“It just sort of happens,” English teacher James Daniel says about forming friendly relationships with his students. “You just sort of click. It’s about common interests; it could be about books, movies, or a similar sense of humor.” This was the case for two brothers (senior Nick Tolfa and sophomore Nathan Tolfa) who are close to Daniel because of their shared interests. “They love reading and movies,” Daniel says. “We just talk about films that were made 30 years ago together.”
Teachers are some of the most important people in an adolescent’s life. The relationship between Daniel and the Tolfa brothers demonstrates how sometimes a teacher and teen have so much in common that it takes them beyond the boundaries of a simple educator-student relationship.
Ari Brenner, an Aragon alumnus and Daniel’s former student, shared the same comedic nature as Daniel. This connection ultimately led to their friendship. “We both loved improv and had fun together during class. He’d tell silly jokes and I’d tell mine, and we sort of bounced off each other,” Brenner says. Daniel, who is still in contact with Brenner, says the two have formed a close friendship. He adds, “Ari comes over to our house for dinner. He used to babysit my children.”
“He’s just the best teacher,” Brenner says about Daniel. “He’s eager to form relationships with students.” Brenner graduated from Aragon in 2010 but had Daniel as a teacher for sophomore English. “He was basically my adviser during high school. I’d come to him with college applications; I really valued his opinion,” says Brenner.
Although Brenner still views Daniel as his teacher and mentor, he says that he can call Daniel, whom he has referred to as “Jim” for the last two years, his friend. “We have a unique relationship,” he explains. “He’s both my friend and teacher. I respect him, I look up to him.” Though Brenner is away at college, his friendship with Daniel has not been strained by distance. He says, “I think we’ve gotten closer; we never got less tight. The move to college brought us to a deeper level, since there’s more to talk about.”
English teacher Jennifer Wei is another Aragon teacher who is to connected to many of her students, both current and former. Wei laughs, “Two-fifths of my job is to care for my students. I try to be threatening and caring at the same time. Idle threats are just a part of my personality, and with my humor, most students enjoy that or will laugh.”
Wei started teaching at Aragon in 2007, so some of her students from her first year of teaching have already graduated from college. “We’ll get lunch and catch up,” she says about her former students. “But we don’t hang out; we don’t go to parties together or anything like that.” Coincidentally, Wei is also a former student of Daniel’s. “Mr. Daniel encouraged me in my writing. I’d start writing a short story on the back of my spelling test and he’d read it aloud in class,” she explains. “That became a class tradition. I do it with my class now sometimes.”
Generally, most teachers become closer to students once the student is finished taking the teacher’s class. Wei believes that there is a limit, and she says, “There’s still a conflict of interest there; I still have to give [the students] grades. It is more appropriate to be friends with students after they graduate.”
Junior Sabrina Raji, who views many Aragon teachers as her friends, explains, “Teachers can have a sense of humor and joke like a friend but also be there for you like a friend. I consider Ms. Ecklund to be my friend and she treats me like an average person.”
Although the prospect of students and teachers as friends is at times conflicting, teachers will still have a large impact in their students’ lives. “Aragon was a phenomenal experience,” Brenner recalls. “But it was really the teachers that made it great. They go the extra mile. It’s a great memory for me.”
