Interrogating Privilege: Reflections of a Second Language Educator

Chapter 10: The Aging Educator

Chapter 10 The Aging Educator It is my first day of teaching as a very young graduate assistant.I am extremely nervous. I wonder how I, who was an undergraduate student myself just three months before, can have the authority and expertise to teach an advanced ESL writing class. It doesn’t help that I am babyfaced, very young looking, nor that most of my students are graduate students and older than I am. I (over)prepare carefully and conscientiously, and the class goes well.As the class hour proceeds, I feel increasingly elated, and by the time I walk out of the classroom, I feel a sense of exaltation, a “high.”This is it!This is what I was born to do! Thirty-five years later, our program assistant tells me there is someone here to see me. I go out into the reception area and see a man of perhaps 50 years old, with a young woman of about 25 years old. He greets me enthusiastically, and reminds me that he was in one of my ESL classes about 30 years ago, when he was a very young student and I was only a bit older. He is from a Middle Eastern country, has a high position with the government there, and has brought his daughter for a visit to the United States. He tells me several times how much he 145 Interrogating Privilege 146 liked our program and my class,and how often he remembers his time at our university .We look at his records, and find a photograph of him looking very young; we laugh nostalgically about those days, and about how much time has passed. Neither of us remarks directly on how much we have each changed. Now in my late 50s, I feel myself in a somewhat unsettled zone between youthful forward movement and intimations of aging.So much in my personal and professional life has changed during the more than 35 years I have been teaching. People—family members, friends, colleagues —around me talk more of health issues, of slowing down, of possibly retiring. My parents’ generation has a host of illnesses, physical and mental, and many of them are dying or have died. My father died in 2003; my mother is in reasonably good health and stays her positive and active self, but has had increasing health problems, has recently downsized from her house into an assisted living community, and watches as several of her siblings and friends ail and die. I recently took a trip with my mother to visit relatives and friends in their 80s, and although it was wonderful to see them, I felt the oppressive weight of their ailments and limitations.One aunt was in a wheelchair,her movements mostly limited to her home. My mother’s college friend and bridesmaid was cheerful and active, but her mind and memory were failing badly. Soon after that trip, I happened to read in quick succession two novels (Hadley, 2007; Sebold, 2007) and a memoir (Hampl, 2007) that, by chance, all focused on aged parents and the ravages of age, which furthered focused me on the topic of advancing age and how it affects both the aging individual and those around her or him. I do not mean that I am only focusing on the negative,on illness,on death;no,I expect to have many more years of productive work and life,and I look forward to those years with zest.But I have begun to think more about the aging educator, and the changes that occur as one moves into the later stages of her or his career. I feel the breath of time and age at my back, in both my personal and professional lives (and as we know, for academics, the two lives are 10: The Aging Educator 147 closely intertwined). I still enjoy my teaching and other university work, and still feel positive about my scholarly work and writing; I believe I still have something to say, but I realize that I have less time to say it than ever before.A close colleague who is only four years older than I am retired three years ago.Two of my younger brothers recently retired from long teaching careers. Increasingly frequently, people ask me when I am thinking of retiring; when they ask, I am surprised.Who, me? I am not one of “them...