Tweens

I inflict my mad English skillz on children ages 5-ish to 15-ish. I'm a big hit with the wee bits: I'm high-energy, I'm goofy, we get along great. And I have good rapport with the full-fledged teenagers too. But I can't get a break with the eye-rolling tween set. They barely tolerate my class, they get away with as much as possible, and then they go home. I go home too. But they go home smirking. I go home and drown my post-tween stress in Tsingtao.

I blame it on the cool factor: Tweens are genetically wired to seek out and destroy anyone who isn't cool. I am not very cool.

Here's how I think it works: No one is cool for the first ten years of their life. During that time, most of us are primarily concerned with playing, watching cartoons and trying not to piss our pants. Then you get into the double-digits and a light goes on: You realize being cool is your destiny. Further, you realize you spent the whole of your life up until this point being not cool. The humiliation! Therefore, you spend the next four to six years trying to compensate for all that prior uncoolness.

I remember this stage keenly. I dreaded my parents hugging me in public. I spent hours, days, weeks maybe! considering how to acquire an Abercrombie and Fitch t-shirt when there was no Abercrombie store in Alaska (there is now). I disavowed my status as jedi-class Star Wars freak. I stayed up nights worrying over what the boys whispered about in the back of the class. And when the other seventh-grade girls got gell pens/toe socks/doc martens/hello kitty stationery/smiley face t-shirts/cranberry lip balm - I'd be damned if I didn't get it too.

Eventually most of us get used to ourselves again and get over it. But at the volatile juncture of tweendom it's be cool or be verbally cannibalized by your peers. When you are a cool tween, the other cool people are your allies. They build you up, make you cooler. Anyone who is not cool must be sought out and destroyed. Failure to annihilate the uncool lessens your own cool-factor.

I am not cool. My little kids are oblivious. My teenagers are over it. But my tweens are on red-alert. The boys affect non-ironic, exaggerated swaggers when they drop into class. The girls spend the hour attempting to chat the boys up, and then act distressed when I pair them with boys for activities. And through it all they do their best to tell me - even though their English is pretty crappy - that I am totally, completely, undeniably lame.

When I was in junior high, my eighth-grade social studies teacher had somewhat of a meltdown. He went around the class one day and told each of us what he hated about us as individuals. At the time I thought he was a bad teacher. Still do. But I also kind of get it now.