The Third Wall

In the theatre, there is a third wall, the allusion of reality that is never to be breached during a performance. It separates the actors from the audience, while allowing the appearance of a relationship. The audience knows that it's a performance, but engages with the actors who create a believable stage reality. When the final curtain falls, the actors leave the stage, change their costumes, remove their make-up, and go about their personal lives.

Such is teaching. An effective teacher must also be an effective actor who actively engages the students in a relationship that allows the instructional process to flourish. However, when the class period ends, the teacher exits the stage and resumes his/her real life, a life wherein the audience, the students, are not part of the teacher's personal circle of friends.

Students, however, seem not to understand that being friendly within a professional relationship does not make the student/teacher friends. Today, it's all about being friends and liking one another, rather than establishing a relationship that is friendly, supportive, and effective to accomplish our mutual goal: education. Students want to call teachers by their first name, feel free to contact them on their personal phones, and engage in social interaction outside the classroom as part of the student/teacher relationship. Students don't understand that assuming that relationship is actually counter-productive to the business relationship of the classroom because it becomes personal, not professional.

I do allow students to contact me via email so they can ask questions, send drafts for response, write on-line journals, and receive electronic copies of materials I use in the classroom. I do not expect and/or accept personal emails from them, a differentiation that I make very clear and reinforce with my actions, the same way that I would if we were in the actual classroom, rather than a virtual classroom. If it's business, we conduct it; if it's personal, they lose their email privileges.

As funny as this sounds, I move past the teacher-student relationship when the course ends and another course begins. I don't remember; I don't pick up where we left off when I see the former student on campus. I separate myself from each year's worth of students, replacing one group of hundreds with another. There have been so many thousands of students that, for me, maintaining the third wall is a survival skill: I cannot continue the relationship as each of us goes his/her separate way.

As the students are younger and younger, this concept is more challenging for them to understand. It is as if they have to be friends -- or we become frenemies: friendly enemies. It is the projection of their personal relationships onto their business relationships, a projection that makes me uncomfortable because it assumes a level of intimacy that I don't want to accept. Sometimes I wonder if it is this inability to separate relationships that leads young people to come onto a campus and shoot to kill: if the only columns they have are "friends" and "enemies," it somehow becomes easier to obliterate perfect strangers simply because they aren't on one's "friends" list.

I do have friends, hard to believe, from my professional life and some who sat in the seats as students, but these are individual decisions based on a complex matrix that we all [used to] have for delineating between family, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. Students seem to have two columns in their lives, very little delineation of quality indicators, and the assumption of too much too soon in personal relationships. They are socially presumptuous in a way that transcends boundaries that serve a purpose, and I'm not sure whether that's good, neutral, or wrong.

The times they are a-changing, aren't they, and if I cannot or will not change with them, it's time to retreat to the rocker with my knitting in my lap and my snoring dog at my feet, peering out the living room window once in a while to see what the world is up to today.