When you teach 15-year-olds, as I do, the generation gap is
glaringly obvious on a routine basis. As yearbook adviser, I chuckle at
teachers who obsess over how their pictures will appear in print. To our target
audience of 14-19 year-olds, anyone with the least hint of smile lines or crows’
feet is hopelessly over-the-hill, so why worry about whether the camera
captured your very best angle?
However, over the last few years another insidious gap has
crept into the high school I call home base. The administration’s preference
for “moldable” candidates in concert with the budgetary preference for teachers
at the lowest rung of the salary scale have combined to produce an influx of
teachers who share more cultural memories with my children than they share with
me.
It’s always been the case in education that any given school
would have a mix of teachers varying in age and experience, but the pendulum
has shifted lately, and the bell curve at my school is no longer smooth and
balanced. Instead, it bulges at the lower end, peaking at approximately age 30,
and making a rapid descent thereafter.
Spending my days mingling with more than 1900 teenagers as
well as dozens of colleagues who have yet to experience their 10th
high school reunion, my own advancing age is a realization that cannot help but
slap me “upside the head.” So, as I spend my weekends trying to clean my house
before another school week begins, I do stop now and then to recognize my
affinity with the dirt I’m trying to sweep. Here’s to you dirt - we’re both
really, really old.
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