I wore a tie every day my first two-years teaching. It was not a dress code requirement, nor was it a fashion statement. I hate ties. No, I wore a tie because without one I would have been confused for an underclassman’s big brother.

For a long time, I taught like a big brother, too. And then I no longer needed a tie, and I started going bald, and I had a son, and slowly I no longer looked like an underclassman’s big brother. I looked like their dad. And then I started teaching like one.

In education we talk a lot about pedagogical best practices, but we don’t really ever address the impact aging has on how we engage with learners over time. Young teachers who dress cool and have youthful interests often (not always!) relate easier to their young students. Of course, they may also have trouble disciplining students who view them more as a peer than an authority figure. Conversely, older instructors may be treated with more gravitas by their students, but also run the risk of seeming out of touch or falling into the trap of crafting boring lessons based on connections no longer relevant to students (“Hey kids: this math problem is based on a famous episode of ‘Bonanza’!”). In a world where content mastery and sound pedagogy should conquer all, these differences shouldn’t matter, but they do. Sometimes a lot. Ask any teacher about the importance of connecting with students and they will almost always say that a) it’s important, and b) how, and how well, we connect changes over time.

In my own K-12 teaching experience, I preferred connecting with students more as a “big brother” figure than a “parent.” I think this stemmed from my preference for incorporating student interests into designing lessons and my attempts to use humor in diffusing discipline situations. Not a natural disciplinarian or authority figure, instruction through the lens of “parent” was a difficult transition for me, and one that is ongoing. At times, it feels like adopting an entirely new set of pedagogical skills in which I am unpracticed and unprepared. An old “young” dog seeking new “old” tricks, to butcher a phrase.

And that is something educators don’t really talk about when discussing classroom management and instruction. Maybe it’s because nobody likes to think and talk about getting older and what that means for relating to increasingly younger (than us) students.

But, unless you’re Peter Pan, we probably should.

I’m interested in other people’s experience with this topic. Have your attempts to connect with students changed as you’ve aged? How?