English 101 Students Help Their Professor Reconsider His Will To Live
By: Daniel Williams
Tags: Teaching, Humor, Students, College, Comedy

I started the fall semester this year by asking my 101 students a fun question: “If you could live to any age, what age would you choose, and why?”

It was an ice-breaker, far better than the usual awful name-games, a gift to them.

I imagined them thinking, Wow. What an agreeable time we had answering that imaginative question. Our professor is the greatest ever. Why do other professors even get up in the morning?

Let’s listen in on that first class:

“All right, guys, if you could live to any age, what age would you choose, and why?”

“Are we invincible?” they ask.

“What do you mean?”

“Like, can nothing stop us from living to the age we pick? If we got stabbed or got bitten by a poisonous spider, we’d be fine?”

“No, you’d die,” I say. “It’s just like now: if no disaster happens, you live.”

“What if we got a disease?”

I ponder, then decide: “No diseases.”

“But you said we can die.”

“You can, just not from disease. So, what age would you live to? And why?”

“What if someone gave us a disease,” they ask, “like on purpose? Say they inject us with something. Can we die of a disease then?”

“No. You die of old age.”

“No such thing,” they say. “You’re sugarcoating it. Are we talking pneumonia, a stroke?”

A student’s hand shoots up, “Or diabetes!”

“Guys, it’s just a peaceful death. You slip away in your sleep and that’s that.”

A student says, “So, if we pick three hundred, we’ll be super old for like two hundred and sixty years?”

“No, it’s proportional,” I say, “like your life now.”

They consider. And while they’re considering, I consider the number they just offered: three hundred. And what they said next: we’ll be super old for like two hundred and sixty years?

300 minus 260 = 40.

“Hold on,” I say, “you think being old starts at forty?”

The students look confused. “Uh, yeah,” they say.

“Forty is not old.” And in my mind, I say, I am thirty-seven.

A student raises his hand. “Twenty-five.”

“Twenty-five…what?” I ask.

“Twenty-five years old,” he says. “That’s my number.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“Nope.”

“Why twenty-five? You can live to any age.”

He says, “After twenty-five, it’s all downhill.”

“I’m thirty-seven,” I say.

I expect him to look at this youthful specimen of a man who clearly has so much good life left to live, but the student doesn’t budge. In fact, looking at me only seems to confirm his choice. Judging by the sour expression on his face, if he was me, he would definitely want to be dead twelve years ago.

“Anyone else?” I ask. “What age would you live to? Try thinking outside the box. Sky’s the limit.”

“It’s a trick,” a student says. “Think about it. It’s a trick question.”

“It’s not a trick,” I say. “Just answer.”

“I did,” says the student who wants death at twenty-five.

“How is it a trick?” I ask.

“If it’s proportional,” the student says, “and you pick a thousand years, that means you’ll be a baby for like two hundred years, and horribly old for five hundred years.”

“Listen,” I say, “shut up. How about this; the baby years and the deep-old-age years are the same length as they are for us right now. Okay? It’s just the middle part we’re talking about. Better?”

“You can’t change the question,” they say.

“What are you talking about. I can change it…why can’t I change it?”

“Because it’s not realistic if you keep changing it.”

“What about any of this is realistic?! Just pick a number.”

“Nineteen,” a student says.

“You’re eighteen right now,” I say.

“Correct,” she says.

“So, you want to die next year?”

“I feel like I’m peaking this year.”

I bitterly pinch the bridge of my nose. “You guys are the worst.”

Another hand goes up. “Can I be eighty?”

“That’s how long people live now.”

“I know. That’s what I’m hoping for. I just want a full, long life.”

The rest of the class agrees.

“People,” I say, “I’m giving you a magic question. Magic. The answer can be anything you want. A thousand years. Ten thousand years. Just pick a number. What if the question was about money? Cash. What would you say then? How much money do you want? Tell me.”

“I’d give it to charity,” one student says.

“Stop. You would not give it to charity. Screw charity. Be honest. How much?”

The students look shocked and happy at the same time. They hold up their phones.

“Would you say that again?” they ask.

“What?”

“The screw charity thing.”

“Scr…wait. Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you trying to get me fired?”

“What?” The phones are still up, recording.

“I’m not saying it. Listen, if I asked you how much money you wanted, you’d say billions, trillions. Think of age the same way.”

“You can’t spend age,” they say.

“Yes, you can. You spend it doing wonderful things. Reading books. Traveling. Meeting incredible people.”

“A hundred?” one student says.

“Now we’re talking,” I say. “A hundred years old. Keep going.”

“No, I meant a hundred dollars. That’s all I’d need.”

“A hundred? What about when it’s gone, what then? You’ll remember you could have had any amount, and you’ll hate yourself.”

“No. I’d put it to good use. A hundred makes two hundred. Two hundred makes four. Wait, what about taxes?”

“What do you mean?”

“Taxes on the money. If we say a billion, the government gets half that.”

The students agree. “More than half,” they say.

A raised hand. “My dad says you might as well not even win the lottery, because the government takes so much. It’s like them winning the lottery.”

The class nods. They speak as one: “Amen.”

“I’d pick zero,” a student says. “I don’t want handouts. You’ve got to make it on your own. Otherwise, what’s the point?”

