Numbers.

“In half the time I’ll be twice my age then I’ll learn how to turn the page”

What’s not to love about a literary metaphor and play on words all twisted into one John Mayer lyric? A million ways to look at and over analyze this quote but I’ll put it this way, for me:

The person who takes action in this sentence and learns to turn the page for themselves has figured out how to live; at the same time, as he or she gets older they experience time passing so much faster than when they were young, a paradox. 

A reflective thought about experience, memory, and learning tied up with the visual of a book having its page turned. 

When I first moved from middle school to high school and taught seniors, I was exactly ten years from my own high school graduation year.  I had both my degrees, two kids, a husband, soon a dog, and had been married almost ten years. All in… well, ten years. Most of my students were mind boggled in the times that some of these details came out in class.

I knew when I started teaching that I wanted to be older than my students and that was why I stayed in middle grades during the first part of my teaching career. 

At one of our back to school team building meetings, we were asked to line up according to how many years we’d been teaching. A visual timeline of sorts as we haggled back and forth according to our tenure.  So many people had assumed it was my first year teaching that they were shocked when I said it was my 7th, lucky number 7. We did the activity another year (year 10), which I remember because I was sandwiched between a couple people whose placement surprised me. They were both way older than me, well, okay like ten years older…so my initial thought was to seriously wonder what the hell they were doing during that missing time when I’d started and they hadn’t. I hoped they hadn’t been retaking the certification test over and over trying to pass or something like that. 

One of those teachers was teacher of the year once though (inexplicably) and one of those teachers was eventually unceremoniously let go after having all his computers confiscated at school and his wife suddenly filing for divorce. 

Lest I seem ageist after considering whether forty was old, let me say this; my cross generational friendships as a teacher have been gratifying, satisfying, and enriching! I’ve had the broadest range of ages, genders, and personalities represented in both of the close groups of friends I had as a teacher and I can honestly say, age ain’t nothing but a number. That and the breadth of experience and knowledge available to friends who truly are so different is a valuable byproduct of the best friendships of my life. 

My “work husband” of sorts was another cross generational coach friend. An unlikely ally given my propensity to judge coaches harshly and his feigned curmudgeon persona. 

At first it’s true that my team leader back in the early years had an almost mom vibe to me in our friendship; but our friendship truly did have more dimension than that. In any case, at various points I think my friends and I imagined who was which family role archetype in our group and I almost always got pegged as the wild younger sibling and had a mother figure and crazy aunt type in the group to turn to for guidance along the way. We really do raise each other as teachers. When I went to surprise a shy and reluctant Janis at her retirement party after a semi-reunion of my year one teacher besties, I think that was the gist of my speech to her current school; where they’d only known her a couple years and I feared they couldn’t appreciate the depth and longevity of her career and impact. 

So I told them to look to my left and right where I was flanked by eight or ten other teachers who’d benefited from being on Janis’ team and having her guidance and very soft spoken suggestions and experience to lean on and flourish.  I admitted that I hated to use math speak but that Janis’ impact had simply been exponential. She raised us as baby teachers and grew us into people who could teach and form relationships with students that would have a ripple well beyond what we could even know. 

And we cried. But I digress. This can be the greatest job in the world. 

The oldest student I ever taught was a 7th grader named Jeremy. He was almost as tall as me at about 5’8 and depending on how he wore his hair sometimes looked taller. 

He had a mustache of sorts that I was pretty sure he shaved daily. I wasn’t used to this yet and was already baffled enough when the 6th grader I had lost a tooth. I had no idea kids that old still lost teeth. Anyway, these age contradictions are a surprisingly common feature of many schools. Your eleven year old sixth grade daughter and the fifteen year old eighth grader. 

He was very polite and had moved or something from out of state and had gone somewhere for a while and that is all I ever was informed despite trying to double check that he didn’t have any special accommodations he needed me to be making. 

Such is the nature of being a teacher; you are expected to notice things about dozens of children a day and develop a working understanding of what their normal range of behavior is so that you can notice when they seem different or something has changed or perhaps they are actually ESL, or Special Ed, or on a 504 plan, or recently had a traumatic event no one remembered to tell you about. So you really do have to be keyed in and even as a young teacher I know that I was attentive to these details about students. But in all my reaching out to ensure my own compliance in Jeremy’s education, the most I know is that he was here from somewhere and needed to pass 7th grade. 

