Not Much Just Chillin': The Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780345475763)

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.

Author: Linda Perlstein
ISBN-10: 0345475763
ISBN-13: 9780345475763
Publisher: Ballantine Group
Language: English
Published: 08/31/2004
Pages: 288
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.46lbs
Size: 8.06h x 5.26w x 0.63d

Review Citation(s):
School Library Journal 09/01/2007 pg. 61