The Younger Generations

Once you get past a certain age, I think, you really lose track of kids and what they’re like. Babies and toddlers seem more familiar to me than older ones, probably because there’s not quite so much variation among them. But the rest seem to merge into a single person: kids. It isn’t exactly stereotyping, but it is certainly some kind of over-generalizing tendency. When I see teenagers, for example, on a bus, or flooding the mall at lunchtime, or at the movie theatre, they all seem sort of the same to me. They all seem to be wearing the same outfit, the same hairdo, the same kind of shoes, listening to the same kind of music, reading the same books if they read at all, talking with the same limited vocabulary. They don’t differentiate well for me. And I begin to think that they are indeed all the same. They are teenagers (and not nearly as admirable as teenagers were when my generational colleagues and I were teenagers).

I was brought up by this today because I had a new quilting student in for her first two-hour lesson. I don’t have a lot of students (only two at a time, in fact), but what struck me by this new one was how absolutely different she was from the others I’ve had. I expected this lesson to be pretty much like a first lesson for any of the others, given that they are all beginning sewers first and foremost. But it wasn’t and she wasn’t. Although the process is the same for all of them, and the project they start with is the same, yet each one comes to it with a different attitude, different knowledge, a different physical approach, and different physical aptitudes.

Some of them are quick to see how the machine works, others slower; some are almost afraid of the machine, others indifferent to its speed and motion; some pick fabrics very carefully, while others move more spontaneously. For every movement needed by the task, there is variation among the students. That this is true and indeed a truism, of course, accounts for the real joy of teaching. But when you have 30 kids in a class (as I have had in university teaching), you very often, perhaps daily, or even every minute, are wishing that there was just a little less variation. The luxury of one student is remembering that the kind of teaching that feels just plain good involves looking at that one child to see how she or he is responding each moment to each action or idea that arises, and finding, as a teacher, the words or action that will effectively move that moment on to the next one.

We are a culture that tends to believe that teaching is not a particularly valuable skill. The sadly common aphorism, Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach, attests to that. Rather, we believe that anyone can do it. That might even have some truth to it since we are all called upon to teach throughout our adult lives, although not always in a classroom setting. And a willing teacher requires a willing student. But probably no one can teach very well if they do not have the opportunity, at least some of the time, to teach just one student at a time, an opportunity to see each student as a genuinely individual person. That it is a luxury (or an absolute omission) and not a necessity in our classrooms speaks volumes about our culture, I’d say. But it is a luxury that is given to me by me. Good choice on my part.