The Heart of the Matter: Common Ground: How Old Teachers Reach Young Students

Lou Spaventa, US

Lou Spaventa teaches and trains in California, the USA. He is a regular contributor to HLT - The Heart of the Matter series. E-mail:spaventa@cox.net

Here in California, it’s late spring and the semester is fast coming to a close. At week’s end, Santa Barbara City College will graduate another class of students, and I will be one year older than I was at last year’s graduation. In late August, the Fall 2008 semester will begin, and surely, some campus wag will send out an email with factoids such as: “The students in your class probably have never seen a manual typewriter or put a vinyl disc on a record player. Their collective impression of the Kennedy Era and the Vietnam War is roughly parallel to your own of the Roosevelt Era and World War II when you were their age. Aging Hippie has become a social epithet which they use to criticize any longhaired elder.” And the list goes on, and then what does one think, one being an aging Hippie or Vietnam Era youth? The only certainty is that the gap between those entering students, who are mostly around 18 to 20 years old, and yourself, is widening. The possibility that you are physically attractive to your students is remote. The possibility that you resemble an aunt or an uncle or more likely a grandmother or grandfather is near. The likelihood that you share the same taste in music is nil. So what do you have in common? How can you teach a group of young people with whom you have so little immediate connection?
How hard will you have to work to have students see you as a good teacher when faculty recently hired seem like they should be sitting side by side with the students they teach, and this appears to help them be automatically rated as good because of their youth? And alas! In the U.S.A. age is the ultimate put down. Anything old is somehow less good than anything new. I am guilty of this myself. I get tired of seeing the same old baseball players on my favorite teams and wish for new blood. Is this a natural part of life? Are we aging teachers condemned to fade away because we are not new and not like our students? Whatever happened to the master and apprentice idea in modern pedagogy?

First of all, I concede that there might be enough truth in the above generalizations to sink my ship of hope before it sets sail. However, being someone who doesn’t like to give up, I continue to try to reach my students. Here’s how I think I reach them, well, at least some of them.

I make myself semiliterate on popular culture. Who are the movie stars, athletes, rappers, singers, personalities, and assorted pop culture icons that they know and identify with?
What are the TV shows, movies, and songs they like and what are the fads they have been part of? What level of understanding do they have of politics, economics, world geography and history? All of this I make my own little project to find out by talking with them during the first couple of classes and by occasionally monitoring media directed at them.

The next thing I do is learn about their personal situations as much as I can without seeming to pry into their lives. Who is living alone for the first time? Who has a child? Who is coming out of some sort of addiction? Who is still struggling with a life-changing event? These are things I eventually learn in conversation with students one on one.
On the first day of class, I make a list of simple identification items to get things started. I will ask: Who is enrolled in classes for the first time? Who knows what s/he wants to do with her/his life? Who has a brother or sister enrolled at the school? Who is from Santa Barbara? Who is from another county? Another state? Another country? Who grew up speaking more than one language? I have students self-identify and share their information with each other as a beginning to making sharing a normal part of the in-class learning process.

Another strategy I use is to organize classes around issues that have no clear or pat answer, so that I am on the same level of closure as my students. An example of this would be an essay of cause and effect that I assign to students. The topic is poverty.
I ask students to come up with some reasons that a certain group of people are poor and what being poor means in terms of daily living. I have gotten some of my best essays on this topic because students are truly reading and then writing to learn. Most international students have not known poverty. Many of my local students, sons and daughters of legal and illegal immigrants, have known poverty. This past semester, a young Indian man took class time to tell us what poverty means to him and what he had experienced as part of a large Indian family which had recently migrated to California. I feel he was able to speak so clearly and from the heart on the subject because we had created a classroom environment in which we were truly trying to understand the topic, and that included me. I, as the instructor, did not have the “right” answer, and I think that helped students to understand that age does not create certainty, and that an open mind is something one can cultivate throughout a lifetime.

Finally, I use humor. I gently kid my students when they don’t do their work on time. I want them to know I know what’s going on and that I can understand to a certain extent why a student has not done his or her work. I had a student this semester who came to class every morning with sleep in his eyes and with bed hair (which incidentally is a popular style for guys in California this year). He clearly did not function well in the morning when we had class. Part of his problem in doing academic work had to do with the rhythms of his late adolescence. He simply was not comfortable starting work in the morning, and it had an effect on his production in class. I kidded him about this, and my kidding was a tacit acknowledgement that for some young people, the daily rhythm of life is different enough to create problems if they need to function intellectually in the early morning.

Perhaps there is one more thing connected to my cursory knowledge of student culture. I make my points in class by referring to events and individuals well known to students. For example, we were discussing an article which claimed that comedians had to know where the line was and then deliberately cross it, no matter whose feelings were hurt. This was part of a discussion of public speech in the age of political correctness, post 9/11 fears, and the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. My students used examples from their favorite comedians: Dave Chappelle and George Lopez for two, and from TV reality programs that they watched. I understood the references. That made it easy to continue the discussion, and for me to add other references which students immediately “got.”

So, these are some of the ways that I try to bridge the gap between an aging self who instructs a group of ever-younger students. My classes often have as many as six or seven cultures and languages represented. The fact that I spent much of my twenties and thirties living in other countries and trying to learn other languages helps me reach new immigrant and international students. I am fortunate to have lived in several countries. Not everyone has I realize, but I do think that every instructor can reach his or her students, no matter the age gap. It is at least worth the effort.

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