Teaching is filled with memories - many wonderful, some not so, but usually plenty of amusing moments. Some become more troubling over time. About 10 years ago, in the middle of design and technology lesson in which my charges were meant to be focused on constructing a medieval siege weapon, one pupil asked me how old I was. Nothing unusual about that - it comes up with the same frequency as the questions about your “real name”. Why is it, incidentally, that they presume that our surnames are merely pseudonyms?

Anyway, nothing unusual about my response either. I’d never had any qualms about admitting my age and it usually quells the conversation, so I responded as usual: “I’m 28. Now that join isn’t going to survive a castle siege, is it?”, and fully expected the focus to return to the activities at hand. But it wasn’t to be. The response I got was a bit of a blow: “Twenty-eight? But you can’t be. My dad’s 43.”

And there, in a single sentence, my illusions of youth disappeared. I had known that teaching in key stage 1 you’d fully be seen as indistinguishable from parents, grandparents and prime ministers, but I was teaching Year 7 at the time. To a 12-year-old, it seemed incredible that I could be younger than their parents. I still considered myself to be simply “in my twenties”. That was the day that I realised technically, I was old enough to be their parent.

Going grey

That’s the trouble with this job: it ages you - in more ways than one. Sometimes it’s just the things the children say. One asked why I had a rag doll in my classroom. It had been given to me as a gift in my earliest years of teaching, and the dark-haired suited ragdoll was meant to be a representation of me. When I tried to explain this to my Year 5 pupil, her response? “But you’ve got grey hair, not black”.

And it only worsens as time goes by. Firstly, there’s the constant reminders of the passing of time every time you see a cohort’s dates of birth. It’s so easy to find yourself commenting on an event in the recent past, before realising that the children in your class won’t remember it - or worse, weren’t born then. The current cohort of Year 6s in our primary schools were born in 2007 or 2008. Of course they don’t really remember the London 2012 Olympics: which 10-year-old would?

In primary schools, it doesn’t take long before you’re able to tell children you’ve been a teacher longer than they’ve been alive. And soon after you realise you’re old enough to be their parents, you start to find yourself meeting at parents evenings with adults younger than you. It’s a slippery slope before you find yourself talking to parents that you taught as children.

I’ve made sure to steer clear of that. I know of a few of my former pupils who are now parents themselves, although none that are quite a school age yet. But even so, there’s a certain safety in a geographical move to prevent that awful moment when you recognise a parent on the welcome tour, and instantly remember the time you told them off in the playground.

For those teachers who stay at a school long-term, there’s a risk that in time your age ceases to be a number, but is instead referred to in terms of generations you’ve taught. You can at least comfort yourself with the knowledge that, to the average five-year-old, you’re just the same age as every other adult. Let’s say, about 21, shall we?

Michael Tidd is headteacher at Medmerry Primary School in West Sussex. He tweets at @MichaelT1979