Senior High School Quotes

Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. Some of you like Pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read.

Senior year. And then life. Maybe that's the way it worked. High school was just a prologue to the real novel. Everybody got to write you -- but when you graduated, you got to write yourself. At graduation you got to collect your teacher's pens and your parents' pens and you got your own pen. And you could do all the writing. Yeah. Wouldn't that be sweet?

Gino’s Pizza Boy had the look of someone who’s biggest aspiration in life was to make it out of high school after two senior years.

What's wrong with me? ... I might seem like the ideal student: homework always in early, every extra credit and extra curricular I can get my hands on, the good girl and the high achiever. But I realized something just now: it's not ambition, not entirely. It's fear. Because I don't know who I am when I'm not working, when I'm not focused on or totally consumed by a task. Who am I between the projects and the assignments, when there's nothing to do? I haven't found her yet and it scares me. Maybe that's why, for my senior capstone project this year, I decided to solve a murder.

Q, you're going to go to Duke. You're going to be a very successful lawyer-or-something and get married and have babies and live your whole little life, and then you're going to die, and in the last moments, when you're chocking on your own bile in the nursing home, you'll say to yourself:'Well, I wasted my whole goddamned life, but at least I broke into SeaWorld with Margo Roth Spiegelman my senior year of high school. At least I carpe'd that one diem.

What did that mean? Where could it go? He was a death diety. I was a high school senior.

Education, The less you think about it, the more it makes sense.

In school, the year was the marker. Fifth grade. Senior year of high school. Sophomore year of college. Then after, the jobs were the marker. That office. This desk. But now that school is over and I've been working at the same place in the same office at the same desk for longer than I can truly believe, I realize: You have become the marker. This is your era. And it's only if it goes on and on that will have to look for other ways to identify the time.

Getting into a fight with a popular senior. Pissing off a school teacher and the local chief of police. Hanging with two major-league losers." She slapped my back. "Welcome to high school.

He’s a senior in high school Bernardo. Jean-Claude is his legal guardian and had to enroll him in school. He comes home with homework and shit and then he wants to cuddle and have sex. It weirds me the fuck out.

That girl is a suburban dad's midlife crisis in a high school senior's body

Ethan and I are done," I said finally. "I'm sorry." "He was my first boyfriend." "I know." "The only real boyfriend I've had. I'm a senior in high school and he was my only real boyfriend." "I know." "And I won't find another one at Jones Hall. That is guaranteed." "Okay." "This is all very sad and tragic," I said. Alan unwrapped a sleeve of Smarties. "Yet, oddly, you don't seem that upset." "I know.

In the darkest hour of winter, when the starlings had all flown away, Gretel Samuelson fell in love. It happened the way things are never supposed to happen in real life, like a sledgehammer, like a bolt from out of the blue. One minute she was a seventeen year-old senior in high school waiting for a Sicilian pizza to go; the next one she was someone whose whole world had exploded, leaving her adrift in the Milky Way, so far from earth she was walking on stars.

I'd violated the primary rule of junior and senior high-- don't get people talking about you too much. This was wearing the brightest shirt on the playground. This was Mom giving you a kiss in the lobby.

Actually, nothing hurts like hearing the word slut, unless it is hearing the word rape dropped about carelessly. Again, a word I wouldn't have thought much about, except that when I was in high school a girl gave her senior speech on her best friend's rape. She ended not with an appear for women's rights or self defense, but by begging us to consider our language. We use the word 'rape' so casually, for sports, for a failed test, to spice up jokes. 'The test raped me.' 'His smile went up to justifiable rape.' These references confer casualness upon the word, embedding it into our culture, stripping it of shock value, and ultimately numb us to the reality of rape.

WAKE Dealing with an alcoholic single mother and endless hours of working at Heather Nursing Home to raise money for college, high-school senior Janie Hannagan doesn’t need more problems. But inexplicably, since she was eight years old, she has been pulled in to people’s dreams, witnessing their recurring fears, fantasies and secrets. Through Miss Stubin at Heather Home, Janie discovers that she is a dream catcher with the ability to help others resolve their haunting dreams. After taking an interest in former bad boy Cabel, she must distinguish between the monster she sees in his nightmares and her romantic feelings for him. And when she learns more about Cabel’s covert identity, Janie just may be able to use her special dream powers to help solve crimes in a suspense-building ending with potential for a sequel. McMann lures teens in by piquing their interest in the mysteries of the unknown, and keeps them with quick-paced, gripping narration and supportive characters.

We have to reach out to kids sooner. Everybody needs to step outside of their comfort zone and become friends with someone who is different, no matter what that difference is. And we all have to do it much sooner then senior year of high school.

The most dangerous among us come dressed as eagles and we learn too late they are chickens in disguise. (Speech to seniors at Klein Forest High School)

Every now and then, I’m lucky enough to teach a kindergarten or first-grade class. Many of these children are natural-born scientists - although heavy on the wonder side and light on scepticism. They’re curious, intellectually vigorous. Provocative and insightful questions bubble out of them. They exhibit enormous enthusiasm. I’m asked follow-up questions. They’ve never heard of the notion of a ‘dumb question’. But when I talk to high school seniors, I find something different. They memorize ‘facts’. By and large, though, the joy of discovery, the life behind those facts, has gone out of them. They’ve lost much of the wonder, and gained very little scepticism. They’re worried about asking ‘dumb’ questions; they’re willing to accept inadequate answers; they don’t pose follow-up questions; the room is awash with sidelong glances to judge, second-by-second, the approval of their peers.

Let me tell you girls a story, short and sweet. In high school, I was a junior varsity cheerleader dating a senior who was up for football scholarships. I'd slept with him several times willingly. One night I wasn't in the mood, but he was. So he held me down and forced me. The few people I told about it - including my best friend - pointed out what would happen to him if I told. They stressed the fact that I hadn't been a virgin, that we were dating, that we'd had sex before. So I kept quiet. I never even told my mother. That boy put bruises on my body. I was crying and begging him to stop and he didn't. That's called rape, ladies.

The quarterback? Wow. My mom wouldn't let me stand in the same checkout line as a high school senior. She's so lame. She's not lame. She thinks eighteen year old boys are dangerous. She calls them penises with hands and feet. Tell me that isn't lame.

I was in the fifth grade the first time I thought about turning thirty. My best friend Darcy and I came across a perpetual calendar in the back of the phone book, where you could look up any date in the future, and by using this little grid, determine what the day of the week would be. So we located our birthdays in the following year, mine in May and hers in September. I got Wednesday, a school night. She got a Friday. A small victory, but typical. Darcy was always the lucky one. Her skin tanned more quickly, her hair feathered more easily, and she didn't need braces. Her moonwalk was superior, as were her cart-wheels and her front handsprings (I couldn't handspring at all). She had a better sticker collection. More Michael Jackson pins. Forenze sweaters in turquoise, red, and peach (my mother allowed me none- said they were too trendy and expensive). And a pair of fifty-dollar Guess jeans with zippers at the ankles (ditto). Darcy had double-pierced ears and a sibling- even if it was just a brother, it was better than being an only child as I was. But at least I was a few months older and she would never quite catch up. That's when I decided to check out my thirtieth birthday- in a year so far away that it sounded like science fiction. It fell on a Sunday, which meant that my dashing husband and I would secure a responsible baby-sitter for our two (possibly three) children on that Saturday evening, dine at a fancy French restaurant with cloth napkins, and stay out past midnight, so technically we would be celebrating on my actual birthday. I would have just won a big case- somehow proven that an innocent man didn't do it. And my husband would toast me: "To Rachel, my beautiful wife, the mother of my chidren and the finest lawyer in Indy." I shared my fantasy with Darcy as we discovered that her thirtieth birthday fell on a Monday. Bummer for her. I watched her purse her lips as she processed this information. "You know, Rachel, who cares what day of the week we turn thirty?" she said, shrugging a smooth, olive shoulder. "We'll be old by then. Birthdays don't matter when you get that old." I thought of my parents, who were in their thirties, and their lackluster approach to their own birthdays. My dad had just given my mom a toaster for her birthday because ours broke the week before. The new one toasted four slices at a time instead of just two. It wasn't much of a gift. But my mom had seemed pleased enough with her new appliance; nowhere did I detect the disappointment that I felt when my Christmas stash didn't quite meet expectations. So Darcy was probably right. Fun stuff like birthdays wouldn't matter as much by the time we reached thirty. The next time I really thought about being thirty was our senior year in high school, when Darcy and I started watching ths show Thirty Something together. It wasn't our favorite- we preferred cheerful sit-coms like Who's the Boss? and Growing Pains- but we watched it anyway. My big problem with Thirty Something was the whiny characters and their depressing issues that they seemed to bring upon themselves. I remember thinking that they should grow up, suck it up. Stop pondering the meaning of life and start making grocery lists. That was back when I thought my teenage years were dragging and my twenties would surealy last forever. Then I reached my twenties. And the early twenties did seem to last forever. When I heard acquaintances a few years older lament the end of their youth, I felt smug, not yet in the danger zone myself. I had plenty of time..

