How do you say no?

This is for a friend of a friend of mine:

Suppose you TAed for a term and got an email from one of the kids who was not in your TA session, but sat in on your sessions. After several emails, that initially started off with a legitimate question about the exam, he asks you out? Is that crossing the TA/student line? And, how do you politely say no?

My friend of a friend would appreciate any help or advice you could give. :P

I wrote this on 18 December 06 when I was feeling .

Comment

  1. ramanan says,

    You need to bring me up more in your casual conversations in class, at work, on the bus, anywhere you are.

  2. sh!ma says,

    It’s not ME! It’s for a friend of a friend! Come on Ram! 8o|

  3. ramanan says,

    Of course, when I was saying “You”, I meant your friend. Lets call her Seema.

  4. sh!ma says,

    No, that’s too close to my name. Lets give her a nice non-ethnic name, like Joanne.

  5. tiff says,

    you should tell him that you’d be breaching your fiduciary duty as a teacher to him as a student. potential law suit should scare him away
    (well actually you’d be the one getting sued.)

    but…good job seducing little GIS boys! aha

  6. Mson says,

    haha…
    You got two options:
    1) Ask if he has any hot girl friends…and if so, bring me along to meet them, then dump the boy…

    2) You need to introduce me to this friend of a friend (so long as her name doesn’t resemble sheema)... :)

    Happy holidays!

    ..hrm.. I hope he hasn’t found your blog.. haha…

  7. mr lee says,

    Shima, it’s so unfair! No kids asked ME out. Lol.

    I only have one question: is he hot? Because then you can tell him that I have another TA who would love to give you a few sessions or two

  8. Jason says,

    It’s not totally unheard of for this friend of a friend to say yes to the student. See the following story Lisa Hjelm, BSc ’95 of Toronto spins this tale of math and love…. Stranger things have happened.

  9. sh!ma says,

    Matt, to tell you the truth, I’m not even sure what he looks like.. :s I have an idea who he is but I can’t be certain. :s
    Jason, those are awesome. I think Ram and I should put up our story there, it’d kick everyone else’s stories butt.

 
Some things to keep in mind: You can style comments using Textile. In particular, *text* will get turned into text and _text_ will get turned into text. You can post a link using the command "linktext":link, so something like "google":http://www.google.com will get turned in to google. I may erase off-topic comments, or edit poorly formatted comments; I do this very rarely.