I've been teaching full-time now for almost 20 years. It's crazy to think that I'm old enough to say that, but my age has been increasingly on my mind as I deal with the myriad of aches and pains, both physical and emotional, that are so typical of midlife.
When I first began teaching, I was barely older than most of my students, and since I teach at a community college, I was, in fact, younger than many. Because one of the courses I teach is Lifespan Development, my young age made my legitimacy a tough sell to the students who were older, had more experience, had raised children, and frankly, were much wiser than I. Often, I would find myself reminding my students that I was not teaching a course on parenting, or marriage, or health, but on lifespan developmental psychology. That I hadn't yet had kids had no influence on whether or not I could speak authoritatively on Piaget or Erikson or Valliant. That I was still newly married and hadn't yet faced any marital crisis *surely* had nothing to do with my expertise on why some marriages failed and others worked. In my mind, my presentation of theory would not--and should not--be influenced at all by one's personal life experiences. I was a professor. I would profess, and anecdotes, while nice, wouldn't mean much.
Now that I'm at midlife, a divorced woman raising an adolescent daughter, I think of the young professor I was, and I cringe. What was I thinking? While it's certainly true that one can speak authoritatively on any theory if one has studied it enough, that I thought developmental theories could be understood as separate from how real lives take place is a testament to my own youthful arrogance. (That my student evaluations were as good a they were is surely a testament to my youthful energy!)
Today, when I teach Erikson's stage of initiative vs. guilt, I don't think of some example from a book. I recall my daughter at age 4, serving me breakfast in bed on Mother's Day. Telling her dad that she *could* carry the tray, despite his protestations that it's awfully heavy and she may drop it. "I can do it" she said. From down the hall, I could hear the determination in her voice as clear as day. And as clear as day was the crash of the tray (and the strawberries and the cereal and the milk) as it tumbled out of her little hands. And I remember her tears, her crying that she "ruined it all", and then her smile when I said I was just so very happy that she thought of doing it in the first place that I'd be totally okay with sitting on the floor in the hallway and eating those strawberries with her. So that's what we did. And the gratitude I felt toward her father for letting her try in the first place was felt deep within me as both a mother AND as a psychologist who knew what an important role moments like that would play in her development.
I have so many other examples of how my own life, and the lives of my close friends, have been weaved into my own understanding of developmental theories. Marriage, divorce, raising children, dealing with aging parents, impending retirement, death--these things are not just topics in a lifespan book anymore. The result is that my teaching is richer, more detailed, and plainly, more real. I do a lot more listening these days, because now I know that talking about divorce cuts pretty close when you've dealt with the end of your own marriage. The written description of the pain and loss experienced when someone loses a child doesn't compare to the voice of your student whose son died last year of leukemia. Stories of love and loss become part of how I help my students see the real life application of what they're reading. Telling students that a sure sign you've reached middle age is needing reading glasses takes on a whole new meaning when you've just used yours while taking attendance.
Now more than ever, I am grateful that it is psychology I fell in love with, and psychology I teach, because my own understanding of development--as shallow as it may have been 20 years ago--laid a foundation that has helped me understand my own life in a context greater than I might otherwise be able to do. At the very least, I'd like to believe I'm a better parent for knowing what I know about child and adolescent development.
I was so much more self-assured 20 years ago than I am today, despite the fact that I have so much more classroom and life experience. My own life has humbled me. Gone is the assuredness of pretty much everything. If there's one thing I know now more than I did back then, it's that I really don't know anything at all. I'm figuring it all out as I go, just as my students are. And every now and then, we get to figure it out together.