I made him a promise." Kevin dragged his stare away from Neil's face to follow Andrew's progress. "He's waiting to see if I can keep it." "I don't understand." Kevin said nothing for so long Neil almost gave up waiting for an answer. Finally he explained, "Andrew on his drugs is useless, but Andrew off his drugs is worse. His high school counselor saw the difference between his junior and senior years and swore this medicine saved his life. A sober Andrew is…" Kevin thought for a moment, trying to remember her exact words, and crooked his fingers at Neil as he quoted, "destructive and joyless. "Andrew has neither purpose nor ambition," Kevin said. "I was the first person who ever looked at Andrew and told him he was worth something. When he comes off these drugs and has nothing else to hold him up I will give him something to build his life around." "He agreed to this?" Neil asked. "But he's fighting you every step of the way. Why?" "When I first said you would be Court, why were you upset with me?" "Because I knew it'd never happen," Neil said, "but I wanted it anyway." Kevin said nothing. Neil waited, then realized he'd answered his own question.

Both of these students- both high school seniors both old enough to vote in the upcoming election- thought 'Al' Qaeda was a person. At that time the United States had been at war for five and a half years and here were two students two young adults leaving the educational system who had never heard of al Qaeda. Both by the way had passed the multiple-choice reading section of the state's high school exit exam.

In the classics section, she had picked up a copy of The Magic Mountain and recalled the summer between her junior and senior years of high school, when she read it, how she lay in bed hours after she should have gotten up, the sheet growing warmer against her skin as the sun rose higher in the sky, her mother poking her head in now and then to see if she'd gotten up yet, but never suggesting that she should: Eleanor didn't have many rules about child rearing, but one of them was this: Never interrupt reading.

When you're a demigod, you worry a lot about staying alive. You hardly ever think about old age. I'd been so focused on just making it out of high school, becoming an adult... but maybe that wasn't the ultimate goal. Getting old might be scary and difficult. It involved things I didn't wanna think about, like arthritis and varicose veins and hearing aids. But if you grew older with the people you loved, wasn't that better than any other alternative?

YOU KNOW HOW WHEN you’re a senior in high school, and you officially know absolutely everything about everything and no one can tell you different, but on the other hand, at the same time, you’re dumber than a poorly translated instruction manual for a spoon?

transient, adj. In school, the year was the marker. Fifth grade. Senior year of high school. Sophomore year of college. Then after, the jobs were the marker. That office, this desk. But now that school is over and I've been working at the same desk for longer than I can truly believe, I realize: You have become the marker. This is your era. And it's only if it goes on and on that I will have to look for other ways to identify the time.

Well, I wasted my whole goddamned life, but at least I broke into SeaWorld with Margo Roth Spiegelman my senior year of high school. At least I carpe'd that one diem.

Nearly 40% of iGen high school seniors in 2016 had never tried alcohol at all, and the number of 8th graders who have tried alcohol has been cut nearly in half.

The one where the high school senior was acquitted of rape because the sophomore girl had shaved her pubic region, which somehow equaled consent.

Eric Harris wanted a prom date. Eric was a senior, about to leave Columbine High School forever. He was not about to be left out of the prime social event of his life. He really wanted a date. Dates were not generally a problem. Eric was a brain, but an uncommon subcategory: cool brain. He smoked, he drank, he dated. He got invited to parties. He got high. He worked his look hard: military chic hair— short and spiked with plenty of product—plus black T-shirts and baggy cargo pants. He blasted hard-core German industrial rock from his Honda. He enjoyed firing off bottle rockets and road-tripping to Wyoming to replenish the stash. He broke the rules, tagged himself with the nickname Reb, but did his homework and earned himself a slew of A’s. He shot cool videos and got them airplay on the closed-circuit system at school. And he got chicks. Lots and lots of chicks. On the ultimate high school scorecard, Eric outscored much of the football team. He was a little charmer. He walked right up to hotties at the mall. He won them over with quick wit, dazzling dimples, and a disarming smile.

The families of graduating seniors emptied out of cars, sheepish in uncommon splendor, like milling clans at the origin of a parade. There is something spent about the families of teenagers; possibly it's the look of exhausted loyalties. Perhaps it's only right that we grow overbig in someone else's space. Perhaps we need to tire and differentiate, leave and adapt.

I never blindly roamed with a team just for the sake of social labeling or fitting in. I was never part of a particular group, scene or tribe. I was friends with everybody. My best friend in high school was prom queen, yet I was voted the biggest nonconformist of my senior class.

I think it’s our culture,” explains Tiffany Liao, a poised Swarthmore-bound high school senior whose parents are from Taiwan. “Study, do well, don’t create waves. It’s inbred in us to be more quiet. When I was a kid and would go to my parents’ friends’ house and didn’t want to talk, I would bring a book. It was like this shield, and they would be like, ‘She’s so studious!’ And that was praise.” It’s hard to imagine other American moms and dads outside Cupertino smiling on a child who reads in public while everyone else is gathered around the barbecue. But parents schooled a generation ago in Asian countries were likely taught this quieter style as children. In many East Asian classrooms, the traditional curriculum emphasizes listening, writing, reading, and memorization. Talking is simply not a focus, and is even discouraged.

When I was young, I thought it was thunder that kills people. But when I learnt physics in St. Paul's High School, I discovered that it is rather the lightning that does the killing. The voice of the thunder itself is just a noise. The lightning is the poise. I learnt to take the course of my life, not by violence but rather with intelligence.

When I was a senior in high school, I was playing in this local band in our town, and I really wanted to be a musician for a living, and it didn’t look like that was going to happen with my band. So, I enrolled in college and stuff. My senior year had ended, and I was going through the anxiety of like, ‘I guess I’m an adult now kind of’ and I was really yearning for a direction. And, I remember like sitting in my back one day, and I was praying alone, and I remember God said, just give up. Just let go of this worry and this need for direction and I will give you direction.

Lincoln,” Sam had asked him on one of those nights, the summer before their senior year, “do you think we’ll get married some day?” “I hope so,” he’d whispered. He didn’t usually think about it like that, like “married.” He thought about how he never wanted to be without her. About how happy she made him and how he wanted to go on being that happy for the rest of his life. If a wedding could promise him that, he definitely wanted to get married. “Wouldn’t it be romantic,” she said, “to marry your high school sweetheart? When people ask us how we met I’ll say, ‘We met in high school. I saw him, and I just knew.’ And they’ll say, ‘Didn’t you ever wonder what it would be like to be with someone else?

We spend more per pupil than any other country, but among industrialized nations, American students rank near the bottom in science and math. Only 13 percent of high school seniors know what high school seniors should know about American history.

To be honest, I hadn’t been emotionally prepared for the emptiness that seemed to accompany my senior year, the many reminders of my mom’s absence. Senior pictures, homecoming, college applications, prom, graduation; as everyone I knew got excited about those high school benchmarks, I got stress headaches because nothing felt the way I’d planned for it to feel. Everything felt… lonely.

And she has been there. I know because her senior high school yearbook, the one with no Daytons, is gone from the bureau where i had left it. She's seen my things scattered about. She knows I'm still here. But she didn't wait Part of me doesn't want to give up, and makes excuses. "She'll be back =," it says. "She just didn't want to run into Aunt Ida. Now that she knows you're here..." But she knew it. Where else would I be? I have to face it: I'm not as important as some package she needs from Seattle. My presence won't bring her back.

You're going to be a very successful lawyer-or-something and get married and have babies and live your whole little life, and then you're going to die, and in your last moments, when you're choking on your own bile in the nursing home, you'll say to yourself: 'Well I wasted my whole goddamned life, but at least I broke into SeaWorld with Margo Roth Spiegelman in my senior year of high school. At least I carpe'd the one diem

You only get one senior year of high school, and I want you to enjoy it. You have a hot boyfriend and you got into a great school. Your birthday is coming up soon. This is the time to just be young and celebrate and enjoy each other!” “Yes, within reason, of course,” Daddy says hastily.

When my son David was a high school senior in 2003, his graduating class went on a camping trip in the desert. A creative writing educator visited the camp and led the group through an exercise designed to develop their sensitivity and imaginations. Each student was given a pen, a notebook, a candle, and matches. They were told to walk a short distance into the desert, sit down alone, and “discover themselves.” The girls followed instructions. The boys, baffled by the assignment, gathered together, threw the notebooks into a pile, lit them with the matches, and made a little bonfire.

He looks off to the side and sees the two figures coming closer. Craig’s mother. His oldest brother, Sam, a senior at the high school. They head right to Craig, and Craig’s mother asks him if he’s okay. He nods slightly. “Sam was watching, and he came to get us.” Us. Craig hears the us, and at first doesn’t understand it. Then his father and his other brother, Kevin, are there, too. “Parked the car,” Craig’s father says. “Your mom couldn’t wait.

