What do you say to a student when he says to you aggressively, “You don’t have to get up in my face like that!”? How do you respond when in fact all you were doing was trying to be “reasonable” and explain why you were calling him down in the first place, and doing it by squatting down to be at eye-level with him, talking to him like a man? Is this blatant disrespect, or something else?

I’m not even sure I know what it means to be “in someone’s face about something.” I’m assuming that it means the chest to chest, strutting peacock type of testosterone-laden behavior I saw myself as a student many times. Of course I wasn’t doing that when students said those lovely words to me, so what’s going on?

An invasion of someone’s personal space is the only explanation I can come up with. In trying to be respectful — and I do believe teachers should be as respectful to their students as they expect their students to be to them — it seems I crossed an unknown, unseen boundary and caused offense. Or perhaps he was just testing me, seeing what he could get by with?