Some Weird Former Teacher Thoughts

 It’s been stunning for me to realize that the first seventh graders I taught back in 1966-67 are now in their sixties. Quite a few of them have grandchildren.

How could that possibly be?

I remember a related feeling, about midway in my career, when, now and then, I’d find myself teaching the offspring of former students. (I actually taught quite a few.)

It was all so weird because, you see, in my head I was still 21, my age when I began teaching. So how could I be teaching the children of those who were, in my head, still in middle school?

Facebook has accelerated the weirdness. There was no Facebook in my own student days, and I never really kept touch with any of my former teachers—not the way today’s Facebookers can. I would write a letter now and then; I would see a former teacher now and then, but mostly they just disappeared from my life. In several cases, I really regret what I did not do.

The same thing happened with most of my former Hiram High School and Hiram College classmates. Some I would see at a reunion, and I have to say that the older I’ve grown, the more weird those experiences have become. At my 50th high school reunion (not all that long ago) I talked and laughed with people I could not recognize even though I knew who they were. (I can still read name tags!)

Though, to be fair, I can look at FB posts of the more youthful me and ask myself: Who is that?

Some classmates, however, as they age, change only in texture (if that’s the right word): I would know them immediately on the street—even though I haven’t seen them in half a century. 

And then my thoughts grow darker. Many former classmates, colleagues, friends, family—many former students—have died, some so very close to me. And so I have reached, more recently, that awareness I should have had long ago: I am going to die. Of course, I’ve always “known” it—but not really. It was more of a possibility than something certain.

Just now, reading Maggie O’Farrell’s wonderful collection of personal essays (I Am. I Am. I Am, 2017), I came across this:

“We are, all of us, wandering about in a state of oblivion, borrowing our time, seizing our days, escaping our fates, slipping through loopholes, unaware of when the axe may follow” (32).

And then—as a reminder of all—Longfellow’s fine poem about growing older:

The Meeting 

 

After so long an absence

      At last we meet again:

Does the meeting give us pleasure,

      Or does it give us pain? 

 

The tree of life has been shaken,

      And but few of us linger now,

Like the Prophet's two or three berries

      In the top of the uttermost bough. 

 

We cordially greet each other

      In the old, familiar tone;

And we think, though we do not say it,

      How old and gray he is grown! 

 

We speak of a Merry Christmas

      And many a Happy New Year

But each in his heart is thinking

      Of those that are not here. 

 

We speak of friends and their fortunes,

      And of what they did and said,

Till the dead alone seem living,

      And the living alone seem dead. 

 

And at last we hardly distinguish

      Between the ghosts and the guests;

And a mist and shadow of sadness

      Steals over our merriest jests.