We should just get a giant bottle of bargain vodka or something," Gil said, pushing his gorilla mask back on his head. "Not classy," Steph said. "This is a special night, not a frat party." "Special? Classy??" Ethan asked. "Steph. We're seniors in high school going trick-or-treating. We look like third-rate street performers.

Look, I didn’t want to be a high school senior.

He hadn’t actually acted since his high school senior play (where he had famously skipped two whole pages of dialog and died fifteen minutes too soon),

Senior year. And then life. Maybe that's the way it worked. High school was just a prologue to the real novel. Everybody got to write you - but when you graduated, you got to write yourself.

A Southern Poverty Law Center survey of high school seniors and social studies teachers in 2017 found students struggling on even basic questions about the enslavement of blacks in the United States. Only 8 percent of high school seniors could identify slavery as the primary reason the South seceded from the Union. Nearly half of the students said it was to protest taxes on imported goods.

If there are significant differences in the surveys to be found, they frequently suggest that whites, particularly white youth, are more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than people of color.11 One study, for example, published in 2000 by the National Institute on Drug Abuse reported that white students use cocaine at seven times the rate of black students, use crack cocaine at eight times the rate of black students, and use heroin at seven times the rate of black students.12 That same survey revealed that nearly identical percentages of white and black high school seniors use marijuana. The National Household Survey on Drug Abuse reported in 2000 that white youth aged 12–17 are more than a third more likely to have sold illegal drugs than African American youth.13 Thus

Over six months I went from having a fourth grade reading level to that of a senior in high school. My vocabulary mushroomed. I wrote out thousands of flash cards and went over them for hours, days, and weeks.

This is the last time we’ll walk up this staircase together, Peter taking the stairs two at a time, me nipping at his heels, huffing and puffing to keep up. It’s the last day of school for seniors, the last day of my high school career. When we reach the top of the staircase, I say, “I feel like taking the stairs two at a time is just bragging. Have you ever noticed that only boys ever take stairs two at a time?” “Girls probably would if they were as tall.” “Margot’s friend Chelsea is five eleven, and I don’t think she does it.” “So what are you saying--boys brag more?” “Probably. Don’t you think?” “Probably,” he admits.

Three or four years ago, a city education bureau announced a new measure to raise the quality of local teachers and enable graduating high school seniors to be more competitive in the university entrance examination.

I first used LSD in my freshman year of high school at a homecoming football game. A friend had taken it too, knew more about it than me, and when asked, told me to just stare at certain things. The friend pointed at a rail that had some paint chipped off it and said "Just look at that... it's trippy." I looked at the rail with some paint chipped off. Nothing happened. I was in front of the school after the game was over and must have been high because two friends were in front of me crying. I asked them why they were crying and they said because I had taken acid. "Are you going to tell my parents?" I asked. "I don't know," they said. I was afraid. On the way home someone in the car started screaming. We found an albino praying mantis in the car, stopped and let it out. In a friend's room, later, I was lying on the bed and seeing in the corners nets of colors beating. A Nirvana poster was surrounded by color and moving slightly. After this incident there are no memories of taking LSD until senior year of high school. No one paid enough attention to notice I wasn't getting dressed in the morning, just taking acid and going to school in my pajamas. I would walk in the hallways staring forward with a neutral facial expression. I was terribly depressed. My mom eventually found out.

When I began to read, a whole new world opened to me. I became interested in books. I still could not read very well, but each new book made it easier. I did not mind spending many hours, because reading was enjoyment, rather than work. When I reached this point, I accumulated books and read one after another. I did this all through my senior year in high school and the summer following. By the time I really knew my way through a book, I had graduated from high school.

Every now and then, I'm lucky enough to teach a kindergarten or first-grade class. Many of these children are natural-born scientists - although heavy on the wonder side, and light on skepticism. They're curious, intellectually vigorous. Provocative and insightful questions bubble out of them. They exhibit enormous enthusiasm. I'm asked follow-up questions. They've never heard of the notion of a 'dumb question'. But when I talk to high school seniors, I find something different. They memorize 'facts'. By and large, though, the joy of discovery, the life behind those facts has gone out of them. They've lost much of the wonder and gained very little skepticism. They're worried about asking 'dumb' questions; they are willing to accept inadequate answers, they don't pose follow-up questions, the room is awash with sidelong glances to judge, second-by-second, the approval of their peers. They come to class with their questions written out on pieces of paper, which they surreptitiously examine, waiting their turn and oblivious of whatever discussion their peers are at this moment engaged in. Something has happened between first and twelfth grade. And it's not just puberty. I'd guess that it's partly peer pressure not to excel - except in sports, partly that the society teaches short-term gratification, partly the impression that science or mathematics won't buy you a sports car, partly that so little is expected of students, and partly that there are few rewards or role-models for intelligent discussion of science and technology - or even for learning for it's own sake. Those few who remain interested are vilified as nerds or geeks or grinds. But there's something else. I find many adults are put off when young children pose scientific questions. 'Why is the Moon round?', the children ask. 'Why is grass green?', 'What is a dream?', 'How deep can you dig a hole?', 'When is the world's birthday?', 'Why do we have toes?'. Too many teachers and parents answer with irritation, or ridicule, or quickly move on to something else. 'What did you expect the Moon to be? Square?' Children soon recognize that somehow this kind of question annoys the grown-ups. A few more experiences like it, and another child has been lost to science.

All this is probably for nothing,' she [her mother] said once we'd hatched the plan. 'Most likely I'll flunk out anyway.' To prepare, she shadowed me during the last months of my senior year of high school, doing all the homework that I was assigned, honing her skills. She replicated my worksheets, wrote the same papers I had to write, read every one of the books. I graded her work, using my teacher's marks as a guide. I judged her a shaky student at best. She went to college and earned straight As

Beyond these moments, she could hardly count the fumbling ministrations of boys in high school who, even to her senior prom, never went beyond sticky pleasantries. With one exception, it was just a sort of half-clothed handshake for bragging rights, none hers.

I’ve found newspapers only useful as kindling material for campfires. It’s been said that newspaper articles are written at a fifth grade reading level. If so, I can’t figure out why journalists would write something that the average high school senior can’t even read.

Parent time is like fairy time but real. It is magic without pixie dust and spells. It defies physics without bending the laws of time and space. It is that truism everyone offers but no one believes until after they have children: that time will actual speed, fleet enough to leave you jet-lagged and whiplashed and racing all at once. Your tiny, perfect baby nestles in your arms his first afternoon home, and then ten months later, he's off to his senior year of high school. You give birth to twins so small and alike, they lie mirrored, each with a head in the palm of one hand while their toes reach only to the crooks of your elbow, but it's only a year before they start looking at colleges. It is so impossible yet so universally experienced that magic is the only explanation. Except then there are also the excruciating rainy Sundays when the kids are whiny, bored, and beastly, and it takes a hundred hours to get from breakfast to bedtime, the long weekends when you wonder whose demonic idea it was to trap you in your home with you bevy of abominable children for a decade without school.

No one likes to be condescended to, so it’s hardly surprising that so many high school students develop a loathing for the modernist novels they’re forced to read in senior English and go to the movies instead. (Movies have plots, after all.) They’re being good postmodernists.

Recent national surveys of U.S. students have found that more than 6 percent of all high school seniors used a prescription stimulant at least once during the year to help them study, compared to 10 percent of college students overall, and 20 percent of Ivy League students. Not smart.

I'd heard there were some gay girls in senior year who were dating each other right out in the open. But not any boys. Its different for boys. I mean, everybody knows somebody gay - duh, it's not 1980 or something - but not at school. At school, it was a secret, and you were on your own.

After her mother died and Adrienne and her father took up with wanderlust, Adrienne became exposed to new foods. For two years they lived in Maine, where in the summertime they ate lobster and white corn and small wild blueberries. They moved to Iowa for Adrienne's senior year of high school and they ate pork tenderloin fixed seventeen different ways. Adrienne did her first two years of college at Indiana University in Bloomington, where she lived above a Mexican cantina, which inspired a love of tamales and anything doused with habanero sauce. Then she transferred to Vanderbilt in Nashville, where she ate the best fried chicken she'd ever had in her life. And so on, and so on. Pad thai in Bangkok, stone crabs in Palm Beach, buffalo meat in Aspen. As she sat listening to Thatcher, she realized that though she knew nothing about restaurants, at least she knew something about food.

On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” Now let’s look at how Einstein articulated all of this in the famous paper that the Annalen der Physik received on June 30, 1905. For all its momentous import, it may be one of the most spunky and enjoyable papers in all of science. Most of its insights are conveyed in words and vivid thought experiments, rather than in complex equations. There is some math involved, but it is mainly what a good high school senior could comprehend. “The whole paper is a testament to the power of simple language to convey deep and powerfully disturbing ideas,” says the science writer Dennis Overbye.

