Do Students Care About A Teacher’s Age And Height? What I Learned My First Year Teaching
Three days before my first day teaching 4th grade, I stood on a step stool in my tiny apartment bathroom, craning my neck to see how the new charcoal blazer fit. My roommate leaned in the doorway, sipping coffee, and said, “No offense, but you look like you borrowed your older sister’s work clothes for a high school career day.” I was 22, five foot one, and I’d spent the whole week obsessing over the same question I saw popping up over and over in new teacher Facebook groups: Will the kids care how old I am? How short I am?
I bought chunky heeled loafers that added an inch and a half to my height, practiced a “serious teacher face” in the mirror, and even googled “how to look older as a young teacher” at 10pm the night before school started. All the advice said the same thing: establish authority first, don’t let them see how nervous you are, don’t give them any reason to question you.
Then came the moment I’d been panicking about, on the third day of school, when we lined up for lunch. Javi, the kid who sat in the back row and traded Pokemon cards under his desk, turned around, looked me up and down, and said, “Ms. L, you’re shorter than me. Wait, how old are you anyway?”
I froze for half a second, all that advice spinning in my head. Then I shifted my weight, because my new heels were already rubbing a blister on my heel, and I just laughed. I said, “I’m 22, and yeah, I stopped growing in 9th grade. Fair warning, if we’re on the same kickball team at recess, this is a total disadvantage for us.”
The whole line erupted. Mia, who sat up front and loved drawing, said her aunt was 22 and she did TikTok dances at her birthday party. Javi said his dad was six four and he hit his head on every doorway in their house. By the time we got to the cafeteria, they were already arguing over who got chocolate milk. No one mentioned my age or height again for three weeks.
A month later, Ms. Rita, the 67-year-old veteran who taught down the hall, brought me a lukewarm coffee after dismissal and asked how it was going. When I told her about Javi’s question, she laughed so hard she snorted into her mug. She’s four ten, and she said she’s gotten the same question from nervous new teachers for 40 years. “Students don’t care about the number on your driver’s license or how tall you are,” she said. “They care if you remember that their cat died last week, and if you don’t yell when they spill juice on your lesson plan.”
That hit me, because I’d spent so much time trying to fix my “flaws” that I’d missed how obvious that is. I threw the painful heels in the back of my closet after the second week, swapped them for my beat-up white sneakers, and no one said a word. I bought a $10 wooden step stool to keep by the whiteboard for top-shelf markers, and now reaching for markers is a coveted classroom job that kids fight over.
It’s not that kids never notice, of course. Back in November, a group of kids argued that I was too young to take care of our class hamster over winter break. But that wasn’t really about my age—it was about making sure their hamster wouldn’t get hurt. When I told them my family had had hamsters for 10 years when I was growing up, and I’d bring him home with me, that was enough. They stopped worrying. Ms. Rita gets asked all the time if she’s old enough to be a grandma (she is, three times over) and she just says, “Yep, and my grandkids are better at Fortnite than me, what about it?” No awkwardness, no defensiveness, and that’s that.
Now when new student teachers ask me the same question I wondered a year ago, I tell them three specific, small things that have worked for me. First, if a kid asks, answer casually. Don’t overexplain, don’t act like it’s a rude question that you have to dodge. If you’re 24, say 24. If you’re 61, say 61. Awkwardness comes from your reaction, not the question itself. Second, lean into the thing you’re worried about instead of hiding it. If you’re six and a half feet tall, joke about how you have to hunch to write on the whiteboard. If you’re young, mention that you still remember how scary it was to give a presentation in front of the class when you were their age. Turning a perceived flaw into a relatable, human thing disarms any teasing before it starts. Third, don’t waste money or energy changing your appearance to “look more authoritative.” I bought that $150 blazer I wore twice, and now I wear mostly cardigans and jeans that fit me, and no one has ever cared.
At the end of last year, I had kids fill out anonymous exit slips, asking what they’d change about our class if they could. Only one kid mentioned my height, and he wrote, “I wish Ms. L didn’t make me get the markers every time.” No one mentioned my age.
I’m prepping my classroom for my second year next week, and the step stool is still by the whiteboard, my sneakers are by my desk, and that blazer is still hanging in the back of my closet where it will probably stay. I still get that little twinge of insecurity when a parent does a double take when I walk into parent-teacher conferences, like they’re wondering if I’m actually the teacher. But the students? They haven’t cared yet. This year, I’m sure there will be a new kid who asks how old I am, or comments on how short I am, and I’ll just laugh and answer like I did last year. I don’t know if it’ll always be this easy, but so far, the thing kids have cared about most has never had anything to do with how old I am or how tall I stand. It’s always the small stuff: remembering their birthday, having an extra band-aid when they scrape their knee, laughing with them when the class hamster escapes his cage. That’s the stuff that sticks.
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