Illustration: Henrik Drescher
Fighting 'age compression' and the commercialization of childhood
"I saw you on My Space!"
"Yesterday after school Trina and Shayla got in a catfight over Brandon!"
"My butt is hot!"
"I got his phone number!"
"She thinks she's cuter than me."
These comments may or may not raise an eyebrow in any middle school classroom, but the year they became a common occurrence in my kindergarten and 1st-grade classroom threw me for a loop. It was just a few years ago, and at that time I had been teaching for 18 years. My combined kindergarten and 1st-grade classroom was in a small, urban K-8 school serving about 165 students from a mix of cultures and classes. The student population is about 45 percent black, 27 percent Hispanic, and 23 percent white. That particular school year was one of the most challenging I have experienced. The social dynamics were a constant source of stress and strife for my students, my families, my assistant teacher, and for me. At the end of a particularly frustrating day I described the situation to my principal: "We have two 'middle schools' in our school. The middle school and the K-1!"
In a nutshell, that is how the year felt. The problems I encountered, mostly around the over-sexualization of my students, caught me off guard and utterly unprepared. I had 5-year-old girls
vying for the attention of the "coolest" 1st-grade boy. They would push to be near him at the sand table, and groan audibly if I didn't place them in his book group. Students in the class thought of each other as "boyfriend" and "girlfriend." Freeze dance and soul train, which are usually a big hit and lots of fun, had a new dimension as students danced out the social scenarios they had seen in music videos. Performer Chris Brown was the ultimate favorite, though 50 Cent and others were also on the scene. My 5-, 6-, and 7-year-olds played out and talked about "being in the club" and "drinking Heineken." They wrote about the music world in their journals and turned the block area into a radio station. Sometimes they used the hollow blocks to build a stage to perform on. Small cylindrical blocks were their microphones. This type of play was OK with me, except who was "in" and who was "out" was a constant social battle.