Weaned on educational games and multimedia encyclopedias, kids naturally seek out the trivial when forced to read books. While visiting a school librarian, I listened to a high school senior seek help with an assignment: "I'm writing a report about Napoleon," he said. "Can you find me a thin book with lots of pictures?

Do you want to do this thing? Sit down and do it. Are you not writing? Keep sitting there. Does it not feel right? Keep sitting there. Think of yourself as a monk walking the path to enlightenment. Think of yourself as a high school senior wanting to be a neurosurgeon. Is it possible? Yes. Is there some shortcut? Not one I’ve found.

And it wasn't just us. It wasn't just that we were high school, me a junior and you a senior, with our clothes all wrong for restaurants like this, too bright and too rumpled and too zippered and too stained and too slapdash and awkward and stretched and trendy and desperate and casual and unsure and baggy and sweaty and sporty and wrong.

But when I talk to high school seniors, I find something different. They memorize 'facts'. By and large, though, the joy of discovery, the life behind those facts, has gone out of them. They've lost much of the wonder, and gained very little scepti-cism. They're worried about asking 'dumb' questions; they're willing to accept inadequate answers; they don't pose follow-up questions; the room is awash with sidelong glances to judge, second-by-second, the approval of their peers. They come to class with their questions written out on pieces of paper, which they surreptitiously examine, waiting their turn and oblivious of what-ever discussion their peers are at this moment engaged in.

There’s also the small detail that . . . I haven’t slept in twenty-four hours. Not a blink. And if past is prologue, there are going to be a lot of sleepless nights in my future. I’m a high school senior—I have exams to study for, projects to complete, extracurricular activities to activitize, lifelong memories to make—and now I have a business to run. Who the fuck has time for sleep? I jack up the volume on my phone and scoop a tablespoon of instant coffee grounds into my mouth—washing the bitter, spiky granules down with a gulp of black, cold coffee. We don’t serve instant for the coffee shop. Instant coffee is disgusting. But it serves a purpose. It’s effective—efficient. I love caffeine. Love it. The high, the rush, the feeling that I’m Wonder Woman’s long-lost cousin and there ain’t shit I can’t do. I would mainline it, if that were actually a thing. I would probably become a meth-head if it weren’t for the rotting-teeth, ruined-life, most-likely-dying-by-overdose elements of it all. I’m a high school senior, not an asshole.

Romantic literature often presents the individual as somebody caught in a struggle against the state and the market. Nothing could be further from the truth. The state and the market are the mother and father of the individual, and the individual can survive only thanks to them. The market provides us with work, insurance and a pension. If we want to study a profession, the government’s schools are there to teach us. If we want to open a business, the bank loans us money. If we want to build a house, a construction company builds it and the bank gives us a mortgage, in some cases subsidised or insured by the state. If violence flares up, the police protect us. If we are sick for a few days, our health insurance takes care of us. If we are debilitated for months, social security steps in. If we need around-the-clock assistance, we can go to the market and hire a nurse – usually some stranger from the other side of the world who takes care of us with the kind of devotion that we no longer expect from our own children. If we have the means, we can spend our golden years at a senior citizens’ home. The tax authorities treat us as individuals, and do not expect us to pay the neighbours’ taxes. The courts, too, see us as individuals, and never punish us for the crimes of our cousins. Not only adult men, but also women and children, are recognised as individuals. Throughout most of history, women were often seen as the property of family or community. Modern states, on the other hand, see women as individuals, enjoying economic and legal rights independently of their family and community. They may hold their own bank accounts, decide whom to marry, and even choose to divorce or live on their own. But the liberation of the individual comes at a cost. Many of us now bewail the loss of strong families and communities and feel alienated and threatened by the power the impersonal state and market wield over our lives. States and markets composed of alienated individuals can intervene in the lives of their members much more easily than states and markets composed of strong families and communities. When neighbours in a high-rise apartment building cannot even agree on how much to pay their janitor, how can we expect them to resist the state? The deal between states, markets and individuals is an uneasy one. The state and the market disagree about their mutual rights and obligations, and individuals complain that both demand too much and provide too little. In many cases individuals are exploited by markets, and states employ their armies, police forces and bureaucracies to persecute individuals instead of defending them. Yet it is amazing that this deal works at all – however imperfectly. For it breaches countless generations of human social arrangements. Millions of years of evolution have designed us to live and think as community members. Within a mere two centuries we have become alienated individuals. Nothing testifies better to the awesome power of culture.

I never got to take you to the prom. You went with Henry Featherstone. And you wore a peach-colored dress.” “How could you possibly know that?” Callie asked. “Because I saw you walk in with him.” “You didn’t know I was alive in high school,” Callie scoffed. “You had algebra first period, across the hall from my trig class. You ate a sack lunch with the same three girls every day, Lou Ann, Becky and Robbie Sue. You spent your free period in the library reading Hemingway and Steinbeck. And you went straight home after school without doing any extracurricular activities, except on Thursdays. For some reason, on Thursdays you showed up at football practice. Why was that, Callie?” Callie was confused. How could Trace possibly know so much about her activities in high school? They hadn’t even met until she showed up at the University of Texas campus. “I don’t understand,” she said. “You haven’t answered my question. Why did you come to football practice on Thursdays?” “Because that was the day I did the grocery shopping, and I didn’t have to be home until later.” “Why were you there, Calllie?” Callie stared into his eyes, afraid to admit the truth. But what difference could it possibly make now? She swallowed hard and said, “I was there to see you.” He gave a sigh of satisfaction. “I hoped that was it. But I never knew for sure.” Callie’s brow furrowed. “You wanted me to notice you?” “I noticed you. Couldn’t you feel my eyes on you? Didn’t you ever sense the force of my boyish lust? I had it bad for you my senior year. I couldn’t walk past you in the hall without needing to hold my books in my lap when I saw down in the next class.” “You’re kidding, right?” Trace chuckled. “I wish I were.” “Then it wasn’t an accident, our meeting like that at UT?” “That’s the miracle of it,” Trace said. “It was entirely by accident. Fate. Kisma. Karma. Whatever you want to call it.

Every now and then, I’m lucky enough to teach a kindergarten or first-grade class. Many of these children are natural-born scientists—although heavy on the wonder side and light on skepticism. They’re curious, intellectually vigorous. Provocative and insightful questions bubble out of them. They exhibit enormous enthusiasm. I’m asked follow-up questions. They’ve never heard of the notion of a “dumb question.” But when I talk to high school seniors, I find something different. They memorize “facts.” By and large, though, the joy of discovery, the life behind those facts, has gone out of them. They’ve lost much of the wonder, and gained very little skepticism. They’re worried about asking “dumb” questions; they’re willing to accept inadequate answers; they don’t pose follow-up questions; the room is awash with sidelong glances to judge, second-by-second, the approval of their peers. They come to class with their questions written out on pieces of paper, which they surreptitiously examine, waiting their turn and oblivious of whatever discussion their peers are at this moment engaged in. Something has happened between first and twelfth grade, and it’s not just puberty. I’d guess that it’s partly peer pressure not to excel (except in sports); partly that the society teaches short-term gratification; partly the impression that science or mathematics won’t buy you a sports car; partly that so little is expected of students; and partly that there are few rewards or role models for intelligent discussion of science and technology—or even for learning for its own sake. Those few who remain interested are vilified as “nerds” or “geeks” or “grinds.

Do you want to do this thing? Sit down and do it. Are you not writing? Keep sitting there. Does it not feel right? Keep sitting there. Think of yourself as a monk walking the path to enlightenment. Think of yourself as a high school senior wanting to be a neurosurgeon. Is it possible? Yes. Is there some shortcut? Not one I’ve found. Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world. (

It was around the time of the divorce that all traces of decency vanished, and his dream of being the next great Southern writer was replaced by his desire to be the next published writer. So he started writing these novels set in Small Town Georgia about folks with Good American Values who Fall in Love and then contract Life-Threatening Diseases and Die. I'm serious. And it totally depresses me, but the ladies eat it up. They love my father's books and they love his cable-knit sweaters and they love his bleachy smile and orangey tan. And they have turned him into a bestseller and a total dick. Two of his books have been made into movies and three more are in production, which is where his real money comes from. Hollywood. And, somehow, this extra cash and pseudo-prestige have warped his brain into thinking that I should live in France. For a year.Alone.I don't understand why he couldn't send me to Australia or Ireland or anywhere else where English is the native language.The only French word I know is oui, which means "yes," and only recently did I learn it's spelled o-u-i and not w-e-e. At least the people in my new school speak English.It was founded for pretentious Americans who don't like the company of their own children. I mean, really. Who sends their kid to boarding school? It's so Hogwarts. Only mine doesn't have cute boy wizards or magic candy or flying lessons. Instead,I'm stuck with ninety-nine other students. There are twenty-five people in my entire senior class, as opposed to the six hundred I had back in Atlanta. And I'm studying the same things I studied at Clairemont High except now I'm registered in beginning French. Oh,yeah.Beginning French. No doubt with the freshman.I totally rock.

