Not Much Just Chillin'

by PERLSTEIN, LINDA

• ISBN13: 9780345475763
• ISBN10: 0345475763
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2004-08-31
• Publisher: Ballantine Books

Summary

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 Biography

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.

Table of Contents

prologue at least they can't shove me in	3	(8)
autumn
one i can't believe the day's almost over	11	(14)
two everyone else thinks it's a stupid plane crash	25	(14)
three any girl will obsess over at least 1 guy in their life	39	(11)
four stop! don't touch! get out!	50	(9)
five I'm scary enough as it is	59	(10)
six there's always next quarter	69	(13)
seven it's not you it's me	82	(13)
winter
eight i can't make her do anything	95	(10)
nine i barely ever have a chance to make fun of anyone	105	(8)
ten but what dots this actually have to do with real life?	113	(15)
eleven purple. is that close enough?	128	(7)
twelve i don't care about the snack pass	135	(10)
thirteen not much just chillin'	145	(6)
fourteen it's the jackie show!	151	(10)
fifteen I'm not that curious anymore	161	(12)
sixteen i love you more than words can say	173	(4)
seventeen sometimes i wanna say stuff, but i don't wanna say stuff	177	(12)
eighteen another survivor of the woods	189	(12)
spring
nineteen she started humping me! and i was like :-O	201	(9)
twenty now you have the persentagc of your love	210	(8)
twenty-one she's lost to us	218	(5)
twenty-two this is the most i ever typed in one day!	223	(9)
twenty-three why do people always take sex as a play thing?	232	(8)
twenty-four there's nothing to be scared of in middle school	240	(6)
epilogue you get good at something and then you move on	246	(5)
notes	251	(6)
selected bibliography	257	(4)
a discussion guide	261	(14)
acknowledgments	275