Teachers often talk about exasperating students whom we secretly like, the kind of student who asks too many questions, bugs us after class and makes silly mistakes, but who always keeps trying and showing up. This is how I think of
Mature-age students are annoying, I know. I understand that when you’re 18 or 19, and already know everything, there’s not much of a reason to do the readings or show up to tutorials having prepared. I also understand that there are these old people in class who should be doing other things – maybe retiring, or dying so they can give their poor kids their overdue inheritance. They are eagerly asking questions (or worse, answering them) and generally being a nuisance.
I understand because I used to be one of them. I dropped out of high school to smoke cones and play bass guitar, which was pretty great for a decade or so. I got pretty excellent at Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1, 2, and 3. Then in my middish-20s I very accidentally fell into a university preparation program at the University of Newcastle. I still smoked a lot of pot but now I also had some fascinating classes to attend and some really cool ideas to get my head around.
Now I’m at the front of the classroom, I love those students who come prepared and ready to discuss stuff. So here’s to 2016’s annoying mature-age students.
A year later I was granted entry to university proper. I saw a fair few of my mature-age peers fall by the wayside, but I also saw a few succeed. Like many mature age students I kept on going and graduated with honours, and then attained my PhD. That’s the kind of annoying thing mature-age students tend to do, far more often on average than the regular student intake anyway.
Now I teach them. In fact, I have just finished preparing a batch of mature-age students to annoy next year’s young first years.
The students who have just finished the university preparation program I’ve been teaching at the University of New South Wales come from a diverse range of backgrounds. Some came to Australia as asylum seekers.
Peter and the rest of the apostles. Physically worn out, tired of being followed around by the increasing packs of strangers who have attached themselves to their charismatic teacher, these fishers do not want to go back to work after being up all night.
Plenty of the saints were annoying, exhausted, burned-out students themselves, but they dropped everything and followed because they wanted to learn, so that one day, they too could teach.
But they do. The apostles return to their boats and their nets once more. Why? There is no obvious reward, no promise that there really will be fish this time. They do it again because Jesus is that good of a teacher. The best teachers understand when we feel the most depleted, the most robbed of the capacity to continue, that this is when we can push through one more time and make a miracle happen. Some of my own professors helped me to do this when I was ready to quit. Try one more time, they’d gently suggest. Go back and find one more source.
In Robertson Davies’ novel The Rebel Angels, a young scholar says that what her professors saw in her was not promise, but something else: an unslakable thirst for knowledge that marked her as a member of their cabal. Peter and the other apostles, who “leave everything” to follow Jesus, might not be in pursuit of something as concrete as a degree, but they are in search of something Christians will always be students of: gnosis, the same knowledge of the divine that the saints possessed. Plenty of the saints were annoying, exhausted, burned-out students themselves, but they dropped everything and followed because they wanted to learn, so that one day, they too could teach.
Teachers often talk about exasperating students whom we secretly like, the kind of student who asks too many questions, bugs us after class and makes silly mistakes, but who always keeps trying and showing up. This is how I think of Simon Peter and the rest of the apostles. Physically worn out, tired of being followed around by the increasing packs of strangers who have attached themselves to their charismatic teacher, these fishers do not want . go back to work after being up all night.j
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