EL Education Curriculum

Parents give up on them. Teachers can’t reach them. Often they can’t even love themselves. Instant-message middle-schoolers “Whassup?” and they’ll type back “NMJC” — “Not much just chillin’.” But it’s a lie, a front, a shrug as old as adolescent angst. Nobody just chills in middle school. That’s where everything happens. Sixth grade takes in children and eighth grade spits out teenagers. Their bodies and psyches morph through the most radical changes since infancy, leaving them torn between anxiety and ardor, dependence and autonomy, conformity and rebellion. Not Much Just Chillin’ is an up-to-date anthropology of the critically formative middle school years. Linda Perlstein spent a year immersed in the lunchroom, classrooms, hearts, and minds of a group of suburban middle schoolers and emerged with this pathbreaking account. The book follows five representative kids through the school year as they study, flirt, argue, rollerskate, instant-message and expain what they think and feel. NMJC offers a trail map to the baffling no-man’s-land between child and teen, the time when children don’t want to grow up, and so badly do. The book follows five children. Eric Ellis ended seventh grade striving to please, but by eighth grade realizes there’s not much room in his life to aim for A’s, and that it is in his power to ignore his schoolwork. Jackie Taylor, who not long ago invented a inoculation against boy germs, now obsesses over serial crushes, recounting soap-operatic plotlines mystifying to everyone who thinks you actually have to talk to a boy to be his girlfriend. Elizabeth Ginsburg, who used to ask her parents for help with just about everything, suddenly shrugs off their suggestions and invariably answers “Nothing” to the daily question, “What did you do at school today?” Jimmy Schissel is living through uncomfortable alterations to the way his body works—from sleeping to eating to thinking to sitting to running—and wonders what is normal and what comes next. Lily Mason is experiencing a new sixth-grade absorption in where she stands among her friends, such that to peek underneath her easygoing persona is to witness a constant effort to fit in, lest she drop a notch in the eyes of Mia Reilly.