Getting Old (or even older)

The lives of educators, like the lives of the rest of us, are littered with milestones. We remember teaching our first class, we remember when we failed our first student, and we remember the first - and last - time we walked into class with our fly open.

Recently I reached a milestone. Or perhaps it was a grave marker.

Just last week, a former student of mine came to take a tour around Lake Tahoe School with her children. Which means that next year, should she enroll her kids, I will, officially, be teaching a second generation.

Officially, that will make me old. Or even older.

For me, one of the pleasures of teaching has always been that it keeps me young. After all it's tough to feel all that old when your students are still enthralled with the Power Rangers, solving for "x," or worried about acne. And students are notoriously bad at guessing your age; either a teacher is 24 or he is 53. There is no in between.

But at some point (perhaps it was around the time a student guessed that I was 53) I came to the abrupt realization that my students were - and always would be - the same age, and that I was actually getting old. Or even older.

I couldn't seem to understand the whole convoluted universe of Pokémon characters. I didn't appreciate being able to tell, in distressing detail, what color and kind of underwear my students wore. I didn't know who Clay Aiken was, and I didn't even really care.

Instead I found myself nodding in agreement while listening to an interview with Tom Friedman (author of The World is Flat) on National Public Radio when he said something along the lines of "The difference between the Chinese and American education systems is that in China, Bill Gates is Britney Spears, while in America, Britney Spears is . . . well . . . Britney Spears."

And that's when I sensed that perhaps I was getting old. Or even older.

When my partner, also a teacher, and I had found out that we were going to have a child of our own, we realized that we had a problem, a problem from which many teachers no doubt suffer. Namely, that it is virtually impossible to come up with a name for your own child because there are hundreds and hundreds of names that conjure up visceral evocations of the hundreds and hundreds of students you have had in your hundreds of classes.

As we were ransacking our brains to find an appropriate name that didn't reek of negative connotations from being intimately connected with this student or that student, we had an epiphany - we had taught a lot of students. That meant that we were getting old. Or even older.

And now it is official. I have come to point in my life where I have come to understand that I am officially old. I no longer get carded when I buy beer. The Fed Ex guy refers to me as "Sir." In English class the other day, not one student got my reference to a Bruce Springsteen song. In fact none of them had ever heard of Bruce Springsteen.

And now I'm on the verging of teaching my students' children. That definitely makes me old. Or even older.

--Steve McKibben
1/21/07