I was sitting in the same classrooms, taking lectures from some of the same professors they would later meet when my new students were born. I was dancing my way through fraternity parties and living in my first apartment when they were learning to walk.
Most of the freshman entering college this year were born in 1996. Perhaps this is why my students no longer say they are surprised by how young I am. Either I’m getting older or they’re getting younger. I would like to think it’s the second one.
When I first started teaching in Fall 2003, I worried that I was too close to my students’ ages. The 26-year-old version of me created obsessively clear boundaries between myself and my students—some of whom were the same age as my younger siblings and knew my undergraduate classmates.
My fear of being considered a peer instead of a professor is gone. My new students don’t know who JonBenet Ramsey was. They were in kindergarten when the Sept. 11 terror attacks occurred.
Other items I found interesting from Beloit’s 2018 Mindset List are:
- They think of Harry Potter, not John Lennon, when they see wire-rimmed glasses.
- They think a pound sign is a hashtag.
- Courts have always been overturning bans on same-sex marriages.
- Joe Camel has never introduced one of them to smoking.
- Cloning has always been a fact, not science fiction.
- Ads for prescription drugs, noting their disturbing side effects, have always flooded the airwaves.
- Whether to embrace fat or spurn it has been a front page debate all their lives.
- There has always been “TV” designed to be watched exclusively on the web.
- There has always been a national database of sex offenders.
- They have never had to hide their dirty magazines under the bed. They just look online.
- Bill Gates has always been the richest man in the U.S.
- While the number of Americans living with HIV has always been going up, American deaths from AIDS have always been going down.
- Two-term presidents are routine, but none of them ever won in a landslide.
- One route to pregnancy has always been through frozen eggs.
- They have probably never used Netscape as their web browser.
- The rate of diagnosed diabetes has always been shooting up during their lifetime.
- “Good feedback” means getting 30 likes on your last Facebook post in a single afternoon.
- Their collection of U.S. quarters has always celebrated the individual states.
Yep. I’m officially old. When the heck did that happen?
cloudspark says
ThinDifference profkrg for them, popcorn has always been popped in a microwave and movies have always been available out of the theater.
TheNapkinDad says
I started teaching community college when I was 30. Most of the younger students were within 5 years of my age. Most of the older ones were 10 years or more away from my age. They were old. My younger students and I were cool, we got it. We were all buddies and pals and had a great time getting the same jokes, feeling easy about computers and technology. 9 years later when I left teaching, I was old. The younger ones looked at me as dad all of a sudden and the older ones and I were talking a lot about our kids and jobs and finances. I was old.