Dear Mature Student,

I am very happy for you that you are taking more school and getting the education in the area you always wanted to. I think its fabulous when people do what they actually want to do in life, so Kudos for breaking out of the traditional behaviours dictated by our society. But I have a few things to say.

First, if you are one of those mature students who sits in the middle-back of the class and quietly takes your notes, asks relevant questions and generally acts like a normal student I have no beef with you, keep doing what you’re doing.

If you are the other kind of mature student I would really like to fill you in on a few facts. We know that you’re old, plain and simple. Not to be overly rude, but we can see that and judge the level of your oldness purely on physical factors, so don’t think we do not realize this fact. We also know that by virtue of being old you have had more years of life experience than we have. This is clear. So please do not talk to us in your sing-song storyteller voice like we’re 9 year olds who have a hard time understanding any degree of abstractness. We don’t need it and rarely do we appreciate it.

We know you’ve done other jobs and degrees before you came here to study with us, and when it’s relevant we are friendly with the idea that you would like to share some of that information with us. But relevance is key. It is utterly painful to have to sit through you’re attempt at an eloquent diatribe explaining some riveting phenomena in literature studies, philosophy, English, or any other discipline that is not the one related to this particular class’ course code.

We do not want to hear how you did it back in the day when that does not align itself to how we do it now. Your virtue of being old does not excuse you from the mass amounts of reading that we all have to do or the current level of understanding we are supposed to achieve. Just because you dress in more formal clothes and completely exclude hoodies from your wardrobe does not fool the professor as to your amount of intelligence. In fact, professors are quite clever these days at evaluating students based on their actual work and analysis.

Overall, I do not appreciate your condescension, mostly because I am not a member of the lower gentry in the early 19^th century. I do not mean to disrespect my elder but please realize that we are equals in the context of our studies and we wish to be treated as such.

Mostly I am asking that you shut up in class because we have no interest in you making class go longer than scheduled. I do not agree with your whispered scathing comments but have no socially appropriate outlet to tell you this.

Thanks.