Having been a college professor for some 25 years, I some-times experience in class what might be called a reverse Dorian Gray moment: While everyone else in the room is the same youthful age my students have always been, I am all-too-visibly getting older. Sure, I am in “the best shape of my life,” as evidenced by the fact that I can jog five miles at a stretch (though I’d better stop at three if I don’t want my right knee to buckle when I walk down stairs). I probably couldn’t do that 25 years ago, although, to be frank, it never occurred to me to try back then. The very fact that I now take pride in making it that far is a pretty sure indication that I am getting older.
I’m certainly old in the eyes of my students. As if I needed any confirmation, my college-freshman daughter is always willing to remind me. She seems purposely to forget how old I am, just so she can ask me what my age is. When I tell her, she reacts with a mixture of wonder and pity before responding, reflectively, “That’s old.” That’s what I see in students’ eyes. How old am I? As old as their parents. That’s old.
This probably bothers me more than I’d like to admit. Feeling or being deemed old would bother anyone, especially in this country that worships youth and is terrified of aging. For veteran college professors, there’s an extra twinge, as they see the new crop of 18-year-olds arrive each fall, just as the days are growing shorter and colder. The first freshmen I taught were born in the first Eisenhower administration; this year’s class barely recalls when Ronald Reagan left office or when the Berlin Wall fell, let alone when it was built. Watching American Graffiti on videotape with me last summer must have felt to my daughter something like my first glimpse of a clip from an Andy Hardy movie.
Can I do anything about this widening disparity in age between my students and me, other than to observe, along with T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, “I grow old ... I grow old ...”? Like him, I sometimes wonder, “Shall I part my hair behind?” -- or, to bring things more up-to-date, draw my thinning hair into a ponytail or get some body part pierced or tattooed? I suppose I could conduct an archaeological dig in the bottom of the attic closet for some back-in-fashion clothes, hoping there would be enough fabric in reserve to let out the waist and seat. But, like Prufrock, I hesitate. I suspect that any such step would smack all-too-pathetically of a “midlife crisis” (too bad a professor’s salary doesn’t have enough margin for a little red sports car or a face-lift), or of what was described in a popular book of the 80’s as the “Peter Pan syndrome.” And it would only reinforce the hard reality of what might be called the “Wendy syndrome” -- whose sufferers learn that there is no returning to Neverland.
Things were not always so. Once, I had what I (perhaps mistakenly) felt was a special rapport with my classes, by dint of earning my doctorate and begin-ning teaching when I was in my mid-20’s. I remem-ber growing a beard and wearing a tie on the cam-pus, so I could look a little older than my students. In spite of that, just after I arrived, I was asked by a senior colleague at a reception for undergraduates what courses I was taking. In those days, I seemed to be able to communicate more easily with the students. When I tried to explain Walt Whitman by pointing out that his poetry was one of the antecedents of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” the allusion drew a knowing nod rather than the blank looks it would elicit a few years later. Even when those looks began, I still felt some kind of connection, a mutual understanding based on the fact that, even if my students and I did not share a frame of reference, I could still recall what it was like to see the world through their eyes.
I liked to think that such understanding made me a more effective teacher: not just a person who imparted what he knew, but one who recalled how it felt to discover the things I spoke of for the first time, and who intuitively sensed what kind of a guide was needed to enable students to do their best exploring on their own. Today, one of my biggest concerns as a teacher is that I may have less of that sense. There’s a paradox here: While, in the fullness of time, I have probably developed a richer knowledge of the subjects I teach, I sometimes feel less able to convey what I know as effectively as I wish. I have more to say, but, as I am talking -- longer, it seems -- I wonder whether less is getting across.
Some external indicators -- notably the university’s teaching-evaluation forms that students fill out at the end of each term -- may verify that. Both the numerical ratings and the essay comments I used to receive were extremely favorable. Now, while the numbers are hardly shabby, they have dipped slightly. And I note in reading the negative comments (what instructor pays attention to the positive ones?) that a few students complain about not knowing “what he wants” or, worse, that what I want is for them to say things as I would say them, though they also complain that it’s impossible to know what that might be. Those comments hurt -- both to the extent that I am sure they are unjustified, and that I fear they may be true.
Can I take comfort in the notion that the students, not I, have changed? Perhaps, since they didn’t used to complain as much about the amount of work in courses that have always had a very similar load, or about how I have always graded papers. Or have they felt the way they do now, but didn’t express it?
Maybe the problem, such as it is, is that I am the same age as their parents, so the distance that I -- and perhaps they -- feel between us is part of the sometimes healthy and necessary questioning of authority. Besides, being like their parents can also help me out, since I am at a window in my own life when I have children their age. In a broad sense, I know what books they used to read while growing up, what TV shows and movies they watched, what toys they played with; a reference here and there to Cabbage Patch Kids, He-Man figures, Transformers, Oregon Trail, or Ghostbusters can trigger a shared remembrance of things past. In other words, if I cannot tell, any more than I can with my own children, just what is on their minds, I have at least some sense of what is in it. (I fully realize that I may be indulging in a self-serving delusion.) In any case, as my youngest child works her all-too-rapid way through college, the window will close. Once it’s shut, the shade will be drawn, and little light will come through.
There may be a glimmer on the horizon, however, if I can just hang on long enough. Like the clothes in the attic closet, things have a funny way of coming back around. Last summer, my daughter gladly paid an outrageous price for the privilege of driving 50 miles and enduring a three-hour traffic jam to see in concert, of all people, Bob Dylan and Paul Simon -- who are older than I am. Go figure. And, once safely beyond the age of my students’ parents, perhaps I will pass into the enchanted realm of being a charming old codger, appreciated precisely because I can recall firsthand the era when the Beatles, if not dinosaurs, roamed the earth.
Still, for the time being, my hope is that I am successfully adapting to the present circumstances. I think there is little point in trying to make believe that the age difference does not matter, or in trying to convince today’s students that I was once their age, or (as one of my colleagues put it more directly) that drugs and sex existed before they were 15 years old. The best approach may be neither to assume that I can see things as my students do nor to expect them to receive with awe and reverence the wisdom of my years. It may be, instead, to try to use whatever perspective has come with these years to integrate more fully into my teaching an awareness that the difference exists. To do that involves keeping in mind the timeless value of being willing and able to listen in the classroom, as well as to speak, and of trying to find out where students are to help them discover where they might go. In any event, probably the best policy is to skip the ponytail, which at least leaves open the possibility of becoming one of those professors who is so uncool he’s cool.
Carl Smith is a professor of American studies, English, and history at Northwestern University.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B20
