Have you ever had one of those mornings when you woke up, sat straight up in bed and said “Holy crap, I’m 25 years old?!?!?!” Well, I had one of those mornings in late November when I came to the realization that I had entered a new stage in life and would never be able to go back again. Now, don’t get me wrong, 25 is young. But there is something about turning a quarter-of-a-century that brings you to the scary realization that…. YOU ARE NOT A COLLEGE STUDENT ANYMORE.
I mean, you can fight it all you want to. You can dress like a college student (hooded sweatshirt anyone?), you can talk like a college student (abbreviate EVERYTHING), and you can even eat like a college student (mmm…. Hamburger Helper again), but eventually you might come to the same realization:
A. All the players on my favorite college sports teams are 4 years younger than me
B. Staying up until 10:30 is considered a late night
C. I say things after work like “the kids sure wore me out today
D. I look forward to watching Jeopardy…
This is NOT college anymore.
Getting older is a strange thing. When we talk about getting older we tend to focus only on age, when there are so many more factors involved. Am I a different person now than I was when I was 24? Not really, but just the mention of 25 puts me up in the next category of life. A category packed full of life-changing decisions.
The life of the quarterly aged is a unique experience and I often wonder how it would be different back in the United States. When I was teaching at Fruitport High School I was one of the only teachers my age, but here I live in the 20-something ghetto. It’s a weird post-college-pre-real-life stage that we find ourselves in.
Back in college I had a friend who made me promise to never get old. I mean… I could get older in age, but certainly not in spirit. Now I’m down here in Honduras spending most of my time with teenagers and she just got on a plane bound for Africa…. I feel as though we are doing a pretty good job.
Two weeks ago I was on a trip with the 10th grade class to go see some Mayan ruins. I was the only chaperone who: A. spoke English as a first language and B. didn’t have a spouse and kids. Throughout the trip I found myself much more willing to spend my time with the students than with the other adults. I wanted to sit by the students for meals, on the buses and walk around the town with them. I often wondered what was going through the other chaperones’ minds when they came across things like this:
- A field full of thirty 10th grade boys, half with their shirts off, running around with an American football and tackling each other in a free-for-all game of rugby. And there is Mr. Manting laying out some unsuspecting student.
- The entire 10th grade going in a chain down a water slide at a water park (possibly against about every single rule at the water park). Who is the first one down the slide? Manting again.
I kind of got some of the same looks last year as a chaperone for the Math team trip where I was playing a pool game of king-of-the-mountain for a good solid two hours. The 8th graders are still talking smack about how they are going to dunk me this year (keep dreaming boys).
As you can see, I’m probably not a such a great chaperone…
Long live youth
Here are my students learning all about the Mayan ruins
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