If connecting with kids is a prerequisite to building positive relationships with students, I would like to cite a concern, a clear and present danger related to aging.
I don’t understand the children any longer.
Whereas 20 years ago when I began teaching my main preoccupation was distinguishing myself from the youth, distancing myself so as to prove I was a person of authority and import (“yes, old lady, I DO belong in the teacher’s lounge!”) today I find myself increasingly befuddled, scratching my head in a corner, confounded.
I first really felt it in my mid-thirties when my youngest was old enough to express her preferences. She became obsessed with those mini cheap plastic toys and watching “unboxing videos” and I found myself suddenly lost at sea. I am one who easily suspends my disbelief. I find relating and sympathizing with a wide variety of preferences and differences as natural as breathing. But something about the age gap between she and I leaped a generational logic.
I really, honestly, vividly and suddenly didn’t get it.
There was that entire fifth grade year of Zander Rust in which I needed a dictionary to decode his friend-speak: “bussin bussin” and “cap” and the like. This was my only son, the one I had grown inside of me and then given the gift of language. A Christmas or two ago my nephew spent a good 45 minutes on the couch in earnest trying to explain “Skibidity” to me. I was more confused when he finished than when he started. How could they play me like this? (At least I’m not alone; thanks Wall Street Journal author lady.)
Youtube is apparently overtaking all of the more traditional entertainment content platforms like Netflix. I could have told you that was coming. For years my youngest has been generally averse to watching coherent storylines and plots on shows and has been more apt to turn to youtube shorts. I stand peering over my two younger childrens’ shoulders like an anthropologist observing a culture I am utterly unfamiliar with, marveling at the strange assortment of things their algorithm has deemed interesting for their viewing pleasures. There are animal videos, teacher videos (!), so many basketball videos, teens talking quickly and loudly about what they believe about the world with circular logic, a few makeup and skincare routines, ladies talking about what it is like to be pregnant (WHAT?!), those weird AI generated ones where they say “put your finger up if . . . “
I do not get it.
There was that obsession Zander had a few years ago for Prime, quite possibly the grossest drink ever invented. Prime says “I’ll take you, flavor, and I’ll increase you times 100 so it’s basically undrinkable! ENJOY!”
I could go on. I haven’t even begun to delve into the senselessness of intensely sour candy or games like “Adopt Me” in Roblox that insist that you “not break a streak” and spend your free time frantically taking care of fictional things. (All I want to do if I ever find a spare moment is stare blankly at something green outside holding a warm caffeinated drink.)
So thus is the life of becoming middle aged. Just as we begin to notice wrinkles and hairs popping out of our chins, we get the double-whammy of suddenly not knowing the same bands or pop culture references as the youth that populate our classrooms. And yes, it takes more sleuthing and questioning than it used to on my part to make sense of my students’ interests. But there is also a distinct gift from this sudden gulf of separation. We have a wider view. And as we ask all of these questions with the goal of better-understanding, humility invariably follows the initial shock and judgment. We are enlarged by our students and they are, on the good days, enlarged by us. We are at work all day every day to reach across the gulf. And we care about each other enough to reach out on both sides to make that stretch less strain-inducing for all parties involved. In the end, on the good days, we leave more flexible, loose, less stiff.
There is something else too. While I understand my students and my personal children less and less on the basis of the small stuff (the media we consume, the technologies we use to consume that media, and the language we employ to describe the world), I think in the larger-more-important sorts of ways, 42 year old Julie “gets” youth BETTER than 21 year old Julie did. I no longer believe that connecting to youth has much to do with fashion or pop culture. Forever and always until the end of time, students are good at sniffing out faculty that care about them and that will be stable mentors and adults into what is to come. They don’t need us as peers to gossip about the latest thing. They do need some tips for how to get into college, or how to read that article like a historian, or how to decode blends, or how to show up and work hard even when the work of the school day isn’t coming easily.
I believe life is filled with ironies and this is just another example. The less I understand the children, the more I can really see them. The more inscrutable the generation coming seems, the more common ground somehow gets unearthed.
Or perhaps, the older we get, the more room we have to love.