Okay, so I'm having a bad knee day and I may have groaned just a bit when I got up from the computer desk at the end of class this morning, but there was only one student left in the room and it wasn't a loud groan. Nevertheless the student very helpfully responded to my pain thus: "I remember what my grampa always says about getting old," and I wanted to tell the student to stop right there because a sentence that starts that way cannot possibly end well, but he insisted on completing the thought: "Grampa said the only thing golden about the golden years is his pee."
Nothing I've ever read or heard or experienced as a teacher has equipped me to respond in the moment to that kind of statement, so maybe the best thing to do under the circumstances would be to pretend I've gone deaf. Which would only serve to reinforce the student's belief that I'm a creaky old codger contemporary with his grampa.
Earlier in the same class students had been showing me their progress on annotated bibliography entries, most of which were in fonts so small they could have been etched on the edge of a sewing needle. I kept needing to blow up the page and squint, which made me feel about a million years old.
And then I pulled some real old-fogey moves like insisting that the deadline is real and therefore the right time for students to mention a dead laptop is at the beginning of class, not at the moment after the dropbox closes, and if some technical difficulty made submitting the assignment on time impossible, then their best approach would be to ask me what they can do to remedy the situation rather than to tell me "I'll just be turning this in later" with a smirk that brings to mind the phrase "arrogant prick."
But of course I wouldn't say that out loud to a student--and even if I did, he wouldn't be able to hear it over the creaking of my bad knee.