Near the end of the session, a slight, middle-aged man in a dress shirt approached the microphone. “I’m here to ask your forgiveness,” he said quietly. “I’ve been a pastor with a conservative denomination for more than thirty years, and I used to be an antigay apologist. I knew every argument, every Bible verse, every angle, and every position. I could win a debate with just about anyone, and I confess I yelled down more than a few ‘heretics’ in my time. I was absolutely certain that what I was saying was true and I assumed I’d defend that truth to death. But then I met a young lesbian woman who, over a period of many years, slowly changed my mind. She is a person of great faith and grace, and her life was her greatest apologetic.” The man began to sob into his hands. “I’m so sorry for what I did to you,” he finally continued. “I might not have hurt any of you directly, but I know my misguided apologetics, and then my silent complicity, probably did more damage than I can ever know. I am truly sorry and I humbly repent of my actions. Please forgive me.” “We forgive you!” someone shouted from up front. But the pastor held up his hand and then continued to speak. “And if things couldn’t get any weirder,” he said with a nervous laugh, “I was dropping my son off at school the other day—he’s a senior in high school—and we started talking about this very issue. When I told him that I’d recently changed my mind about homosexuality, he got really quiet for a minute and then he said, ‘Dad, I’m gay.’ ” Nearly everyone in the room gasped. “Sometimes I wonder if these last few years of studying, praying, and rethinking things were all to prepare me for that very moment,” the pastor said, his voice quivering. “It was one of the most important moments of my life. I’m so glad I was ready. I’m so glad I was ready to love my son for who he is.

Rather, part of the argument is that with so much graduate unemployment, juvenile delinquency and high-school absenteeism, there could be practical alternatives to what we have now. A case could be made for a return to apprenticeships in trades such as car mechanics. Another would be to rearrange our priorities during workplace hiring. Less dependency might be placed on easily-achieved academic certificates - and more public recognition be given to hard-won experience. Other possibilities include early entry into the armed forces or police - via military finishing schools or junior police academies, instead of book-obsessed senior high schools and colleges of the woolly-minded humanities. But, for sure, a campaign of objections to this broader model would be publicly raised by the very groups who stand to lose financially from the decrease in municipal funding. That is, well-heeled academics and comfortably-off teaching unions.

I didn’t know it yet, but he would become one of our high school’s super-athletes. There were hints of athletic (and, presumably, sexual) prowess there. For one, boys as ridiculously Abercrombie- esque good-looking as he was are always sports stars throughout high school. It is a rule, a self- fulfilling prophecy. It seems as if, sometime during elementary school, coaches make note of the little boys with the most classic bone structure and the best height projections and kidnap them, training them under cover of night. Not all of them will make it in college ball (that’s what people call it, right?) because by the time they’re all seniors, many of them will have been riding more on the sportsman-like nature of their faces than their actual abilities. But until that day, coaches will keep putting them on the field in the most prominent and visually appealing positions because they just kind of look like that’s where they should be. At least I’m pretty sure that is what’s going on.

He had been sent to Camp Green Lake because of a bucket of popcorn. He had been trying to ease his way along a row of seats at the movies. He was only fourteen at the time, and was making his way past a couple of high school seniors when one of them stuck out his foot. They yelled at him for spilling popcorn on them, and he demanded that they pay for the popcorn, and by the time it was all over, the two older boys were in the hospital, and he was on his way to Camp Green Lake Juvenile Correctional Facility.

PATRICK HENRY HIGH SCHOOL  Department of Social Studies   SPECIAL NOTICE to all students Course 410    (elective senior seminar) Advanced Survival, instr. Dr. Matson, 1712-A MWF   1. There will be no class Friday the 14th. 2. Twenty-Four Hour Notice is hereby given of final examination in Solo Survival. Students will present themselves for physical check at 0900 Saturday in the dispensary of Templeton Gate and will start passing through the gate at 1000, using three-minute intervals by lot. 3. TEST CONDITIONS: a) ANY planet, ANY climate, ANY terrain; b) NO rules, ALL weapons, ANY equipment; c) TEAMING IS PERMITTED but teams will not be allowed to pass through the gate in company; d) TEST DURATION is not less than forty-eight hours, not more than ten days. 4. Dr. Matson will be available for advice and consultation until 1700 Friday. 5. Test may be postponed only on recommendation of examining physician, but any student may withdraw from the course without administrative penalty up until 1000 Saturday. 6. Good luck and long life to you all!   (s) B. P. Matson, Sc.D.    Approved: J. R. Roerich, for the Board

It doesn't matter which story. Let's say it was the one where the young actresses said yes to a pool party and didn't know or no, let's say it was the one where the rugby team covered up the girl's death and the school covered for the rugby team. Actually, it was the one where the therapist spent years grooming her. It was the one where the senator, then a promising teenager, shoved his dick in the girl’s face. She was also a promising teenager. It was the one where the billionaire pushed the woman into the phone booth, but no one believed her. The one where the high school senior was acquitted of rape because the sophomore girl had shaved her pubic region, which somehow equaled consent... The one where the judge said the swimmer was so promising. The one where the rapist reminded the judge of himself as a young rapist. It was the one where her body was never found. It was the one where her body was found in the snow. It was the one where he left her body for dead under the tarp. It was the one where she walked around in her skin and her bones for the rest of her life but her body was never recovered. You know the one.

I was already an atheist, and by my senior year I had became obsessed with the question “What is the meaning of life?” I wrote my personal statement for college admissions on the meaninglessness of life. I spent the winter of my senior year in a kind of philosophical depression—not a clinical depression, just a pervasive sense that everything was pointless. In the grand scheme of things, I thought, it really didn’t matter whether I got into college, or whether the Earth was destroyed by an asteroid or by nuclear war. My despair was particularly strange because, for the first time since the age of four, my life was perfect. I had a wonderful girlfriend, great friends, and loving parents. I was captain of the track team, and, perhaps most important for a seventeen-year-old boy, I got to drive around in my father’s 1966 Thunderbird convertible. Yet I kept wondering why any of it mattered. Like the author of Ecclesiastes, I thought that “all is vanity and a chasing after wind” (ECCLESIASTES 1:14) . I finally escaped when, after a week of thinking about suicide (in the abstract, not as a plan), I turned the problem inside out. There is no God and no externally given meaning to life, I thought, so from one perspective it really wouldn’t matter if I killed myself tomorrow. Very well, then everything beyond tomorrow is a gift with no strings and no expectations. There is no test to hand in at the end of life, so there is no way to fail. If this really is all there is, why not embrace it, rather than throw it away? I don’t know whether this realization lifted my mood or whether an improving mood helped me to reframe the problem with hope; but my existential depression lifted and I enjoyed the last months of high school.

I tell you these stories because when I look back, I still think of my life in high school musical theater as a metaphor for pretty much everything that was to follow in the real world. I've had ups and downs; I've had successes and senior slumps. I have been the girl who has the lead and the one who wished she had the bigger part. The truth, they don't feel that different from each other. My happiness has not been found in the mosts or bests no matter how many times I expected to find it there, and I looked; believe me, once in a while, I still look. We are all told it is there, all the time.

Jobs also decided to bring his son Reed, then a high school senior, back with him from Hawaii. “I’m going to be in meetings 24/7 for probably two days and I want you to be in every single one because you’ll learn more in those two days than you would in two years at business school,” he told him. “You’re going to be in the room with the best people in the world making really tough decisions and get to see how the sausage is made.” Jobs got a little misty-eyed when he recalled the experience. “I would go through that all again just for that opportunity to have him see me at work,” he said. “He got to see what his dad does.

Welcome to part one of my author’s note: the inspiration behind this book. Just a few years ago, the wildest thing ever happened to me. During my senior year, Tom Holland secretly enrolled in my high school, the Bronx High School of Science, as an undercover student to learn more about American high schools for his upcoming role as Spider-Man. I was lucky enough to meet and talk to him during his time there (literally still reeling in shock if we’re being honest because w h a t), and I’ve always treasured that experience. Since then, an idea has lingered in the back of my head—wouldn’t this be such an incredible concept for a book?

Teenagers without strong family ties can become so dependent on their peer group that they will do anything to be accepted by it. About twenty years ago in Tucson, Arizona, the entire senior class of a large high school knew for several months that an older dropout from the school, who had kept up a “friendship” with the younger students, had been killing their classmates, and burying their corpses in the desert. Yet none of them reported the crimes to the authorities, who discovered them by chance. The students, all nice middle-class suburban kids, claimed that they could not divulge the murders for fear of being cut by their friends.

