You have the same respect, power and influence whether they are in your class or the class next to you.

Very well said. Unfortunately I fear it will on deaf ears due to their ears not being any where near the organ they do most of their thinking with!

I'm amazed that anyone would argue their side. This isn't an issue that gets hashed out in sociology class. It's no more undecided morally or in legal terms than is teachers beating students. The jury has convened on this one, a long, long time ago.

Where I lived in China businassmen (misspelling deliberate) smoked wherever they damned well pleased, even if it were in a restaurant with signs posted forbidding smoking. That could be annoying, but some of my Western colleagues would also bust out the cigarettes in the restaurant, er, because they were in China, er, even if it was against the law. I'm not saying they'd smoke discreetly at all, I'm saying they'd chain smoke at the table with the ashtray propped among the entrees. It was if the science behind why one can't inflict one's smoke on others no longer was factual, but a mere cultural curiosity left back in the West. Almost every student can't stand smoking, incidentally, so they were visibly uncomfortable at times when they were present. The point I'm getting at is that Westerners in China will find any excuse to do what they feel like, and blame it on China, even if they know they are being rude and inconsiderate, or actually much worse, in the case of the philandering "teachers".

Actually, the foreigners would smoke more than the Chinese businassmen and bossholes. This brings me to another strange phenomenon I've observed in Asia, which is Westerners "going native" in ways that are actually an affront to the native culture. The mind boggles as to why people would go to a country like Thailand to get a tattoo, for example, and then go around shirtless thinking they are closer to the culture by being "noble savages" when in Thai culture they are being really disrespectful. Ah well, I can forgive ignorance, but not ignorance that harms other people, especially when someone brags about it online.

Back to more important things than this forum. However, I do really like that voices are coming out in defense of young female students, and against older patriarchal exploiters. It was starting to stink like a sexpat bar in here.