Youth and age

3. Central Argument: Both age and youth include positive and negative characteristics.

In his essay, Of Youth and Age, Sir Francis Bacon discusses the positive and negative characteristics of both age and youth. And I absolutely agree with his idea; I find so many young men passionate yet inexperienced, old men organized yet indifferent, and men of different age with various range of experiences and ponderous opinions.

I remember when I was a sports captain in middle school I wanted to make people more interested and passionate about sports. Only imagining the day people will love sports and participate in school sports activities, I merely made a chart filled with facts about why sports is good for you. I brought up the idea that on sports day we should have dance performances and special songs to entertain the audience. As suggested by Sir Francis Bacon in his essay, I, as a young girl, was “fitter for new projects;” I didn’t want to stick to the same, old ways previous sports captains simply followed. But time passed by, and I ended up following what all the previous captains had done. People loved the idea, but planning was a horrifying job. I wasn’t aware how to change the system our school had followed for years, how to organize the setting, and how to make people enthusiastic. I was not ready.

My mom, on the other hand, is a very well organized person through experiences. She is a teacher with more than twenty years of experience. But she told me something very interesting; she follows the same pattern of teaching even though the world is improving day by day. She says that she can’t even think of new ideas of making students excited about learning and that she is not really willing to make anymore changes in her teaching style. Teaching piano has now become a part of her life, but my mom tells me that she does not enjoy teaching anymore as much as she did when she first started it and sometimes wonder why she picked piano teacher as her profession. As mentioned in the essay by Sir Bacon, “men of age… adventure too little, repent too soon.”

Regardless age and youth, people have had different experiences through their lives, and we cannot ignore those valuable experiences just because we didn’t experience. Those experiences may have impacted people in positive or negative way. Noticing some people older than me very stereotypical when they face certain situations and some people younger than me very mature, I realized that both old and young people have good as well as bad characteristics to their behavior. What I must learn, though, is that others will also have opinions about me, either good or bad, and hence, I need to work on improving myself into a better experienced, mature, creative and passionate person in the society.