As an advice columnist, I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of the fact that I’ve been teaching and administrating for so long (26 years and counting). Yet there is a definite drawback to all those years of experience: they have also been years of my life.
In other words, I’m getting old. Well, not old, but definitely middle aged, and although healthy, active, and relatively fit, I still sometimes feel the effects of the years when I step inside the classroom.
For one thing, my memory isn’t what it used to be. I’m not talking about remembering students’ names. I’ve never been very good at that, perhaps my greatest failing as a teacher. But I’m working on it and actually getting better.
Nor am I talking about remembering what I’ve read or things that I’ve learned. I can still recite poems I memorized as an undergraduate.
But there are times when I lose track of what I’ve told one class and what I’ve told another. I fear that sometimes this leads me, like my father or grandfather, to reiterate the same points, repeat the same examples, retell the same stories. No doubt I am in the process of becoming my father and grandfather. I just wish it weren’t happening in full view of my students.
In my defense, part of the problem (this semester, at least) is that I teach four of my five classes, including three sections of the same course, in the same room. This arrangement is in many ways quite convenient, but the familiarity of the surroundings makes it difficult to keep track of what I have or haven’t said: I may remember very clearly having told a class something in that room, but I can’t remember which class it was. I frequently have to remind myself, as I’m talking, whether it’s Monday or Tuesday, first period or second.
I also console myself with the same platitude that I offer my wife when she misplaces her car keys or her cell phone: It’s not that our memories aren’t working as well as they used to, I tell her. It’s just that there’s so much more to remember than there used to be. The memory chip is full. Whenever we download new data, we have to delete something else.
Another age-related issue I’m having is that so many of my favorite stories and examples from pop culture—or what used to be pop culture—are now hopelessly out of date.
The other day, as I was introducing the concept of peer editing, I wanted to make the point that moviemakers in Hollywood do much the same thing on a grander scale. That is, they screen movies for focus groups before releasing them to the general public. I told them that, in the original cut of Die Hard, the L.A. cop played by Reginald VelJohnson gets killed at the end. After the focus group gave that resolution an unequivocal thumbs down, the producers went back and re-shot the final scene.
I don’t know, by the way, if that story is actually true or merely apocryphal. I read it somewhere and thought it illustrated perfectly the point I wanted to make. The only problem is, hardly any of my students had ever seen Die Hard. The example, true or false, meant nothing to them.
Come on. Who hasn’t seen Die Hard? A bunch of students born in the 1990’s, apparently, for whom any movie made before they appeared on the scene might as well have been a silent picture.
So I guess I’m going to have to find some new pop culture references, which means—unfortunately—exposing myself to new pop culture. That I find the idea distasteful is no doubt also a function of age.
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