ARTICLE: NYT Middle School Girls Unlock a Room of Their Own, in Miniature

[Ryan Goble]

Interesting NYT article on the new fad of locker decoration companies. Three key paragraphs...

Rachel Simmons, a co-founder of the Girls Leadership Institute, a nonprofit group, and the author of “Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls,” said the trend “exemplifies the mixed messages that girls get about being powerful in the world,” adding: “Now you can’t just go to school and put your books in your locker between periods; it has to become a showcase for your design skills. You become a homemaker in the hallway.”

Wendi Aarons, a humor writer from Austin, Tex., needled the decorating phenomenon on a blog, The Mouthy Housewives. “Old gum. Rotten fruit. Broken hairbrushes. Smelly socks, dog-eared pictures of teenage werewolves,” she wrote. “That’s what a kid’s locker should have as its décor.”

Despite the causes for concern, the growing popularity of locker outfitting has fueled a mini-industry.

You can read the whole article HERE.

[Phyllis Ain]

I am familiar with this author's work on girls and aggression and have used it with my 6th grade girls to deal with cliques and "friending."  Girls can be really vicious and this locker competition makes me really uneasy.  Having a space of one's own at school is one thing; the potentially significant expenditure of funds and the one-upmanship aspects of this practice really bother me.  Yet all the regulatory actions that would impact on personal space are equally distasteful.

[Ryan Goble]

Talk about a rock in a hard place - what parts of Simmon's text do you use? How do students respond?