The weekend before last, I attended two concerts: Cold War Kids at Bates, and Janelle Monae at Bowdoin. I am a huge music fan and absolutely love going to live shows. I have hosted a weekly radio show for many years, first at the UT Austin radio station, KVRX, and now at the Bates radio station, WRBC. As you can imagine, I went to concerts frequently during my grad school days in Austin (I mean, what better place than the self-proclaimed live music capital of the world for that?). The things that’s new these days, especially when attending these college-sponsored shows, is that I am no longer one more person in the crowd. I am a professor, and in many cases the math professor of a lot of the people at the show. That weekend, I may have recognized about a dozen or more of my former students (there were probably many more in the crowd). This was very strange and uncomfortable, but I couldn’t really decide why. In this post, I want to share some of my thoughts on the subject of how close is too close when it comes to socializing with students.
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