It’s annoying when people assume you know nothing, just because you’re young.

As someone who entered high school at age 12, I’m only too familiar with this annoyance.

In high school, I had classes with girls who gushed about football players, while I still thought boys had cooties. In college, many of my fellow students are older by a decade and have children of their own or bachelor’s degrees.

I just got my driver’s license.

Talk about a generation gap.

Just the other day, when carpooling to a journalism conference, I mentioned liking rap, only to be told I had no taste in music. Someone then shoved a CD into the player, and the car was flooded with a wistful keening of bells, harps and flutes.

Well, excuse me, but I’d take Jay-Z over a Celtic hymn any day.

College is starting to make me feel inferior because people tend to tell me what I should know, and I can’t be the crazy, loud girl I was in high school because everyone is so “mature.”

The thing is, I do lag behind most college students in a psychological sense. I am younger by at least a couple of years, so I have to work twice as hard to learn things other people already know.

For example, I am not interested in the presidential election – political speeches are my sandman – and I’m not old enough to vote.

But, hey, I know a lot of things, too. I’ve been all over the world (save for Antarctica), and I’ve lived a lifetime in less than 20 years. I cook, I clean, I run the household and I have a 4.0 to boot.

It would be great if people stopped hounding me about the things I don’t know – like who Bob Marley is.

It would be even better if youth no longer equaled stupid in some people’s eyes.

As the Bible says, “Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young.”

I still have a curfew, I’ve never had a job, I don’t drink and I hold my breath every time I walk through smoker central in the Main Quad.

I may not know what the ’80s were like, but it’s the youth who sometimes have the most to offer.