Getting Personal

When students ask questions, and believe me, they will, I sometimes have no idea how to answer them.

And I’m not referring to questions about class content.

I’m referring to the personal questions. From day one of this experience, I’ve fielded questions that I expected to be asked, and questions that I never could have even dreamed to have been asked.

A few weeks ago, the questions became so bizarre that I began making a list of them. Below, I’ve typed up a fairly comprehensive list of the questions I have been asked:

What is your first name?
What is your zodiac sign?
Do you have a significant other?
Where do you live?
Where are you from?
Where did you go to high school?
Are you good at sports?
Do you know so-and-so?
When is your birthday?
How old are you?
How many siblings do you have?
Who is your favorite celebrity?
Who is your favorite author?
what is your favorite movie?
What is your favorite book?
What do you order at Skyline?
Where do you go to college again?
What is your major?

I’m sure that there are questions that I am missing from this list, but these are some of the most common/bizarre questions students have asked me.

So how do I deal with these questions?

I give my students the most vague and non-committal answer as possible. While sometimes this is less than satisfactory to my students, I'm okay with that. I think it's important to have strong relationships with my students, but I don't want my students to know too much personal information about me.

In my creative writing classes, I share my writing with my students, so if they ask a question about some of the content of my writing, I usually give them an answer if I can tell they’re not trying to make me go off topic since I’m willingly sharing that information in my writing anyway.

For example, I shared a piece I had written about a injury from when I ran cross country, so I shared that I used to be a runner.

But when students come out of left field in the middle of a lesson, as they occasionally do, I ask students to save them for after class. Not that this always stops them, as some of them are rather persistent, but usually they give up.