View from the Pennines: Mind the (generation) Gap

A man who fought in the Great War is remembered with a mixture of awe and fear by the older men in the village. He lived alone on the side of the valley, and was said to have had a ‘good war’. A bit of probing reveals that this means he was surly and ill-disciplined, but good at killing. One story in particular is used to illustrate this. A young officer asked him to find a German helmet as a trophy for the officer to display. Our man was scornful that the officer needed his help, but slipped across to the German lines, killed a man and returned to the officer, nonchalantly throwing the helmet into the officer’s lap. The officer jumped up screaming: the previous owner’s head was still attached. This is a brutal tale of a brutal time. And it is worth remembering just what war entails as modern reporting can give it a different gloss. As someone who (thankfully) has never experienced war, or any extreme of violence, it also emphasizes just how much the experience of different generations can vary. Research into, and the teaching of, mathematics are human activities and hence they are not immune to the vagaries and particularities of the time in which they are practiced, nor the people who practice them. I have long crossed the threshold from being a (fairly) trendy young lecturer who speaks a language closer to that of the students than that of more senior colleagues, to being a senior colleague – a grey-hair – myself. And, oh dear, I am listening to David Bowie as I type this rather than the Arctic Monkeys (hang on a sec while I change the CD... no I don’t have an i-Pod). Does this matter? This transition is inevitable and probably needs to be accepted with a degree of good grace. My concern, however, is that it is affecting my teaching. I have always felt that I am a good lecturer – students seem to enjoy my classes and I have had good feedback from them. But as I grow older there is a larger distance between me and them, and I am beginning to wonder whether my style has moved out