But another student turns to this one and says, “But pretend. Just for fun. Like if you could have any amount of money.”

“A billion,” he says. “Fifty billion.”

“That’s what I’ve been saying!” I yell. “It’s pretend. Just for fun. You can pick any number.”

“Ooooh.” They’ve had an epiphany.

“Good,” I say. “So, what age would you live to?”

“Five hundred?” a student says.

“Great, keep going.” I don’t dare ask why five hundred. They’re finally on track. I’ve got to keep this going. “Who else?”

“Seven hundred.”

“Excellent, more.”

“A thousand.”

“Exactly,” I say.

“Twenty-five,” he says again.

“Anyone else…wait.” I can’t help myself. “Why twenty-five?”

“I’d get bored. Life is boring.”

“So instead of doing something to be not bored, you’d just die?”

“Yeah.”

“You are going to be twenty-five someday. You’ll have a family, probably. Kids. What then?”

“Play with my kids. Live life. The American dream. What else?”

“And not die?”

“Of course not. I’m not leaving them. I would never do that.”

The students celebrate his nobility.

“So, in your real life, you’ll live it and enjoy it, but in your dream, magic-question life, you’d die? What about your kids then?”

“It’ll make them stronger.”

“No, it won’t! They need you. Don’t you think they want to spend time with their father?”

“No guarantees in life,” he says.

“I’m giving you a guarantee in life! You can live to any age. That’s the guarantee.”

“But you said we can die.”

“Yeah, if it’s a tragedy. Like a bus hits you.”

“So, there’s no point,” he says. “If I pick ten thousand, a bus hits me when I’m twenty-five. Why pick anything? Why even live?”

The class agrees.

“Guys, you could step outside and get hit by a bus today.”

“I’d sue,” a student declares. “I’m pre-law.”

“You can’t sue,” I say, “you’re dead.”

“My cousin did it,” a student says.

“Did what?”

“Got hit by a bus.”

Everyone turns to listen. “Really?”

“Yeah, she sued Greyhound. A quarter of a million dollars. Can you imagine?”

The students are smiling. Imagining. “Man,” they say, “what would you do with that kind of money?”

“Pay off college debt,” someone says.

Their eyes light up. “Yeah!”

“Wait,” I say, “so if I gave you a quarter of a million dollars, that’s what you’d do with it? Pay off debt? What about something fun?”

“I’d give it to charity,” a student says.

The phones go up.

“I’m not saying it.”

“Not saying what?”

A quiet student raises her hand. “What about you?” she asks. “What age would you pick?” Then she qualifies the question: “It can be any age. You don’t die of diseases, only disaster. And it’s not exactly proportional, but — ”

“I know how the question works,” I say. “It’s my question.”

“So,” she says, “what age would you choose?”

I smile. I love answering this question. It occurs to me that I only ever ask it so eventually I’ll get to answer it.

“Not a thousand,” I say. “Not twenty-five. Not ten thousand. I’d choose to live forever.”

A student asks, “Won’t we have destroyed the planet by then?”

“We’ll have moved on,” I say. “To the moon. Or Mars. Wherever we go, I want to live and live.”

“Why would you ever want to live that long?” they ask.

“Think about it,” I say. “If you set out to read every book ever written, you’d never reach the end. People are always writing new books, and books can be read over and over. Or say you want to know every place. It takes a hundred years to know even a small town, and still, you don’t really know it. It’s always changing: people coming and going, dying and being born, constantly transforming the old place, turning it into someplace new. You’d never run out of new experiences, even in a small town. You’d be endlessly learning, endlessly growing wiser as you take in more and more of this magnificent existence.”

Unfortunately, they’ve heard none of this. I made the mistake of saying it fifteen to twenty minutes before the end of class, a time when students begin violently repacking their backpacks.

I want to stop them, tell them we have plenty of time left, but they’re professionals.

They cover one another in military fashion, the left side of the room laying down a suppressing fire of sound to distract me from the students on the right who are slowly standing. When I go to tell the right side to sit, the lefties are rising. When I go to tell them to sit, the righties are gone. When I, enraged, try to tell the lefties, “Stay right where you are,” they send up a representative who offers me a mind-bendingly complex explanation as to why his laptop will not allow him to print homework assignments on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, talking on and on until all the lefties have escaped, and then he says, “Wait, never mind. I think I just answered my own question. Bye.”

And the room, like my heart, is empty.

I trudge back to my office and sit there thinking about my answer to the magic question, the long, long life I always choose. I think about teaching and how I feel at the start of every fall semester: hopeful. Excited. Overflowing with joy as I imagine interacting with minds lit up by the thrilling fire of youth, minds eager to rush for the goal of becoming more than they were, more than they ever dreamed they could be, and by some impossible luck, I get to help them!

Suddenly, Facebook sends a notification. I discover a meme created by my students. It’s viral. I see an image of me at the blackboard. Above my head floats a cartoon bubble filled with the following words: “Screw charity.”

I consider my age-question and decide to answer it again, but this time I select a new number:

Me: “If you could live to any age, what age would you choose, and why?”

Me: “Yesterday.”

Me: “You want to live until yesterday?”

Me: “Yup.”

Me: “Why? Never mind. I know why.”