"Grandma Death and the Mandatory Retiring Age"

This is an unpublished article I thought I'd share with you all. I consider it to be one of my harshest works to date. Dedicated to the kids in Darby's writing class. Without further ado...

"Grandma Death and the Mandatory Retiring Age"

Apart from the obvious symptoms of sagging arms, diminished hair quantities and wrinkly, blotchy skin, common stereotypical belief states that the older you get, the wiser you become. I commend old people who accept themselves for who they are becoming, and I believe that they, perhaps, are wiser than most. However, I also believe that there is a certain point after which the ancient ought to retire to Florida, embark on world travels or take up knitting and cease to impose their démodé collection of facts on the world, especially in university circles where the strength of a teacher’s knowledge and utilization of current events, trends and popular culture plays a vital role in student development.

Ratemyprofessors.com has proven to be one of the most useful, legendary websites for high school and college students in recent years. When I first entered high school all of five years ago, I looked to ratemyprofessors.com for the lowdown on the whose-who of the classes I was about to enroll in. To my dismay, my aged homeroom-teacher-turned-biology-professor had very bad reviews. Derogatory comments on her curriculum, teaching style and flexibility of schedule painted a depressing picture of the woman, who I immediately sympathized with. “She couldn’t be that bad,” I reasoned, “After all, she has wisdom on her side.” The first day of class proved otherwise. First of all, she looked like she had just crawled out of a crypt. Appearances aside, her lecture was not only boring, but also extremely outdated. The slides she popped up on a wheezing projector seemed to be as old as she was, and her obvious lack of technology manifested itself in the chalkboard she wrote class notes on that, coupled with her gingham dress, screeched “Little House on the Prairie” in every scripted cursive letter she wrote. Needless to say, I got out of there as soon as possible—nothing in this world can subject me to archaic presentation methods and antiquated knowledge of chromosomes and Cnidaria.
spongebob is riding a cnidaria
Experiences like mine not only validate the importance and accuracy of ratemyprofessor.com, they also make you wonder about the possibility that a teacher competency test is in order for school systems.

First of all, lets clarify one thing: wisdom does not necessarily come to smart people, and even the wisest of people may not be smart—it is important to keep both terms separate. Wisdom, to me, implies street smarts, expertise of right versus wrong and general enlightenment on the ways of the world. Smart people have mastery of facts, quick thinking and superior intelligence on their side. My high school professor may have been a genius back in her 1940-something-days, but the twenty-first century demands continual upgrading of “product knowledge”. Those, whose synapses have stopped firing, should stop renewing their license to teach. Chatting casually to “Grandma Death” was like exploring the timeline of a life totally worth living. She had experienced every imaginable atrocity and could recite “morals of the story” faster than Aesop could spin his famous concluding remarks, but questions of discrepancies between her lectures and the book readings was like banging your head against a choleric, nappy wall that constantly smelled like cats and dandruff shampoo. My frustration throughout the semester was unaided by the school administration, which had deemed her a “living fossil” (when is that ever a good thing?), and intended on giving her an exclusive 45+ years of service award the next month. My private high school refused to gently nudge, much less push, the woman out the door even though she had accumulated more complaints than years she had been alive.

thats grandma death (aka ashley tisdale)
Since I’ve gotten to Colgate, ratemyprofessor.com has probably been hit up more times than Facebook.com. Okay, that’s an exaggeration but in college, the importance of having the right professor to fit my learning style has been vital. Students are about as attuned to a professor’s teaching competence as the professor is to their procrastination, and violations of this understanding are cause for the catacombs of Ratemyprofessor to light up with grievances. Some of my friends have used me as their sounding board to gripe about certain senile professors who resemble my very own “Grandma Death” and, while I enjoy a good laugh or two every time this happens, a part of me sighs with disbelief. Teaching professionals who refuse to get with the times should get a new job because primordial methods, coupled with an inability to employ flexible thinking processes is a recipe for a distasteful student-instructor relationship. To expand our minds, our professors themselves need to be capable of expansion and while many do upgrade their wiring, those that don’t have no reason to change anytime soon. It’s a vicious cycle that ultimately ends in wasted tuition money and time spent listening to an old person drone—or cackle—from a decade reminiscent of our country’s founding.

The two things students from around the world have in common is that they are destined to take standardized tests to estimate academic proficiency, and must deal with frustrating teacher situations at some point in their careers. I think I speak for the whole of the student population by saying that standardized tests were a bummer. Not to be vengeful, but I think schools should implement some kind of teacher evaluation process to combat the anti-retirement attitudes of a rapidly aging baby boomer population. There is nothing wrong with living off a 401K plan and I’ve recently begun to consider it noteworthy, but something about certain geriatric teachers directs them to teach till the grave. Why not lay down a borderline age, after which the taking of yearly evaluations becomes mandatory? If we want to improve our school systems and provide optimal levels of equal opportunities for all involved, new faces must be cycled in and the incompetent, old-fashioned-old be booted out.

Even though I love my grandma very much and am willing to listen to her recitation of life lessons all day, I would never request that she start teaching academic subjects. There is little reason to question the wisdom of our elders, but the lack of questioning of decrepit teachers’ usefulness is alarming at the very least. They deserve respect for what they have accomplished, but disgrace mounts quickly when a student says, “I am doing the world a public service in informing you that Mrs. D- is a bad teacher, stay far, far, FAR away from her.” Let’s make the retirement years of our old people the best years of their lives by pushing them out the gate before criticism goes this far.