Dilemma

Every once in awhile I see stories on the news of those bad, bad teachers who have bad, bad relationships with students. Now with Facebook and Myspace and everything, it gets even trickier because teachers are friends with their students on those sites, and lines get all blurry. Everytime I see those stories I feel thankful that I am never planning on teaching people older than 12, and should therefore never run into this problem.

But yesterday I got a Facebook 'friend request' and then a follow-up message from a name that sounded familiar. I then realized it was a former summer school student. This student is on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum, and was 13 when I taught him 6 summers ago. This past summer, he attended a summer program at the school where I was teaching summer school. I recognized him immediately, but didn't know if he'd recognize me until he walked right up to me and said, "Hey Stace!" He has an incredible memory, so it shouldn't have been that surprising.

So. Yesterday he sent a nice facebook message telling me how he graduated from high school, and about the lifeskills program he's attending now, and how he enjoyed summer school. I'm certainly not going to accept his friend request, but I can't decide whether or not to send him a message back. I want to tell him that I'm happy to hear that he's doing so well, but I don't want to cross that line by sending an email to a former student, even though I know there's no chance of being his teacher again. Can you do that? Is it a bad idea? Am I better off ignoring him, or is it harmless to send a message back?