Wait.” One of his eyebrows lifted, and I could have sworn he blushed. “You think I have big dick energy?” I didn’t have anything to hide. “Hell yeah. You’re all buff and manly and stacked. All that swagger you toss around. Plus, I know your dick is big.” Facts were facts. Big dicks were big dicks. And I didn’t make the rules or hand out the dicks. I refilled my glass and poured a little more in his. “You’ve never seen my dick.” “Oh, yes I have. I saw that monster your senior year of high school when we went skinny dipping at the Foresters’ pond.” He scratched the back of his neck and grimaced. “Don’t look at my dick.” “Well, I haven’t since then.” I laughed. “But I bet the damn thing is even bigger now.

She hummed along with the radio while cutting thick slices from the ring of ciambellone she remembered from her childhood, but it was close. She fixed the sweet, lemony bread the way she always did, the slices spread with mascarpone and sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar. "You're a natural in the kitchen," Pop always said. Being good at cooking was nothing special. She wanted to be good at Latin, at vector analysis, at Jungian psychology. Not cooking. Yet she always seemed to be feeding people in spite of herself. In high school, she was the one who brought snacks to study tables or booster meetings. By senior year, she had football players eating cichetti and the students council debating the merits of different types of olive oil.

People are going to see you talking to nobody and think you're weird." This amused him. It neither amused nor worried Blue. She'd gone through eighteen years as the town psychic's daughter, and now, in her senior year, she had already held every single possible conversation about that fact. She had been shunned and embraced and bullied and cajoled. She was going to hell, she had the straight line to spiritual nirvana. Her mother was a hack, her mother was a witch. Blue dressed like a hobo, Blue dressed like a fashion mogul. She was untouchably hilarious, she was a friendless bitch. It had faded into monotonous background noise. The disheartening and lonesome upshot was that Blue Sargent was the strangest thing in the halls of Mountain View High School.

Parent time is like fairy time but real. It is magic without pixie dust and spells. It defies physics without bending the laws of time and space. It is that truism everyone offers but no one believes until after they have children: that time will actually speed, fleet enough to leave you jet-lagged and whiplashed and racing all at once. Your tiny, perfect baby nestles in your arms his first afternoon home, and then ten months later, he’s off to his senior year of high school. You give birth to twins so small and alike, they lie mirrored, each with a head in the palm of one hand while their toes reach only to the crooks of your elbows, but it’s only a year before they start looking at colleges. It is so impossible yet so universally experienced that magic is the only explanation. Except

Like, he’s pretty sure he’s straight. He can pinpoint moments throughout his life when he thought to himself, See, this means I can’t possibly be into guys. Like when he was in middle school and he kissed a girl for the first time, and he didn’t think about a guy when it was happening, just that her hair was soft and it felt nice. Or when he was a sophomore in high school and one of his friends came out as gay, and he couldn’t imagine ever doing anything like that. Or his senior year, when he got drunk and made out with Liam in his twin bed for an hour, and he didn’t have a sexual crisis about it—that had to mean he was straight, right? Because if he were into guys, it would have felt scary to be with one, but it wasn’t. That was just how horny teenage best friends were sometimes, like when they would get off at the same time watching porn in Liam’s bedroom … or that one time Liam reached over, and Alex didn’t stop him. He

Yup. Still got it.” Shane caps it off with a playful grin. I can’t tell if he’s referring to football or his looks. Yes to both, but he doesn’t need his ego stroked. “Eh.” I shrug, feigning indifference. His jaw drops. “What do you mean, ‘eh’? You saw me play in high school.” “A few times.” He snorts. “Yeah, right. You went to all the games. You’d sit up on the right side, near the announcer booth. It was like it was your spot. For years.” I frown. “You saw me there?” He never told me that. I assumed I didn’t exist to him before that summer we dated. “Of course, I did. You wore this long, red-and-black sweater that you’d hug around your body like you were cold, even when it was seventy degrees out. I always felt like I should run up there and give you a hug.” I did always wear that sweater. It was old and ratty, and I loved it. And my fifteen- and sixteen-year-old self would have died from happiness had Shane Beckett run into the stands to even acknowledge me. “You stopped coming senior year,” he murmurs, more to himself, his brow puckering.

When a reporter who spent months in a Los Angeles high school asked graduating seniors what they had learned, he received this reply from a boy described as “the smartest student in the class”: I learned that in the Vietnam War, North and South Korea fought against each other, and then there was a truce at the 38th parallel, and that Eisenhower had something to do with it. The reporter asked: Would it bother you to know that the things you learned were wrong? The answer was: Not really. Because what we really learned from Miss Silver was that we were worth listening to, that we could express ourselves and that an adult would listen, even if we were wrong. That’s why Miss Silver will always be our favorite teacher. She made us feel like we mattered, like we were important. The teacher herself saw her role in very similar terms: I want to be real in class and be a human being…. And I want my students to know that they can be themselves and I’ll still listen to them. I want every one of them to have a chance to express himself or herself. Those are my priorities.18 Neither

After graduating early from high school, I carefully listened to the quarterback during my first play in college spring ball. My mind was on the very basics of football: alignment, assignment, and where to stand in the huddle. The quarterback broke the huddle and I ran to the line, meeting the confident eyes of a defensive end—6-foot-6, 260- pound Matt Shaughnessy. I was seventeen, a true freshman, and he was a 23-year-old fifth-year senior, a third-round draft pick. Huge difference between the two of us. Impressing the coach was not on my mind. Survival was. “Oh, Jesus,” I said. I wasn’t cursing. I was praying for help. Is anyone among you in trouble? Let them pray ( James 5:13). That day Matt came off the ball so fast. Bam! Next thing I knew, I was flat on my back, thrown to the ground. I got up and limped back to the huddle. Four years later...standing on the sidelines in my first NFL game, bouncing on my toes, waiting for my chance to go in, one of the tight ends went down. My time to shine! Where do I stand? Who do I have? I look up and meet the same eyes I met on my first play in college football. Matt Shaughnessy! ...

As we’ve seen, one of the most frequently pursued paths for achievement-minded college seniors is to spend several years advancing professionally and getting trained and paid by an investment bank, consulting firm, or law firm. Then, the thought process goes, they can set out to do something else with some exposure and experience under their belts. People are generally not making lifelong commitments to the field in their own minds. They’re “getting some skills” and making some connections before figuring out what they really want to do. I subscribed to a version of this mind-set when I graduated from Brown. In my case, I went to law school thinking I’d practice for a few years (and pay down my law school debt) before lining up another opportunity. It’s clear why this is such an attractive approach. There are some immensely constructive things about spending several years in professional services after graduating from college. Professional service firms are designed to train large groups of recruits annually, and they do so very successfully. After even just a year or two in a high-level bank or consulting firm, you emerge with a set of skills that can be applied in other contexts (financial modeling in Excel if you’re a financial analyst, PowerPoint and data organization and presentation if you’re a consultant, and editing and issue spotting if you’re a lawyer). This is very appealing to most any recent graduate who may not yet feel equipped with practical skills coming right out of college. Even more than the professional skill you gain, if you spend time at a bank, consultancy, or law firm, you will become excellent at producing world-class work. Every model, report, presentation, or contract needs to be sophisticated, well done, and error free, in large part because that’s one of the core value propositions of your organization. The people above you will push you to become more rigorous and disciplined, and your work product will improve across the board as a result. You’ll get used to dressing professionally, preparing for meetings, speaking appropriately, showing up on time, writing official correspondence, and so forth. You will be able to speak the corporate language. You’ll become accustomed to working very long hours doing detail-intensive work. These attributes are transferable to and helpful in many other contexts.

Fast-forward nearly a hundred years, and Prufrock’s protest is enshrined in high school syllabi, where it’s dutifully memorized, then quickly forgotten, by teens increasingly skilled at shaping their own online and offline personae. These students inhabit a world in which status, income, and self-esteem depend more than ever on the ability to meet the demands of the Culture of Personality. The pressure to entertain, to sell ourselves, and never to be visibly anxious keeps ratcheting up. The number of Americans who considered themselves shy increased from 40 percent in the 1970s to 50 percent in the 1990s, probably because we measured ourselves against ever higher standards of fearless self-presentation. “Social anxiety disorder”—which essentially means pathological shyness—is now thought to afflict nearly one in five of us. The most recent version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV), the psychiatrist’s bible of mental disorders, considers the fear of public speaking to be a pathology—not an annoyance, not a disadvantage, but a disease—if it interferes with the sufferer’s job performance. “It’s not enough,” one senior manager at Eastman Kodak told the author Daniel Goleman, “to be able to sit at your computer excited about a fantastic regression analysis if you’re squeamish about presenting those results to an executive group.” (Apparently it’s OK to be squeamish about doing a regression analysis if you’re excited about giving speeches.)

