Wham! Bam! Let's go Glam!

Seventh grade boys are an odd bunch. Then again, that's what makes them so darn amusing (and infuriating) in the first place.

Case in point. I have a lot of skaterboarders on my team. Last year we had the jocks, the kids who played football and basketball. This year we have the little boys (skaters are, for some reason, invariably small) who are completely into skateboards. They sneak skatobard catalogs into the classroom and read and compare every chance they get. I never once saw a boy with a catalog last year, a game magazine perhaps, but a catalog, never. Now I find them everywhere. My advisory kids, in fact, have so many catalogs that they sit there and comparison shop. Some of these kids, in fact, began selling their Halloween candy to classmates in order to fund their addiction to radical t-shirts and skateboard decks.

In any case, there are two trends among the skater squirts that are a bit more than a tad weird, and they began showing up this week.

First trend - skater squirts are wearing girls jeans. Apparently the reason they are wearing girls jeans is because they're tight (very, very tight if you've seen the styles lately) whereas boys jeans are very, very loose (so loose you could be three skaters in one pair). Skaters like tight jeans because the loose ones get in the way when doing skateboard tricks. However, it's really weird seeing some of our boys in these skintight jeans. In fact, one of them, Whiney Boy, looked as if he was having trouble walking. I'm wondering if their parents have any idea what they're wearing to school.

The other new thing is eyeliner. Dark, smokey, almost Goth eyeliner. And the little seventh grade girls just adore this new fad and are whipping out their eyeliner pencils and dolling up the boys in between classes. This whole trend, along with the jeans, has Mr. Social Studies just about beside himself. He's retired military and boys just don't do things like this in his book, even goofy, space cadet, seventh grade boys.

However, as I'm standing there in my room it occurs to me that my boys are now starting to look like David Bowie and the Spiders from Mars. The Glam movement is alive and well in my classroom! All they need is a little glitter and they'd be set.

I happened to mention this to a few of the boys who, thankfully had heard of David Bowie, but never heard of the Spiders, Mick Ronson, Sweet or any of the other Glam bands from that era. So sad, their musical background is a void.

Perhaps I need to whip out and play my Velvet Goldmine CD during class?