Middle School The Inside Story

Remember middle school? Many parents would rather not. It’s often a rough ride, filled with insecurity, peer pressure, awkwardness, and world-rocking change. This book provides practical, hands-on advice for helping your child through this minefield—with information about what he or she is really going through, but isn’t likely to share. Best-selling learning-styles expert Cynthia Tobias and veteran teacher Sue Acuña reveal what they’ve found by listening to kids when parents aren’t around—and give you insider tips on how to bless your middle-schooler with success in class, at home, and in relationships. Topics include advice for keeping communication lines open, predictable physical and social issues, and solutions for problems like self-centeredness and over-the-top emotions.

"The French have a name for the uniquely hellish years between elementary school and high school: "l'ãage ingrat" or "The Ugly Age." Characterized by a perfect storm of developmental changes-physical, psychological, and social-the middle-school years are a time of great distress for parents and children alike, marked by hurt, isolation, exclusion, competition, anxiety, and often outright cruelty. Some of this is inevitable; there are intrinsic challenges to early adolescence. But these years are harder than they need to be, and Judith Warner believes that adults are complicit.With piercing insight, compassion, and humor, Warner walks us through a new understanding of the role that middle school plays in all our lives. Part intellectual investigation and part call to action, this timely book unpacks one of life's most formative periods and shows how we can help our children not only survive it, but thrive"--

New York Times bestselling author of One Last Word and Coretta Scott King award-winning Bronx Masquerade Nikki Grimes offers fresh novel in verse story about young heartbreak and hope. For twelve years, Joylin Johnson's life has been just fine. A game of basketball with the boys-especially her friend Jake-was all it took to put a smile on her face. Baggy jeans, T-shirt, and hair in a ponytail were easy choices. Then, everything suddenly seemed to change all at once. Her best girl friend is now flirting with her best guy friend. Her clothes seem all wrong. Jake is acting weird, and basketball isn't the same. And worst of all, there is this guy, Santiago, who appears from . . . where? What lengths will Joy go to--and who will she become--to attract his attention? In short poems that perfectly capture the crazy feelings of adolescence and first crushes, award-winning author Nikki Grimes has crafted a delightful, often hilarious, heart-tugging story.

Through the stories of kids and parents in the middle school trenches, a New York Times bestselling author reveals why these years are so painful, how parents unwittingly make them worse, and what we all need to do to grow up. “As the parent of a middle schooler, I felt as if Judith Warner had peered into my life—and the lives of many of my patients. This is a gift to our kids and their future selves.”—Lori Gottlieb, author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone The French have a name for the uniquely hellish years between elementary school and high school: l’âge ingrat, or “the ugly age.” Characterized by a perfect storm of developmental changes—physical, psychological, and social—the middle school years are a time of great distress for children and parents alike, marked by hurt, isolation, exclusion, competition, anxiety, and often outright cruelty. Some of this is inevitable; there are intrinsic challenges to early adolescence. But these years are harder than they need to be, and Judith Warner believes that adults are complicit. With deep insight and compassion, Warner walks us through a new understanding of the role that middle school plays in all our lives. She argues that today’s helicopter parents are overly concerned with status and achievement—in some ways a residual effect of their own middle school experiences—and that this worsens the self-consciousness, self-absorption, and social “sorting” so typical of early adolescence. Tracing a century of research on middle childhood and bringing together the voices of social scientists, psychologists, educators, and parents, Warner’s book shows how adults can be moral role models for children, making them more empathetic, caring, and resilient. She encourages us to start treating middle schoolers as the complex people they are, holding them to high standards of kindness, and helping them see one another as more than “jocks and mean girls, nerds and sluts.” Part cultural critique and part call to action, this essential book unpacks one of life’s most formative periods and shows how we can help our children not only survive it but thrive.

"An oral history of HBO"s The Wire"--

Martin Amis's dazzling autobiographical novel of a unique literary life seen through the lens of friendships, family, sex and love, is wise, warm, heartbreaking and funny: the heart-to-heart testimony of an incomparable writer. This is the portrait of an extraordinary life lived by a great writer. Martin Amis leads us through boisterous romantic entanglements and literary friendships, the encompassing ties of family to generously revealing details about how to write (from the master of prose style), and finally to the intimate sorrow of a death closely felt. Inside Story had its birth in a death--that of the author's closest friend, the beloved thinker and writer Christopher Hitchens. From their early days as young magazine staffers in London, reviewing romantic conquests and the latest literary gossip (not to mention ideas, books and where to lunch), Hitchens was Martin's wingman and adviser, especially in the matter of the alluringly amoral, unforgettable Phoebe Phelps--an obsession Martin must somehow put behind him if he is ever to find love, marriage, a plausible run at happiness. We meet the literary giants who influenced him--his father Kingsley Amis, his hero Saul Bellow, the weirdly self-finessing poet Philip Larkin, and significant literary women, from Iris Murdoch to Elizabeth Jane Howard. Moving among these greats to set his own path, Martin's quest is a tender, witty exploration of the hardest questions: how to live, how to be a husband and father, how to grieve, and how to die? In his search for answers, he surveys the horrors of the twentieth century, and the still-unfolding impact of 9/11 on the twenty-first, and considers what all this has taught him about how to be a writer. The result is a love letter to life and to the people in his life, which is simultaneously a wonder of literary invention--wise, meditative, heartbreaking, funny, and as engaging as a novel--that achieves a new level of confidentiality with readers.

The learning-styles expert gives parents a better understanding of the types of learning approaches that will help their children do better in school.

"A collection of ten short stories that all take place in the same day about kids walking home from school"--