As if aging men didn’t have enough problems, there was always Andy Rooney.

Rooney retired recently and, unfortunately, he’d sort of outlived his usefulness. He could be a thoughtful writer and a perceptive commentator, but he had become known as sort of the national grumpy old fart. It’s been a few years since I’ve watched him, but I’m willing to bet he didn’t get any less old fartish as he neared retirement. Like anybody who stays past their welcome, he became a sort of self-parody. No matter what he said, it always sounded like “GET OFF MY LAWN!”

That’s too bad, but then, Andy had a steady gig for a long time and probably made some pretty good money. And he had his audience. A lot of us may not have been among them, but he must’ve had at least a few people watching his shtick to stay around as long as he did.

But as I said, he made it rather difficult to be an aging white male.

I’ve been acutely conscious of my aging-white-maleness for some time. As a columnist, you always have to guard against that sort of thing. The worst thing you can do is develop a shtick like Rooney did, because it makes you predictable. When you’re predictable, you’re boring. And when you’re boring, people stop reading. (I say that knowing very well some people may find me predictable as a columnist, but it’s not for me to judge.)

But obviously, what made me even more acutely conscious of my aging-white-maleness was returning to school.

Granted, graduate school draws a little older student population, but they’re not that much older. The people here have been fabulous – I really can’t, off the top of my head, name a single fellow grad student I don’t like – and part of that is they haven’t made me feel elderly. And they’ve had plenty of chances.

Just to give you an idea of what this kind of thing feels like from the older end, I remember discussing the Internet during one of my first-semester classes. I looked around the room and suddenly was struck by the realization that except for the professor (and I wasn’t sure about him) I was the only person in that room who had spent part of their working life without the Internet. That realization, weird though it was, was immediately followed by the equally weird thought that my classmates were literally half my age. I have a classmate who was born two weeks before my younger son. She’s really cute and a real sweetheart, too, and I ought to fix them up, but that would just give her sufficient reason to avoid me.

But those kinds of realizations weren’t unexpected. In fact, one of my greatest fears in returning to school was that I’d turn out to be the kind of obnoxious older student who was constantly talking about how different the real world was from what you learned in school and how much more I know than everybody else because of my vast life experience and how I’d forgotten more about journalism than any of my professors ever knew. In fact, I made my classmates a deal: If any of them ever heard me say something to the effect of, “that’s how we do it in the real world,” the first one to get to me and kill me would receive whatever was left of my financial aid.

I’m still here, so either I haven’t done that or my classmates are a tolerant bunch. Or they’re planning a slow, complicated demise for me.

It is interesting, though, spending the majority of one’s time with a different generation. The most pleasant thing is the discovery that for all the bitching and moaning you hear about young people these days, they’re a pretty good bunch. While I’m not viewed as some kind of venerable elder here, I’ve gotten a fair amount of respect from both my grad school classmates and the undergraduates I teach.

And about those undergraduates: Their generation has gotten something of a bad rap, as all up-and-coming generations do. We older folks like to believe that they’re spoiled, that they came from the generation where everybody got a trophy and they can’t take criticism and they’re just a bunch of whiners.

There’s some of that, but certainly no more than there was among us baby-boomers (who are, to be fair, members of the most obnoxious generation in history). And every time a kid comes to me to express concern about a grade, I cut them a little slack, because they’re facing a far tougher world than I was coming out of college. I graduated in 1981 during a recession and times were lean, but these kids are going to enter a world with the worst economy since their great-grandparents’ generation. I would not like to be graduating from college today. It’s hard to tell them to lighten up about their grades when they know that a letter grade’s difference could be the only thing that separates them from the other guy going for the same job.

I’ve even been pleasantly surprised that a few realize they’ll have to pay their professional dues before they land that dream job.

So don’t sell today’s students short. The next time one acts in a way you might not have in your early 20s, keep one thing in mind: It’s a tougher world out there than we walked into and unlike us, they have cause to seriously question whether it’s going to get any better. For God’s sake, try to give them an encouraging word.

But you know what? As much as I like younger people, I still wish they’d stay the hell off my lawn.