Those Teenage Years

I have a class at my academy that previously consisted of mostly 6th grade boys and girls, 4 or 5 of each, who segregate themselves in the classroom and, as gender groups, are quite distinct. The boys are quieter (in this one class) and don't play with English as much, while the girls are quite into pop culture and chatting.

What has really interested me is that both groups just moved into middle school (or 7th grade), and their lives are forever changed. The outward markings of this change are that they now wear uniforms to school; I have had, this week--the first week of the new school year in Korea--a few short discussions with the girls about their uniforms: Do they like them? Whose uniforms are better? (Some of them go to different schools and so have different uniforms.)

Also, there is a current Korean drama, called "Boys Before Flowers", that many students (and people in general) are infatuated with, and it has become a topic of interest in several classes. In the drama there are four main teenage male actors, and the popularity of the show has led them to be referred to as "F4".

A younger elementary student in another class gave me a picture of one of the actors, and when I showed the pic to my newly minted middle school girls one of them appropriated it and said, "I am his [the teenage actor's] wife."

Ah, those teenage years.