Hormones on fire

13-15 year old boys should be confined to prison cells made of cold shower stalls. I would tell you all to lock up your daughters, except that the girls are equally inappropriate, though in a different way. It's odd. guys will tell you comments about themselves that you wish they would keep secret (I have heard the word "masturbation" more times here than the rest of my life combined, and lets remember that most of my friends are celibate 20-somethings...). The girls don't comment on themselves as much as they do about others (half-joking with guys about the aesthetics of their posteriors or that they want to bear their children). So maybe we just need to lock everyone up in individual cold shower stalls... miles and miles from each other.

Having a large group of pretty female camp counselors doesn't help things. This is mostly because they equate small stature and beardlessness to innocence. But then at night I can hear the boys rating the counselors'... various body parts. Our nurse is a beautiful, 22 year old, spanish girl... and suddenly all the boys seem to suffer from a lot of scratches and bruises that need treating. Perhaps I am equally naïve about the girls, but I doubt it. After last summer, I can see that girls are just as bad as boys though in different ways. Most male counselors have felt a bit stalked by a girl camper or two at some point.

And then of course, hormones also affect these kids' emotional discernment. Girls swing from mood to mood, and I never know what to expect from my class. When I come in in the morning, I have no idea if they will be chirpy and cooperative, or bitchy and irritable. Girls seem given to tears quite easily. One day they are all best friends and the next day they hate each other. Boys just become aggressive and taunting. I've already had to drag one kid out of a classroom when, arms swinging, he tried to get at another boy.

Sometimes I just wish I had fire-hoses like the riot police. I can picture myself saying, "ok, thats it!" and pulling the nozzle out from under the desk and letting it loose. Gallons of water per second rush out of the mouth of the hose, spraying over desks and chairs. Kids yell and duck for cover behind the coat racks. The stream of water leaves a swathe of destruction across the back wall; wet posters and progress charts crumble and fly. And then I turn off the pressure and stand there holding the hose as it dribbles the water left in it. The kids slowly come out from under their desks, soaked from head to toe. They stand there, shivering in their soggy clothes. They wipe their wet hair out from in front of their bewildered eyes and look at me. "Please turn to page number 45 in your exercise books, and let's have no more of this nonsense."