don’t describe anything you might not have had with a female teacher, for instance. It is OK for a student to have one particular teacher that they trust for conversations about personal issues in a way that they don’t trust other teachers. It is OK to have a rapport with one teacher that you do not have with others or that the teacher doesn’t have with every student.

Changing your grade was not “weird.” It was wrong for your teacher to have done that, if a lower grade is what you deserved. That was a violation by your teacher against justice and against the truth. If you *knew *you deserved an “F” and got a “B-”, it would have been praiseworthy to speak up about it. I wouldn’t fault you for not doing that, and I would hope you don’t beat yourself up about it now, because in your shoes, it would be normal to think, “Hmm. Weird. Oh, well. I guess I got lucky.” For all you know, you weren’t the only student who got the benefit of that largess. Your teacher might have wanted to make his grade book look better. I don’t know what I would suggest that a student do in your circumstance, save talk to a counselor about it and let them handle it. If it happens again, investigate and make sure your grade was correct, just as you would if the grade were unjustly low. It is water under the bridge now, however.

It is not atypical for a student to have a crush on a favorite teacher. It is wrong but not atypical for someone who has a crush on someone else to feel jealousy towards legitimate romantic issues that the “crush” has with their spouse or significant other. Recognizing that jealous feeling as a temptation to pride and to covet someone else’s spouse, and therefore denouncing it, was the right act of conscience. You felt guilt–that was a smoke alarm from your conscience, telling you that your thoughts were sinful in nature. To have said “no” to that temptation to violate the 9th Commandment was the right thing to do. You don’t have to confess the venial sin of entertaining the pride and covetousness, although it would be right to confess it if you were doing an examination of conscience about it afterwards. Now, however, I’d simply recognize you did the right thing, advise yourself to avoid the near occasion of sin of indulging a crush on someone else’s husband, and let go of the guilt.

 

[SuperLuigi]

Did you know for sure that your grade was an F? Sometimes, teachers will adjust grades and students do not do anywhere nearly as bad as they think.

Also, EasterJoy, please note that the concept has changed over the decades. The way the game is now played is yesterday’s F is today’s C. Some teachers realize that there is grade inflation, especially in college, and culturally speaking being such a hard grader may impact students when they seek funding or fellowships. I’m currently affiliated with a university, and I’ve seen resumes from the past where students have 2.5 or less GPAs, and in some programs with that performance today, one would flunk out easily.

So, it’s different, and I’m having a lot of trouble seeing why a high school should be punished over grade exactness.

I can’t sit here and say that’s morally acceptable in the eyes of God right now, but I would refer someone for spiritual direction if you really thought they should argue to lower a grade from a B- to an F.

Look at it like this: in the real world, people aren’t going to hash over someone’s grades. They’re going to look at if the person can do the job, and if they know that person can, that person already has an advantage even over someone with a good paper record because they know that person.

 

[EasterJoy]

Did you know for sure that your grade was an F? Sometimes, teachers will adjust grades and students do not do anywhere nearly as bad as they think.

Also, EasterJoy, please note that the concept has changed over the decades. The way the game is now played is yesterday’s F is today’s C. Some teachers realize that there is grade inflation, especially in college, and culturally speaking being such a hard grader may impact students when they seek funding or fellowships. I’m currently affiliated with a university, and I’ve seen resumes from the past where students have 2.5 or less GPAs, and in some programs with that performance today, one would flunk out easily.

So, it’s different, and I’m having a lot of trouble seeing why a high school should be punished over grade exactness.

I can’t sit here and say that’s morally acceptable in the eyes of God right now, but I would refer someone for spiritual direction if you really thought they should argue to lower a grade from a B- to an F.

Look at it like this: in the real world, people aren’t going to hash over someone’s grades. They’re going to look at if the person can do the job, and if they know that person can, that person already has an advantage even over someone with a good paper record because they know that person.

Grades don’t keep you in positions, but grades certainly can be necessary to get you there. A B- instead of an F on a high school transcript can easily be the difference between getting an opportunity such as an internship or a scholarship and not getting it. High school grades don’t matter once you have a work history or a college transcript, but they do matter for as long as they matter.

I was not suggesting that she argue to have her grade lowered; thank you for the chance to clarify. I do not think there is any moral imperative for a student to refuse a grade they don’t think they deserved. If I were the school principal, for instance, be very sure that if I found out that she got a B- when she deserved an F, she would not be the one in hot water! I would probably let the unfair grade stand, even if it netted a reprimand for the teacher who gave it out, as long as the student had nothing to do with the unfair grading. Raising a question would be praiseworthy because the student might be shining light on something shady, something the teacher thought he was safe from having her raise any question about. Noticing a lie but saying nothing about it because it was not your lie can come back to bite you, and can certainly lead to someone else getting bitten.

I was suggesting she find out what happened. She’s not talking about getting an F from Mrs Y and then getting a B- from Mr X. She’s talking about getting feedback from Mr X that led her to believe she was getting an F, then finding a B- from that same Mr X on her report card, something she regarded as “weird” rather than as an accomplishment. If you get a grade that you totally did not deserve–not a C bumped to a B, but an F bumped to a B–and accusations come out later that you secured this grade by having an “affair” with the teacher, what leg do you have to stand on when you claim you were not complicit? What if the grade was indeed deserved–would you not like to be able to frankly rejoice in the turnaround you achieved? Besides, what was with that? If you are Mr X’s principal or school board, you want to know what on earth Mr X was thinking, and what he was doing singling this one student out for special attention. Was that B- some kind of grooming for a seduction? If something about a high school teacher seems weird to a high school student, it may well be because there truly is something weird going on.

It is not unknown at all for high school students to have feelings of having done something wrong in their relationship with a teacher when in fact it was the teacher and the teacher alone who was being manipulative and inappropriate. The victim of this manipulation may go through life beating herself up about a situation in which she was actually someone a predator was assessing as a possible victim of serious sexual abuse or emotional manipulation. Worse yet, the teacher may do this to student after student for the better part of a career, if no one ever says anything until his offense is truly egregious.

Sometimes a student might feel guilty about an innocent situation because she was just inexperienced about how easy it is to fall into a crush for an unavailable co-worker. In this case, the teacher and the teacher’s wife might have been oblivious to any crush or “competition,” and no one was harmed at all. Because she was* tempted* to do wrong, she can wrongly feel she actually did wrong, when in fact she was victorious in her first run-in with a very strong set of emotions. Likewise, maybe the B- was not only totally innocent, but something of an accomplishment on her part. Maybe she was “getting an F” because he had mistakenly misplaced some assignments that he later gave full credit in the grade book. If you never ask, you shield yourself not just from bad news, but from good news, too.

The bottom line, though is that you are right on this count: She doesn’t have to say anything. She can just move on and move out of this situation, and keep going. There are innocent explanations for such a grade change. Assume that must be the case, and don’t worry about it.