Impressionableness

While I would not want to ally myself with Miss Brodie's fascism, and am not ambitious or presumptuous enough to claim that any student is mine for life--change, thank goodness, is recursive--, my students' impressionableness meant that by the middle of the semester of their English honours course in Queer Theory they were making zines and dvds, even if somewhat nervously, were queering popular culture, and were appropriately punctuating their work with explicit and even colloquial sexual references, albeit sometimes only after asking permission to do so.

I do fancy that he meant something more--a certain softness of nature, an impressionableness, a sensibility too near the surface.