Preaching to the choir
When you work for Corporate America like I do, you often have to take online training courses. I don’t mean educational courses about jobs. I’m not sure *anyone* (including me) could write a coherent course on how to do my particular job.
These courses are more to remind people of the ethics surrounding their job. Bribery, security, etc. There’s always a multiple choice quiz at the end and being a life-long straight A student, I am always a little nervous about taking the quiz even though I almost always get 100% and if I do miss a question it’s usually because I didn’t read it carefully or it involves an alphabet soup of acronyms that I can never remember. But mainly the questions have common sense answers. You don’t hand your brother-in-law’s company a contract without running it up the corporate chain and you don’t let people in the door behind you if they don’t have a badge. That kind of stuff.
This year, for the first time, we were served up a training course on sexual harassment, to use an “umbrella” term for a wide variety of scenarios. Amazon Woman and I were talking about this course last Friday (we both tend to do training on Fridays) and I said something like, “I couldda written that course.”
I mean. College piano teacher (male, divorced) gets the hots for 20-year-old me and invites me over to dinner. “I’ve invited a group of students over.” Um, yeah, one girl and her BOYFRIEND. I survived that night by asking (on the sly) the girl/boyfriend for a ride home and I grew a pair right then, boy oh boy. So when the orchestra director tried to crash my practice room, I gave him the 70s version of what we now call the side-eye and ushered him out as politely as I could.
I was annoyed in both of these cases and others because I couldn’t figure out why these guys thought they might be attractive to MEEEE.
Overall I haven’t really encountered a lot of sexual harassment in my various careers. The reasons are too complicated to articulate here tonight but for one thing all of the male bosses I worked for had stable marriages and respected the quality of my WORK. Any low-level harassment was perpetrated by people who didn’t have any control over my livelihood. Plus in my Childhood Career, the GG also worked there and I’m sure that was a deterrent to any attempts to mess with me.
Now of course I’m a baggy old bag and nobody is all that interested in getting into my “pants”. But why oh why oh why oh why do we have to keep talking about this stuff? As annoyed as I am about having to take training about this kind of stuff, I guess we are doing it because there are some people who STILL DON’T GET IT! I did pass the course with flying colors!
November 16th, 2020 at 7:44 pm
Every year courses about sexual harassment between adults and adults to children take up a lot of my teacher training time. I roll my eyes because most of it is common sense. Should I give a student a ride home in my car? Is it OK to discuss my sex life with a student? Should I tell suggestive jokes in the staff room? Is it OK to pat a co-worker on the butt? Eye roll.
November 17th, 2020 at 8:39 am
Margaret, did you ever have a student pester you about going out with him? I did, and my response to when was, “How about the 12th?’
Beat, Beat, Beat.
“of Never!!!”
My sons were older than he was for gosh sakes!
November 17th, 2020 at 7:48 pm
Pooh-When I was a young teacher, there were some students who had crushes on me, but I don’t think there were any that were bold enough to invite me out. The 12th of never!! 🙂 One of my teachers married one of his students; a friend of mine was in the same class with this person and said that it was obvious that they were interested in each other. Ewwww. They are still married to this day though and have several children together.