In the last few weeks of classes, especially during Spring semester when the weather lightens everyone's mood, my students and I are looser in class and the discussion often digresses into things completely unrelated to the task at hand. The other day, after several such digressive moves away from the exercise I had set them to do, my students started asking me about where I'd gone to college. I don't make it a habit of divulging personal information, but when asked, I try to be forthright, so I told them. Then one of my students said something like, “oh yeah, I knew you went there, 'cause I googled you.”

The student had found something I’d written for my alumni magazine and also some links to stuff from graduate school. The alumni magazine piece mentions printculture, but apparently he wasn’t interested enough to check out this site. There’s nothing about me online that I would mind sharing in casual conversation, but because I don’t keep a personal webpage or anything that’s out there for public consumption, finding out that someone knows stuff about me that I didn’t tell them is slightly, well, unnerving is too strong a word, especially since my student is genial and has shown no signs of strange devotion, but it’s slightly weird.

Actually, come to think of it, it’s not so much that I’d been googled that was weird; it was finding out that I’d been googled by one of my students. It went against the general assumption that students (i.e. undergrads) aren’t curious about their teachers, beyond wondering whether they’re hard or easy graders, and don’t really think of them as having lives or identities outside the classroom. There was no occasion for me to ask him why he’d googled me or what he’d hoped to find, and to raise the question later would have made too big a deal of it. I know I’m intensely curious about them, but I don't expect that they're interested in me as anyone other than the person at the front of the class.

I think it was during that same class session that the conversation turned to the Facebook, which apparently most of my students have joined and frequent on a regular basis. (There’s an article in this week’s New Yorker about the young founder of the Facebook and its incredible success.) “Oh yes, I’ve heard of this Facebook, and I’m curious about what goes on in it,” I said. Several of my students (not the one who'd googled me) suggested I should join (you just need a valid university email address), and they were willing to “sponsor” me as it were, so that my profile would presumably be linked to some of theirs. Although I’ve read about how the Facebook works, I’m still a little fuzzy about the spatial logic of this social network. In any case, we all had a good laugh about it. But a part of me was genuinely tempted by the idea of getting a glimpse into this new virtual student world that I’d only read about. I remember crowded basement parties with a loud band and floors sticky with beer, but the online Facebook is a student experience that didn’t exist in my day, with new ways of creating group and self identities; it’d certainly be interesting to know what kinds of user groups my students had joined, how they created their online personas, and so on. I’m not interested in befriending my students or hanging out with them, even virtually. But, working so intensively with their writing, a process in which each student’s personality and attitude play a sizeable role in their learning, I like to know what makes them tick, how their attitudes toward learning and writing and intellectual risk and success and failure were shaped, what their passions are, how they see themselves. The Facebook could provide a lot of clues . . . and a lot of entertainment.

But even though there are no rules against my logging on—in fact, at many if not most schools, administrators use the site to monitor student activities—I would feel I was crossing a line in venturing into that world. It’s one thing to overhear student conversations in the student center or while waiting for the light to change at a street corner, but it’s another to follow them back to their dorm rooms and listen in. It's not so much scruples about privacy of information—I'm sure many of the user groups would be silly and adolescent, and because the users control access to what they put up about themselves, it's not like I would be privy to deep dark secrets. My reluctance has more to do with privacy of space; like walking into their dorm rooms, wandering around on the Facebook would feel like trespassing into their territory for what was at bottom a voyeuristic curiosity to see how kids behave with each other, to see what they're like when they're not students in my classroom or my office. So, it's the context, more than the content, of their interactions that I would feel I was invading.

E Hayot has written here about the vexed category of the “personal” in student-teacher relationships, and the limitations of drawing rigid lines between professional and personal, or of thinking such lines are even possible to draw and maintain. The questions he poses there interest me deeply, but there seem to be few occasions for real discussion of the complexities, without the typical knee-jerk responses E identifies. In my view, the boundaries between students and teachers are necessarily porous, and there are ways to be personal within the professional parameters of your role as teacher, without forgetting the power differential and thinking you're friends. The big gray zone between “strictly professional” (whatever that means) and “illicitly sexual” exists for a reason, and it's up to teachers to work out the ethical dimensions of their role without their behavior having to be legislated and policed into a narrow box. The boundaries are porous, but they're there, and knowing where they are and when and how they can be crossed is, it seems to me, part of the job description.

In the end, I like that my student could tell me he'd googled me. I like that my students felt comfortable inviting me to join the Facebook, even if in jest. But I also feel a responsibility not to take them up on it, a responsibility as much to my sense of myself as a teacher as to my students' well-being.