The Sixth Grade Scoop

I'll warn you at the start, this is hot stuff, salacious even, so put on your oven mitts and handle it with care: last night my son Ian and I went to the sushi place for dinner together-- Catherine and Alex went to the Asian place a few doors down-- so it was just me and my younger son, a sixth grader who is 11 going on 12, and while usually his older brother Alex dominates the conversation, this situation gave Ian a chance to air some things that were baffling him . . . he mentioned the fact that some people in his grade were "going out" and that "these things usually didn't last long, only a week or so" and that his buddy "wasn't doing that well" because he had a fight with his girlfriend, and so I asked him what they were fighting about and he said, "Shoes" and so I pressed him and he explained,"You know, if his shoes were cool or not" and I said that sometimes women cared about fashion-- that wasn't uncommon-- and Ian said the consensus among the sixth graders was that girls are "a complicated species"-- he used those exact words-- and I said that was certainly true, and he said that kids are also using the term "third wheel" for someone who is hanging around a couple, trying to get in on the action, they called it "third wheeling" and I said that isn't so uncommon either, and sometimes it's okay to be the third wheel and sometimes it isn't and then he said that his friend had "hugged his girlfriend when he was over her house' and her parents brought the hammer down and banned all hugging and hand-holding and Ian said he was not interested in partaking in any of this stuff in any way, shape, or form and I told him that was fine and that he had plenty of time before he needed to get involved with the "complicated species."