Is youth wasted on the young?

In most classes here at the university these days there are regularly matriculated students of non-traditonal ages (RMSNA). You can translate that however you want, but I mean students who start their university careers after they are 18 years of age. These students are interesting, interested, and invested. They are spending their own hard-won cash to come to school and have made a decision to be here with an end in mind.

I was reminded of the value of these students today when, after class, two of these RMSNA came and wanted to talk about general stuff. My guess is that one of the reasons that the university hired me is to offer the students here an opportunity to interact with a person in the position of a teacher from another country. If that is the case, then by far and away the students who take the most advantage of this feature of the university are these students. Outside of the members of the English Club, students do not tend to seek me out for discussion.

As an RMSNA myself, the returns from that kind of dialog would be most helpful. As it is, I am doing distance learning, and dialogs with teachers are very very few.