I'm not questioning Ross Geller's knowledge of paleontology (mainly because I know next to nothing about paleontology) but there's no denying that his teaching style is idiosyncratic at best. This is a professor who attempts to solve a scheduling difficulty by coming to class on rollerskates and fakes a British accent for his first few weeks, among other standard sitcom hijinks. And that's not even counting the time he had sex in one of the exhibits when he was working in the museum. There's also a plotline where he dates one of his students, the twenty-year-old Elizabeth. This is very much played for laughs in the show, although in the real world rules exist for a reason. Sure, their relationship worked okay on the show because Ross is essentially a good guy (and Elizabeth has a terrifying dad to keep him in line) but if this was happening in a drama you'd expect one of the many ways that things could go wrong to be explored. Like what happens when they breaks up and Elizabeth's ex-boyfriend now controls her grade and essentially her future? What happens if he uses the threat of bad marks to push her into sex? Or even if he behaves like a perfect gentleman, what happens to the other students who are being graded on a curve and suffer through one person suddenly getting suspiciously good marks? Or what happens when she turns in a genuinely bad essay and he gives her an honest mark, for that matter? There are rules which prevent someone in a position of responsibility from getting too involved with people in their care. This is the reason you can't date your doctor (other than them knowing all the embarrassing things on your medical history) or a teacher, or a professor, whether you're over the age of consent or not. But Elizabeth wanted to date him, you might say. And yes, she did. But part of being a professor is that you're expected to be more responsible than the students.
Kate Taylor has a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing and an MRes in Creative Writing. Her nonfiction, reviews and other articles have appeared on Cuckoo Review and Mookychick as well as WhatCulture. Her fiction has been published in Luna Station Quarterly, Eternal Haunted Summer and in anthologies by Paizo and Northumbria University Press. She is 23 and lives in the North of England.
