Like clockwork

Hormones hit on March 1 in the fifth grade. Every year. From sea to shining sea. On Valentine's Day, there's nothing. No coded "will he know what this means?" messages sent in the little tiny V-day cards, no "who likes who" lists going around the room supposedly unnoticed. Two weeks later, though, it's all Boy-Girl Issues, all the time.

Signs of this Mass Onset of Puberty have included one boy shaving his "mustache." He had an ashy upper lip for a week, which is the first time any of us ever noticed there was something going on in that particular region of his face. Also, the class diva "started" and made sure to let me, and everyone in the class know in one way or another by the end of the day. I mean, how many times can you really drop a tampon in one day? Seriously.

The social issues can sometimes feel like a distraction, but I try to remember that the gender stuff is just as important a part of the kids' development as the mind-stretching I intend. I try to stay conscious of just how cute, how normal, how inescapable all this "kid stuff" is. And it's interesting to see how subtly things have changed since I discovered my body, and boys, as interesting topics. We used to use little paper 'fortune tellers' or paper-and-pencil games to invent "couples" out of our class roster. The girls in my class have discovered an online tool that does all the name-matching for them. (Adults, of course, design and market the site--another example of the commodification of childhood.)

Managing all this rush of human development in a positive direction takes a lot of energy, patience, and knowledge. And time! Yet another argument for giving experienced teachers freedom and control over the pace and focus of their curriculum and class time. An argument against 'departmentalizing' elementary classrooms. Does counseling an eleven-year-old on how to tell the difference between needing to change your tampon from needing to pee fall under science, social studies, or language arts? Math, maybe--it's a timing issue, after all.