Reflections on Getting Older

Today's topic came to me just now when I (once again) clicked the "larger type" button on a web page I wanted to read. For the past few years, my eye doctor has asked at each visit if I'm beginning to get far-sighted yet. I always assure him otherwise and ask if he is. (We are the same age). I'm so very near-sighted that it has always been difficult to read fine print anyway, but lately it seems that there are certain print sizes that just don't come into focus for me whether I get closer to them or not. Then, I discovered that I can very easily make print on the screen larger with just a mouse click, and for the first time I'm preferring reading on line over reading from print material. So, maybe far-sightedness is beginning to creep up on me.

The larger type button called to mind a number of other little thoughts over the past few days. I arrived on campus yesterday and noticed a big poster taped to the windshield of a van. I thought it must have something to do with homecoming and started reading it out of curiosity (the print was visible even for me at quite a distance). The text said that anyone who had not voted was a number of not very nice things. I shook my head, with some amusement, and hoped the poster-maker was not much over 18. While I admired his/her civic concern, both the medium and actual content of the message was one I would have appreciated far more at that age.

A few days earlier, I had found a conversation with my cousins about how teens communicate to be very interesting. None of us is technologically illiterate. However, the extent to which teens interact through IM, texting, and the internet is a long way from our own high school and college experiencesor even our own experience now. While I use texting, blogging, emailing, and so on comfortably, and, like some of the younger generation of cousins, find that I am maybe a little more socially comfortable with the help of technology, these tools are still a little new and a little foreign to me, while they are almost an extension of the person for many of the younger generation. I feel a little like Arthur Weesley exclaiming over how wonderful Muggle gadgets are in my approach to these things.

This is all a bit strange to me because being a student myself, I perhaps often see myself as part of the younger group that is part of the stimulus for this reflection.

I can very clearly see that I don't learn as fast as I did when I was younger or assimilate new technologies or ways of doing things as easily as I did when I was younger, and in that respect my younger colleagues have a clear advantage over me -- something that has been a cause for concern to me at times. On the other hand, when grad students get together to talk, those of us who are my age have a sense of perspective that the younger students have had not yet had the opportunity to acquire. In career-related discussions, we raise questions and issues that don't occur to the younger students. We also have skills from previous careers that give us advantages when it comes to using the mathematics knowledge that we are developing now.

I feel like I should have some sort of concluding paragraph, but I suppose reflections don't really have to conclude -- these are just some thoughts. I'd be interested to know if others are thinking along these lines ...

Andrea Jo