Because I'm 43

If you are not a teacher, you have probably not been asked "Which member of One Direction do you think is the hottest?" by a teenager.  You have probably not been laughed at for not knowing a song that you are pretty glad you don't know after listening to it.

My answer to the One Direction question, by the way, was "Wouldn't it be disturbing if I had an answer?"

Last week, I was teaching my students about naming chemical compounds.  When naming covalent compounds, there are prefixes like the "di" in carbon dioxide, so we were going through ways to remember each one.  Eight is represented by "octa," so I was giving octopus and octagon as examples.  When one of the kids brought up The Octonauts, I asked if there were characters since I had never heard of them before.  One of my kids was aghast and indignantly asked, "How have you never heard of them?"  My answer was, "Because I'm 43." 

I remember when I knew all the latest songs and bands and when keeping up with all the tv shows and popular movies was easy.  That was twenty-five years ago.  There were four major networks.  Most people didn't have cable.  And there was not yet an internet.  In my first few years of teaching, I still knew most things, but it doesn't take long before more important concerns drown out the desire to "keep up."  I stand in the grocery store line now and realize I don't know half of the names on magazine covers (and it doesn't help that they only put first names).

Students feel an enormous amount of pressure to keep up with everything that is trending and viral, but it is kind of impossible.  Unlike my childhood, they have thousands of pop culture streams with millions of personalities, and they think they are supposed to know the details of all of them.  They are anxious to know what they think everyone else knows, even though everyone else is having just as hard a time keeping up. 

I know that modeling adult life isn't going to significantly change this pressure, but it could be that they need to see us admit that we don't feel pressured to keep up.  It could be that it would allow them to relax a tiny amount.  It could be that their anxieties might be alleviated just a little.  At this point in their lives, just a little might be just enough.