Not all sluts and playas

A surprising new book finds that despite their R-rated vocabulary and hormonally induced moodiness, most middle schoolers are pretty innocent -- if a little sex-obsessed.

By Elinor Burkett

Oct 3, 2003 | Breasts are my most vivid memory of middle school. I had them; most of my friends didn't. By the logic of a 12-year-old, those protrusions jutting out from my chest were therefore a singular curse.

The only other clear recollection I can dredge up from those dismal years -- now cheerily recast by copywriters as the 'tweens -- is the droning of Mr. Turner, a social studies teacher whose idea of stimulating young minds was to force us to memorize a list of bodies of water, a litany that started with ocean and ended, inexplicably, with swimming pool.

"Why me?" I whined incessantly to my father about the utter tedium of the classroom, about the girls who snubbed me in the morning only to invite me over in the afternoon and the boys who pawed and slobbered and boinged off the walls. Never one to sugarcoat acrid truths, one day he silently handed me a copy of "Lord of the Flies" and declared flatly, "Adolescents are savages."

Despite a decade of tolerance education, self-esteem training and workshops on sexual harassment, they are savages still, although of the most banal order. Or so they emerge on the pages of Linda Perlstein's new book, "Not Much Just Chillin': The Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers."

An education reporter at the Washington Post, Perlstein spent the 2001-02 school year embedded at Wilde Lake , a socioeconomically and racially mixed middle school in suburban Columbia, Md. Seeking clues about what actually goes through the minds of the gaggles of early teens whose behavior seems to mystify adults, she spent months hanging out in the lunchroom, sitting in on classes, cheering from the bleachers at soccer games and trampoline meets. After school, she watched cartoons with the girls and admired the boys' fumbling rollerblade prowess. With the patience and fascination of an anthropologist sussing out tribal rituals, she bantered about clothes with nascent fashion victims, spied on the ever-changing landscape of friendships and documented the alternating sultry silence and explosive fury that drive parents into therapy.

What she found wasn't all that surprising: Today's kids aren't very different from the budding teen Perlstein had been when she was a student almost two decades ago at Maple Dale Middle School near Milwaukee. Sure, the packaging has changed: Obsessive instant messaging has replaced obsessive telephone chatting -- to the relief of many parents who can now stay in touch with their own friends. The sexual seething is overt. And one of the hot topics of the moment is oral sex.

But the girls still spend Friday nights fantasizing imaginary romances. After school, they still pore over Seventeen magazine or its more recent competitors. Striking the wrong fashion note still lands you in 7th grade purgatory, the boys won't sit still, parents continue to be disgustingly goopy, and the educational environment is a screeching bore.

In Perlstein's universe, there aren't even enough drugs, sex or alcohol to justify a community meeting.

In fact, the kids who drive Perlstein's narrative emerge as sweet, even innocent, despite their R-rated vocabulary and the moodiness induced by raging hormones unmitigated by much adult intervention. They might seem mean, but they're not fundamentally vicious -- even when they drive their classmates to tears. Behind a façade of independence, they long for their teachers' approval. And although they never admit to it, they still crave their mothers' protective arms, or at least their specially packed lunches.

The portrait is more upbeat -- more reassuring to parents -- than what I found four years ago while wandering the halls of Prior Lake High School in suburban Minneapolis for my own book, "Another Planet." The high school students I befriended had described their middle school years as a haze of drugs and alcohol. Had they been sweet, at the core? "We were animals," one girl told me. "Not just on the surface. What you saw was pretty much what we were."

I talked to Perlstein by phone about the cheery portrait that runs counter to so many adult stereotypes and so much that I'd learned.

Early in the book, you quote the principal of Wilde Lake as saying of middle school, "If anyone gets through unscathed, I don't know them." Were you scathed?

I wasn't scathed, but most of my friends were. A friend of mine remembers all her middle school stories like they were yesterday. She remembers going through the hall with her friends and the boys, as they walked by, were shouting out ratings of the girls. "So and so is an 8, so and so is a 9. They announced my friend as a 3, and she still remembers it. She was a 3. A 3.

So tell me about your typical week at Wilde Lake?

I wasn't there every hour of every school day, but I always tried to make it to lunch. I went outside with the kids at recess. I sat in their classes, although I didn't always stay for the full class. Fortunately, I had that privilege. I was with them on Saturdays, I was with them on Sunday mornings, and I was with them on Friday nights. I was with them as they sat at home and watched cartoons. A lot of that time was more valuable than some of their social studies classes.

Weren't the parents wary about letting a stranger, a reporter, get so close to their kids?

I didn't get the sense that anyone was wary, which was strange. None of the parents was anything but completely welcoming. The teachers all seemed to be happy to have me in their classes. There wasn't one time in the course of the year when anyone said, "You're not going to put this in the book, are you?" I sat in on meetings with the principal and naughty students. I sat in on staff meetings. I sat there as parents argued with their kids. They all trusted me.

How did the kids treat you? As a peer? An older sister? A weird adult?

I would have to say that the teachers treated me like one of them, the parents treated me like one of them, and the kids treated me like one of them. They knew I wasn't going to join in when they made themselves pass out on the playground as a prank. But they knew I wasn't going to say anything about it either.

They really liked having me around. They begged me to come to their classes. The girls, in particular, always commented on what I wore, on my purses. They were very attuned to me. A seventh-grader named Edith told me, "You're the most popular kid in school." Yippee! I was never that popular when I was in middle school.

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