The things I shouldn't know

There are faculty members to whom students naturally gravitate. They act as counsellors, confessors, drinking buddies, friends. They are repositories of secrets, of self-revelations. I am not one of those faculty members. While I do get close to some of my students, I am generally not the person they run to when they need a shoulder to cry on or a pat on the back.

And this is ok. Knowledge in my hands is dangerous, and I caution students against revealing too much to me. Why? Because you can't expect me to just listen and not act. For example, we invited one of our returning JTA students to take part in the orientation for the prospective JTAers. He started his talk with "The first thing you do is get a fake ID..." I stood up and said, "No, no, no! You don't get to say stuff like that in an official orientation!" I'm sure all kinds of stuff goes down in my students' lives. I don't have to know all of it, because if I find out, I may have to act upon it, and people probably don't want that.