Dec 17, 2009

"He's at least 30, yo"

Marcus's hand shot up a little bit too quickly and at too odd a time for his question to be about today's lesson. I was expecting "When do we get out of here?" or "Can I go to the bathroom?" Instead, he paused for a moment and smirked. "How old are you?"

I'm the world's worst liar, and I'm 22 years old. You can read my facial expressions like a book, so I had a lot of fear in that moment that my whole house of cards was going to come tumbling down in front of me. I wasn't having a particularly strong sales moment, so I cracked up for a second and continued teaching without answering. Of course, that invested every other student in the class in the answer to this question.

"42!" (I don't think that one was serious.) "34!" "25!"

"Nah, he's at least 30, yo."

Clearly I wasn't getting out of this without an answer. My internal random number generator landed on 27. "27 - now Marcus, remind me how to test if a relation on a graph is a function," I said.

They totally bought it. The grumblings I heard afterward were that I was lying and lowballing my age.

Lessons:

1) Continue wearing a tie. Backwards hats cut your age by 15%, and ties apparently inflate it by 30%.

2) Kids are pretty gullible. I'm on the lookout for strategies to positively exploit this more.

5 comments:

Eyawn said...

I'm sarcastic beyond measure with my students. They ask my age? I tell them 40 (I'm 24). They ask if I'm married? I say "yes, and I have 4 kids." They ask if I do anything outside of school? I say "No, I just grade and lesson plan and then grade some more."

abril said...

I was 20 when I started working with Mr. G's kids. I'm also only 5'0". Some thought I was still in high school; others thought I was 30 and married.

Margaret English said...

I am 31 but have (sadly) managed to easily convince my students that I am 43. It was easier than I had hoped.

Kate said...

I just say "How old do you think I am?" and then roll my eyes at whatever they say.

Anonymous said...

I go with Kate's method as well. I never tell! When I was young, they guessed me older. Now that I AM older, they guess me way younger. Apparently, ALL teachers are somewhere around the age of 30, regardless of their real age. Clueless. : )