I could come up with a laundry list of ways that I’m different from my students, for instance:

• I’m in a different stage of life and with a longer experience of life from which to draw on
• As the instructor, I am in a role that is traditionally predicated more on “giving knowledge” than “receiving knowledge,” as students are expected to do
• In many cases, I may have a clearer sense of my educational and professional goals than my largely freshman class

However, all these things (and countless others that I might muse on ad infinitum if I had the time) amount in many ways to fundamental difference in our planes of literacy. That is, the nature of my life experience, institutional authority, and personal ownership effectively amount to a sort of literacy in classroom and institutional economics which may really set me apart from my students. While I don’t claim that, for instance, any of the aforementioned differences make me a more valid or even effective participant in the classroom environment, I may have what I perceive to be a “better” understanding of what exactly I am doing in the classroom and what the classroom does for me (and my role in/the role of the university at-large).

I’m afraid it’s beginning to sound like the main difference I see between my students and I may be a heightened sense of self-awareness—which seems egotistical and presumptive of me. However, I also need to acknowledge that I realize these differences could all be in my head. Just because I am not at all the person now that I was as a freshman; just because I initially tacitly accepted that my education would be something akin to the filling of an empty vessel; just because I was lost for the greater part of my undergrad in the bureaucracy of the university—doesn’t mean that’s true of these students. One of the other differences between us is that we grew up in very different cultural  and environmental contexts. I have no way of identifying my students’ interiority; I can only project my perceived differences based on my personal observations and the context of my own experience.