I Am Now Twice The Age Of A Freshman

Today I am twice the age of an incom­ing col­lege fresh­man. My stu­dents are in trou­ble now, because age and treach­ery always trump youth and exu­ber­ance.¹

The scales are tilt­ed even more in my favor than you might sup­pose. It’s not just that I’m twice their age — I’m far old­er in terms of adult expe­ri­ence. Let’s say that you begin expe­ri­enc­ing the world as an adult at the age of 16 (ignore the howls of laugh­ter you hear in the back­ground). Then most fresh­men have expe­ri­enced life as a grown up for two years. I, on the oth­er hand, have spent twen­ty years in that same state.

Twen­ty is ten times two. So although I am mere­ly twice the bio­log­i­cal age of fresh­men, I am TEN TIMES as expe­ri­enced at think­ing like an adult. Advan­tage: me.

And if you think about it from a pure­ly legal per­spec­tive, the fresh­men have mere months of expe­ri­ence as an eigh­teen-year-old. I’ve been a legal adult for some­thing like 50 times longer than them.

So there. Hap­py birth­day to me.

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¹That’s sort of a quote. There are a lot of vari­ants of it online.