He was the most incongruently old student I ever taught. As far as the youngest, nothing jumps out. I had a junior take my senior class a few different times. I’d say for whatever reason only maybe 1 of the 5 students was truly successful in doing so. I don’t think of my class as the type of traditionally difficult material but just interactive and mature, so something about those sixteen year olds tended to throw off the mix, I suppose.

That is hard for me to admit. I had started taking classes at our local university at a fresh sixteen years old and blended pretty seamlessly into most of my classes. I loved revealing to a professor that I was a 16 year old high school junior.  What can I say? I was motivated by that reaction, however dumb it sounds.  But the sixteen year olds I had mixed in were a truly well, mixed bag. 

One boy was the cause of a negative comment on one of my appraisals and also imitated his dad on a phone call to me that was among the weirdest I’ve had as a teacher. 

Another girl wrote sexually explicit song lyrics on her assignments, never turned work in and I couldn’t understand why she wanted to be there. 

I had a homeschool boy who came to my class to get his college credit. He was the success story. And he was still a little weird to be honest, but he did his work, participated sometimes, socialized a bit, and didn’t otherwise ruin things by being a junior in a senior class. 

A different homeschool boy deserves a shoutout here, but isn’t as germaine to the conversation since he wasn’t some weird age difference in class. 

This year, I started to feel a bit older. But I panicked only once; when my students speculated that I might actually be older than the super ambitious funeral director looking new assistant principal who was fresh out of teaching Orchestra in middle school for three years. Yes, that’s it. Part of the sentence isn’t missing. So anyway, this Abe Lincoln with lighter hair kinda look coupled with wearing a suit every single day (even Fridays) made him seem a bit stiff. 

But back to the point. Someone said they were surprised by how young this AP was. They were talking aloud in class. I allow it when it’s interesting. Or the end of the year (it was nearly the last half day til summer). Anyway. I was like, “Oh yeah? How old is he?” And they couldn’t remember. Yes, that’s how most of these youth convos go. They’ll be talking about something going on and on and when prompted for some detail– like um, the main thing they’re talking about– they’re not quite sure. 

So I let the counselor’s daughter contrive an errand to the office to casually ask the secretary how old this assistant principal was. Of course I did! I needed to be reassured that someone who was more formal than both my grandfathers put together could not possibly be younger than me. Even growing his beard, which I wouldn’t be surprised if he blow dried straight every single morning with an expressionless face, didn’t make him look older or younger. He was age-unknowable in the worst way. It wasn’t a compliment to him that you couldn’t guess his age, more of a testament to how damn stupid it was to pretend to be an old man or proper undertaker and never act human-like. 

If the building principal was an early generation robot whose mannerisms were so mechanical this guy was like a new AI machine accidentally blended with a history game on a school computer to produce him.

When we learned that he was a year and a half older than me, there was a collective sigh of relief. 

Okay, it was mostly me. 

The first year at the high school I was visited by a sanctioned door to door salesman of teacher retirement packages. Or something. I always deferred to my husband on this when we discussed things at home and utilized whatever highest interest and matching options we could; these were almost always in his employers and not the weird Non Social Security pension account that we had to pay into that I knew I will NEVER EVER EVER get anything out of probably, but planned accordingly. 

So this guy was in a nice suit; I could tell when he walked in he couldn’t be a day over 22. 

He was insistent that I take a meeting and I was curious enough.  I figured if I did it once then I could tell the rest of them no forever and ever. 

At our meeting, he was calculating how much Texas would give me when I earned the number of points necessary to retire. But I had no intention of doing that.  Let me also interject to say that setting it up like this point system kinda gamifies your life and retirement, eh?  Games and interactive gamifying is the big thing in education, I suppose. But I wasn’t planning on even trying to win this game and he wasn’t amused that I intended to retire at age 30.  “Be realistic, “ he told me. Like he had any business saying something that hilariously condescending and patronizing–but he did. 

So I said, okay, well, I started teaching when the number of points was 70 not 80, so let’s change that figure. That’s right. Not only do they use “points” like a fun retirement game, but the number of points you need to ever be able to quit working is a number that can be different depending on when you started teaching! Wow! We should have read these rules closer. 

Anyway,  based on the rule of 70, I have no idea how long he said I’d need to teach. You add your current age (mine was 27) to the number of years you’ve taught or something crazy. 

He marvelled for a minute about my age then told me about his favorite book from senior AP English: The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, a perfect book, I agreed. 

Since moving this past year and working and writing from home, I can say I got out just in time. I never felt truly old as a teacher. Whew.