Not Much Just Chillin': The Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers

(Paperback)

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Suddenly they go from striving for As to barely passing, from fretting about cooties to obsessing for hours about crushes. Former chatterboxes answer in monosyllables; freethinkers mimic everything from clothes to opinions. Their bodies and psyches morph through the most radical changes since infancy. They are kids in the middle-school years, the age every adult remembers well enough to dread.

Here at last is an up-to-date anthropology of this critically formative period. Prize-winning education reporter Linda Perlstein spent a year immersed in the lunchroom, classrooms, hearts, and minds of a group of suburban Maryland middle schoolers and emerged with this pathbreaking account. Perlstein reveals whats really going on under kids dont-touch-me facade while they grapple with schoolwork, puberty, romance, and identity. A must-read for parents and educators, Not Much Just Chillin offers a trail map to the baffling no-mans-land between child and teen.

Reviews

Perlsteins interpretation of whats going on inside [middle schoolers] hormone-charged world is information every educator and parent should have. . . . A fascinating and important book.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Linda Perlstein has a wonderful and compassionate way of presenting the incredibly poignant day-to-day stories of middle schoolers. A truly valuable book.
ANTHONY E. WOLF, PH.D., author of Get Out of My Life, but First Could You Drive Me and Cheryl to the Mall

Chillin may not make parents feel more comfortable about early adolescences arrival in their household, but it will certainly make them more prepared.
The New York Times

PERLSTEIN IS A GODSEND. . . . ELOQUENTLY ARTICULATING THE STUDENTS HIDDEN PERSPECTIVES.
Washingtonian

Author Bio

Linda Perlstein was a prizewinning education reporter for The Washington Post. She is the author of Not Much Just Chillin.She lives in Washington, D.C.