Hot For TA
I have been studying ethics at the local university. Two nights a week, lectures, notes, other students herded into neat rows and retracting chairs. I am an ethicist now. As an ethicist, I find no shortage of moral conundrums in my daily business. Is jaywalking wrong? Is refusing to purchase mushy brown broccoli an unfair judgment of bacteria? Is General Tao’s chicken an misappropriation of military heroism for no good end? And the oldest conundrum of all…is it wrong to be Hot For Teacher?
I want to do well in this class, a class for which the TA happens to be smoking hot. While good-looking in the conventional sense, she carries a steely academicism and seriousness combined with a wry smile that makes my heart melt to puddles. She’ll be the first one to read my essays, an act for which there is potential for mischief. I could, hypothetically, write an essay on the ethics of asking out one’s TA in a term paper. Alternately, I could study hard and write the finest, most erudite defrocking of contemporary ethics the university had ever seen. Thus, the dilemma. My teacher-lust could ostensibly end up making me try hard and do well in the class. So, is it wrong to use the desire to snog one’s TA as a primary impetus for academic success? I want to learn, but also to learn how her lipstick tastes. Construct the scene—my sultry TA, curled up on the sofa with a nice stem of Chianti on the coffee table, girlishly nibbling a nail while reading my musings on Kant and the universality-particularity principle as applied to the ethics of euthanasia. Are late nights in the library by the burning candle not worth it?
Given that our relationship is of a commercial nature, and a rather expensive one at that, shouldn’t an advance be considered a breach of an established social contract? Or would the informal and interpersonal nature of the classroom allow a notional breaking of the fourth wall of academia? Sure it would.
Now, is it wrong? Well, if I am to view a TA as a fellow student rather than a representative of the university, surely the boundaries of this relationship have license to grow past the scrape of chalk on a blackboard, and into the scrapes of fingernails across my fleshy back?
I’m just thinking out loud here.
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(3 comments)
Hey…actually I tried to syndicate your site, but no dice. The references are all there on the page, but the URL’s break. Looks like apache isn’t set up to serve those XML files from the http://www.eponym.ca/feed/rss/ etc. directories and you need to add the filename to those URL’s or setup apache to serve them as default pages.
According to my ethics, by the way, if you try to lay your TA by making a ham-handed pass, then that’s totally unethical. However if you lay her by the pure power of your ethics writing skills, and you totally represent triple-x-large-style so she can’t help but ask you out, then that’s completely kosher.
ethics are for the weak and faint-hearted, schoolmarms and environmentalists, to keep them docile and out of the way; ethics are not meant for TA-layers. go for it. we’re all pulling for ya.
Alas, my RSS feed is troublesome. WordPress Inc. hasn’t thought to address the lack of documentation on making a proper feed, so I haven’t a clue how to fix it. Thanks for pointing it out, I’ll hack away at it…
Play on, playas.