Stephen Vincent wrote:
> Without questioning the power and manipulative nature of sexual relations between a student and his or her professor, I would like to hear thoughts on whether or not good teaching is by definition "erotic". And by that I do not mean something that leads to sexual unions between professor and student(s).  But something of a relationship more akin to a dance, at times sensual. then counter-sensual (some might even say "meta-sensual" in its arrival at intellectual resolution and pleasure,)    I can think remember some of my best experiences as a student were when a teacher embraced the subject as a "real body" of knowledge, as well as invited our embrace of that "body."   In terms of poetry, when there is a resentment against the discussion of the poem is primarily defined as a theoretical object, isn't that resentment fueled by the sense that poem is literally losing its body, the one we, as readers, want to embrace most fundamentally on the level of
>  sensations, syllable by syllable, accent by accent? 
>
> Stephen Vincent
> http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
>   

That is an astonishing question because it surfaces something I've said 
to people for years but never dared bring out in the open for fear of 
being labeled a "prevert" or freakazoid (I am both).  And that is: since 
I first went in front of a classroom back in 1970, when a class and 
teacher fall into "sync," something of an erotic relationship 
developed.  Not "let's check into the motor inn," but a reciprocal 
exchange of engagements. The sensation is palpable, charged, there are 
waves of energy going back and forth.  You and the class hear each 
other, sense each others' presences.  Eye contact is *not* avoided.  
There is something if not sexual then balletic in the energy.  I am an 
extremely clumsy person prone to tripping over my own feet like Chevy 
Chase on the old Saturday Night Live show.  But when the chemistry is 
there, I feel like Baryshnikov and can delude myself that I'm moving 
that way.  I feel like a panther prowling the room, but unlike Rilke's 
unlucky panther, no bars confine me.

The students actually talk to me and each other.  The teacher actually 
talks to them.  We respond to each other.  I can transmit my "wired" 
mindset to the room: I feel magical and it is communicated. This is not 
my endless grandiosity at work, it is something I've experienced for 
years, and it's why I come back even when some days are total torpor.  
It does not happen all the time.  But for those four or five days per 
semester, it's what keeps me going because I never know when the moment 
will occur.

ken

-- 
Ken Wolman	http://awfulrowing.wordpress.com/	http://www.petsit.com/content317832.html
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"All writers are hunters, and parents are the most available prey."--Francine du Plessix Gray