Not Much Just Chillin': The Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers
Books / Paperback
Books › Family & Relationships › Parenting › General
ISBN: 0345475763 / Publisher: Ballantine Books, August 2004
An award-winning education reporter for the Washington Post takes readers on a harrowing tour of the middle school years, exploring issues of anxiety, conformity, and rebellion common to this age group. Reprint. 35,000 first printing.
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Suddenly they go from striving for A’s 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 what’s really going on under kids’ don’t-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-man’s-land between child and teen.
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