When I started teaching college English, one of my first students was an ancient Jew with a tattoo on her arm, a row of numbers. I know what you're thinking--why was someone that old taking college courses? And she was quite old. I'm going to assume that she was born around 1900, but here's the thing. It's not unheard of for a senior person to go to college after retirement.
In the 1950s, when I was an undergraduate, the UCLA English department had a successful old Ph.D candidate who was world famous as a novelist and screen writer. Later on I would teach a middle-aged undergraduate student who was a medical doctor. He'd never completed his bachelor's degree. He'd been jumped into med school as an experiment.
At the college where I worked, the average age of students was between 35 and 40. The college had been set up to serve people who had somehow missed out when they were young and quick. We were there to give them a second or third chance they probably hadn't counted on.
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