Postscript, 2005 From the Publisher ON APRIL 7, 2004, the Mid-Hudson Highland Post carried an article about an appearance that John Gatto made at Highland High School. Headlined “Rendered Speechless,” the report was subtitled “Advocate for education reform brings controversy to Highland.” The article relates the events of March 25 evening of that year when the second half of John Gatto’s presentation was canceled by the School Superintendent, “following complaints from the Highland Teachers Association that the presentation was too controversial.” On the surface, the cancellation was in response to a video presentation that showed some violence. But retired student counselor Paul Jankiewicz begged to differ, pointing out that none of the dozens of students he talked to afterwards were inspired to violence. In his opinion, few people opposing Gatto had seen the video presentation. Rather, “They were taking the lead from the teacher’s union who were upset at the whole tone of the presentation.” He continued, “Mr. Gatto basically told them that they were not serving kids well and that students needed to be told the truth, be given real-life learning experiences, and be responsible for their own education. [Gatto] questioned the validity and relevance of standardized tests, the prison atmosphere of school, and the lack of relevant experience given students.” He added that Gatto also had an important message for parents: “That you have to take control of your children’s education.” Highland High School senior Chris Hart commended the school board for bringing Gatto to speak, and wished that more students had heard his message. Senior Katie Hanley liked the lecture for its “new perspective,” adding that ”it was important because it started a new exchange and got students to think for themselves.” High School junior Qing Guo found Gatto “inspiring.” Highland teacher Aliza Driller-Colangelo was also inspired by Gatto, and commended the “risk-takers,” saying that, following the talk, her class had an exciting exchange about ideas. Concluded Jankiewicz, the students “were eager to discuss the issues raised. Unfortunately, our school did not allow that dialogue to happen, except for a few teachers who had the courage to engage the students.” What was not reported in the newspaper is the fact that the school authorities called the police to intervene and ‘restore the peace’ which, ironically enough, was never in the slightest jeopardy as the student audience was well-behaved and attentive throughout. A scheduled evening meeting at the school between Gatto and the Parents Association was peremptorily forbidden by school district authorities in a final assault on the principles of free speech and free assembly… There could be no better way of demonstrating the lasting importance of John Taylor Gatto’s work, and of this small book, than this sorry tale. It is a measure of the power of Gatto’s ideas, their urgency, and their continuing relevance that school authorities are still trying to shut them out 12 years after their initial publication, afraid even to debate them. — May the crusade continue! Chris Plant Gabriola Island, B.C. February, 2005

What’s going on, chick?” she asks, taking a drink. She knows that when Johnnie comes out, something bad has happened. I suck on my teeth and shake my head. She cringes at the burn of whiskey, waiting for me to say more. I glance down at my bracelet. “My past caught up with me.” She slides the bottle back my way. “Need me to hurt someone?” she asks, dead serious. She and I are as close as friends come, and we have been since senior year of high school. And at the core of our friendship is a pact of sorts: nothing’s going to drag her towards the future she doesn’t want, and nothing’s going drag me back into the past I’ve worked to forget. Nothing. I huff out a laugh. “Eli’s already beaten you to it.” “Eli?” she says, raising an eyebrow. “Girl, I’m hurt. Hoes before bros, remember?” “I didn’t ask him to get involved. I broke up with him, and then he got involve—” “What!” She grabs the table. “You broke up with him? When were you going to tell me?” “Today. I was going to tell you today.” She’s shaking her head. “Bitch, you should’ve called me.” “I was busy ending a relationship.” She falls back into her seat. “Shit girl, Eli’s going to stop giving us a discount.” “That’s what your most upset by?” I say, taking another swig of whiskey. “No,” she says. “I’m happy you grew a vagina and broke up with him. He deserves better.” “I’m going to throw this bottle of whiskey at you.” She holds her hands up to placate me. “I’m kidding. But seriously, are you okay?” I barely stop myself from looking at my computer screen again. I exhale. “Honestly? I have no fucking clue.

Generalized Social Anxiety In contrast to people with specific social anxieties, you may be afraid in a wide variety of situations. You might feel that people are judging everything you do and you might set unreasonable standards of perfection for yourself. This condition is called generalized (or discrete) social anxiety. Generalized social anxiety accounts for 80 percent of all cases of social anxiety. Often, people with generalized social anxiety get caught in a vicious cycle. Because they are overly anxious in many situations, they act in clumsy and awkward ways, which in turn makes them feel even more discouraged and anxious. This cycle often results in depression and chronic stress. Generalized social anxiety can affect almost every aspect of your life. This has been the case for Toni, a college senior. In high school, I hardly had any friends. I didn’t participate in any extracurricular activities and managed to get by with average grades. Because I attend a large state university, I am even more invisible. So far, I have avoided any class that has any interaction with my peers, such as discussion groups or labs. As graduation approaches, I need to decide what type of career I want. The thought of job interviews terrifies me. I am considering grad school but would need recommendations to apply. I haven’t even spoken to most of my professors, and the ones who know me probably can’t say anything good about me. As a result, I’m really depressed. When I imagine the future, I can’t see myself being happy. I’ll probably move back to my parents’ house after graduation. I know they are disappointed in me, and that makes me feel like a complete failure.

Evan was attracted to technology early on, building his first computer in sixth grade and experimenting with Photoshop in the Crossroads computer lab. He would later describe the computer teacher, Dan, as his best friend. Evan dove into journalism as well, writing for the school newspaper, Crossfire. One journalism class required students to sell a certain amount of advertising for Crossfire as part of their grade. Evan walked around the neighborhood asking local businesses to buy ads; once he had exceeded his sales goals, he helped coach his peers on how to pitch businesses and ask adults for money. By high school, the group of 20 students Evan had started with in kindergarten had grown to around 120. Charming, charismatic, and smart, Evan threw parties at his dad’s house that were “notorious” in his words. Evan’s outsized personality could rub people the wrong way at times, but his energy, organizing skills, and enthusiasm made him an exceptional party thrower. He possessed a bravado that could be frustrating and off-putting but was great for convincing everyone that the night’s party was going to be the greatest of all time. Obsessed with the energy drink Red Bull and the lifestyle the brand cultivated, Evan talked his way into an internship at the company as a senior in high school. The job involved throwing parties and other events sponsored by Red Bull. Clarence Carter, the head of the company’s security team, would give Evan advice that would stand him well in the years to come: pay attention to who helps you clean up after the party. Later recalling the story, Evan said, “When everyone is tired and the night is over, who stays and helps out? Because those are your true friends. Those are the hard workers, the people that believe that working hard is the right thing to do.

See especially academia, which has effectively become a hope labor industrial complex. Within that system, tenured professors—ostensibly proof positive that you can, indeed, think about your subject of choice for the rest of your life, complete with job security, if you just work hard enough—encourage their most motivated students to apply for grad school. The grad schools depend on money from full-pay students and/or cheap labor from those students, so they accept far more master’s students than there are spots in PhD programs, and far more PhD students than there are tenure-track positions. Through it all, grad students are told that work will, in essence, save them: If they publish more, if they go to more conferences to present their work, if they get a book contract before graduating, their chances on the job market will go up. For a very limited few, this proves true. But it is no guarantee—and with ever-diminished funding for public universities, many students take on the costs of conference travel themselves (often through student loans), scrambling to make ends meet over the summer while they apply for the already-scarce number of academic jobs available, many of them in remote locations, with little promise of long-term stability. Some academics exhaust their hope labor supply during grad school. For others, it takes years on the market, often while adjuncting for little pay in demeaning and demanding work conditions, before the dream starts to splinter. But the system itself is set up to feed itself as long as possible. Most humanities PhD programs still offer little or nothing in terms of training for jobs outside of academia, creating a sort of mandatory tunnel from grad school to tenure-track aspirant. In the humanities, especially, to obtain a PhD—to become a doctor in your field of knowledge—is to adopt the refrain “I don’t have any marketable skills.” Many academics have no choice but to keep teaching—the only thing they feel equipped to do—even without fair pay or job security. Academic institutions are incentivized to keep adjuncts “doing what they love”—but there’s additional pressure from peers and mentors who’ve become deeply invested in the continued viability of the institution. Many senior academics with little experience of the realities of the contemporary market explicitly and implicitly advise their students that the only good job is a tenure-track academic job. When I failed to get an academic job in 2011, I felt soft but unsubtle dismay from various professors upon telling them that I had chosen to take a high school teaching job to make ends meet. It

