Not Much Just Chillin' Paperback by Linda Perlstein

Product Details

• Publisher: Ballantine Books (2004-08-31)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 288 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780345475763
• Item Weight: 232.47 grams
• Dimensions: 20.17 x 13.28 x 1.52 cm

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.

About the Author

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.