25 Biggest Mistakes Teachers Make and How to Avoid Them

Mistake
8
Inappropriate
Teacher–Student
Relationships
SCENARIO 8.1
My Teacher, My Friend?
My worst experience with a teacher was my senior year in high school. I was taking AP
chemistry, and I needed to write about some research I had done for a scholarship
essay for college. My chemistry teacher and I came up with a project for me, developing
a lab for students, and I stayed after school one day to go through a stack of lab
manuals, looking for ideas. As I sat in the lab looking through the books, my teacher
hung about and started telling me the sad story of his life—his past few years of unemployment,
his having to go back to teaching in order to work. He had often acted like
he considered me a friend or perhaps even a colleague since I was the best student in
the class and was planning to teach. He would call me up and explain to me his rationale
for the seating chart and suggest that I consider using it someday, and explaining
the seating chart involved telling me other students’ grades. This teacher had a very
unprofessional manner toward me and overstepped the conventional boundaries
between teachers and students. I did not respect him as a teacher and therefore did
not learn very much from him.
Each age level has its own rules
of social interaction and socialization.
Henson and Eller (1999) investigated
the developmental nature of
friendships and found that adolescent
reasons for being friends differ
remarkably from adult reasons.
They found that adolescents wanted
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