It is not only in childhood that people of high potential can be encouraged or held back and their promise subverted or sustained. The year before I went to Amherst, a group of women had declined to stand for tenure. One of them simply said that after six years she was used up, too weary and too eroded by constant belittlement to accept tenure if it were offered to her. Women were worn down or burnt out. During the three years I spent as dean of the faculty, as I watched some young faculty members flourish and others falter, I gradually realized that the principal instrument of sexism was not the refusal to appoint women or even the refusal to promote (though both occurred, for minorities as well as women), but the habit of hiring women and then dealing with them in such a way that when the time came for promotion it would be reasonable to deny it. It was not hard to show that a particular individual who was a star in graduate school had somehow belied her promise, had proved unable to achieve up to her potential. This subversion was accomplished by taking advantage of two kinds of vulnerability that women raised in our society tend to have. The first is the quality of self-sacrifice, a learned willingness to set their own interests aside and be used and even used up by the community. Many women at Amherst ended up investing vast amounts of time in needed public-service activities, committee work, and teaching nondepartmental courses. Since these activities were not weighed significantly in promotion decisions, they were self-destructive. The second kind of vulnerability trained into women is a readiness to believe messages of disdain and derogation. Even women who arrived at Amherst full of confidence gradually became vulnerable to distorted visions of themselves, no longer secure that their sense of who they were matched the perceptions of others. When a new president, appointed in 1983, told me before coming and without previous discussion with me that he had heard I was “consistently confrontational,” that I had made Amherst “a tense, unhappy place,” and that he would want to select a new dean, I should have reacted to his picture of me as bizarre, and indeed confronted its inaccuracy, but instead I was shattered. It took me a year to understand that he was simply accepting the semantics of senior men who expected a female dean to be easily disparaged and bullied, like so many of the young women they had managed to dislodge. It took me a year to recover a sense of myself as worth defending and to learn to be angry both for myself and for the college as I watched a tranquil campus turned into one that was truly tense and unhappy.

MY PROCESS I got bullied quite a bit as a kid, so I learned how to take a punch and how to put up a good fight. God used that. I am not afraid of spiritual “violence” or of facing spiritual fights. My Dad was drafted during Vietnam and I grew up an Army brat, moving around frequently. God used that. I am very spiritually mobile, adaptable, and flexible. My parents used to hand me a Bible and make me go look up what I did wrong. God used that, as well. I knew the Word before I knew the Lord, so studying Scripture is not intimidating to me. I was admitted into a learning enrichment program in junior high. They taught me critical thinking skills, logic, and Greek Mythology. God used that, too. In seventh grade I was in school band and choir. God used that. At 14, before I even got saved, a youth pastor at my parents’ church taught me to play guitar. God used that. My best buddies in school were a druggie, a Jewish kid, and an Irish soccer player. God used that. I broke my back my senior year and had to take theatre instead of wrestling. God used that. I used to sleep on the couch outside of the Dean’s office between classes. God used that. My parents sent me to a Christian college for a semester in hopes of getting me saved. God used that. I majored in art, advertising, astronomy, pre-med, and finally English. God used all of that. I made a woman I loved get an abortion. God used (and redeemed) that. I got my teaching certification. I got plugged into a group of sincere Christian young adults. I took courses for ministry credentials. I worked as an autism therapist. I taught emotionally disabled kids. And God used each of those things. I married a pastor’s daughter. God really used that. Are you getting the picture? San Antonio led me to Houston, Houston led me to El Paso, El Paso led me to Fort Leonard Wood, Fort Leonard Wood led me back to San Antonio, which led me to Austin, then to Kentucky, then to Belton, then to Maryland, to Pennsylvania, to Dallas, to Alabama, which led me to Fort Worth. With thousands of smaller journeys in between. The reason that I am able to do the things that I do today is because of the process that God walked me through yesterday. Our lives are cumulative. No day stands alone. Each builds upon the foundation of the last—just like a stairway, each layer bringing us closer to Him. God uses each experience, each lesson, each relationship, even our traumas and tragedies as steps in the process of becoming the people He made us to be. They are steps in the process of achieving the destinies that He has encoded into the weave of each of our lives. We are journeymen, finding the way home. What is the value of the journey? If the journey makes us who we are, then the journey is priceless.

Our lives, Domenic’s and mine, had been like an unraveling braid for the past couple of years. The proximate cause of our disengagement was a girl: Caryn, my first serious girlfriend. She and I had found each other as high school seniors. My plans to bum around Europe with Domenic after high school became plans to bum around Europe with Caryn. We all ended up going, but we didn’t see each other over there as much as we had planned. Then I went back to start college, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Caryn came with me. Domenic stayed on in Italy, living with relatives in the village where his father was born, in the eastern Appenines, working in a vineyard, learning Italian. (Domenic liked his own kind fine. I envied that.)

Huff frowned, sipped the beer. He hated beer, truth be told. Tasted like pee on a car battery. But that was not a fact one shared in high school. Maybe a senior could say ‘I hate beer’ without looking like a kid asking for milk. He’d wait till graduation, never touch the stuff again.

After Apollo, Norton, still with TRW, worked on a project to computerize the distribution of hydroelectric power in the Northwest. He was still writing his painfully detailed critiques of other people’s software. As it happened, a high school senior named Bill Gates came to work for him as a programmer. Gates has credited Norton with being among his best software teachers. Norton surely learned more from reading our code than we learned from him. Users of Microsoft software might wish he had learned more.

She’s always been an angry drunk. Senior year of high school, she got trashed and punched her ex-boyfriend in the face for not having any gum.

That unwavering devotion has always intrigued me. People commit to an artist’s music in a way they won’t to a relationship or a career. It’s a constant in their lives, no matter what else changes. My earliest memories are of my parents dancing in the kitchen to Etta James. My mom listened to those same songs my senior year of high school, over a decade after they got divorced.

I was not able to sleep that night. To be honest, I didn’t even try. I stood in front of my living room window, staring out at the bright lights of New York City. I don’t know how long I stood there; in fact, I didn’t see the millions of multicolored lights or the never-ending streams of headlights and taillights on the busy streets below. Instead, I saw, in my mind’s eye, the crowded high school classrooms and halls where my friends and I had shared triumphs and tragedies, where the ghosts of our past still reside. Images flickered in my mind. I saw the faces of teachers and fellow students I hadn’t seen in years. I heard snatches of songs I had rehearsed in third period chorus. I saw the library where I had spent long hours studying after school. Most of all, I saw Marty. Marty as a shy sophomore, auditioning for Mrs. Quincy, the school choir director. Marty singing her first solo at the 1981 Christmas concert. Marty at the 1982 Homecoming Dance, looking radiant after being selected as Junior Princess. Marty sitting alone in the chorus practice room on the last day of our senior year. I stared long and hard at those sepia-colored memories. And as my mind carried me back to the place I had sworn I’d never return to, I remembered.

Each meeting starts with a thirty-minute quiet time where everyone thoroughly reads the memo. From there, all attendees are asked to share gut reactions—senior leaders typically speak last—and then delve into what might be missing, ask probing questions, and drill down into any potential issues that may arise. “I definitely recommend the [six-page] memo over PowerPoint. And the reason we read them in the room, by the way, is because just like, you know, high school kids, executives will bluff their way through the meeting as if they’ve read the memo. Because we’re busy. And so, you’ve got to actually carve out the time for the memo to get read and that’s what the first half hour of the meeting is for and then everybody has actually read the memo, they’re not just pretending to have read it. It’s pretty effective.” —2018 Forum on Leadership, “Closing Conversation with Jeff Bezos,” George W. Bush Presidential Center at SMU23

Besides being a locally infamous bad boy, Harley was a tattooed, twenty-two-year-old mechanic. To a seventeen-year-old highs school senior in the late 1990's, that was basically the equivalent of dating Jordan Catalano

The summer before his senior year of high school, he took the SAT exam and got a perfect score on the math portion (800/800) and a 1430 overall. Then he took the ACT and scored a 34

This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there for a long time. Maybe it stops you from swerving, from ever even considering a swerve, because what you risk losing in terms of other people’s high regard can feel too costly. Maybe you spend three years in Massachusetts, studying constitutional law and discussing the relative merits of exclusionary vertical agreements in antitrust cases. For some, this might be truly interesting, but for you it is not. Maybe during those three years you make friends you’ll love and respect forever, people who seem genuinely called to the bloodless intricacies of the law, but you yourself are not called. Your passion stays low, yet under no circumstance will you underperform. You live, as you always have, by the code of effort/result, and with it you keep achieving until you think you know the answers to all the questions—including the most important one. Am I good enough? Yes, in fact I am. What happens next is that the rewards get real. You reach for the next rung of the ladder, and this time it’s a job with a salary in the Chicago offices of a high-end law firm called Sidley & Austin. You’re back where you started, in the city where you were born, only now you go to work on the forty-seventh floor in a downtown building with a wide plaza and a sculpture out front. You used to pass by it as a South Side kid riding the bus to high school, peering mutely out the window at the people who strode like titans to their jobs. Now you’re one of them. You’ve worked yourself out of that bus and across the plaza and onto an upward-moving elevator so silent it seems to glide. You’ve joined the tribe. At the age of twenty-five, you have an assistant. You make more money than your parents ever have. Your co-workers are polite, educated, and mostly white. You wear an Armani suit and sign up for a subscription wine service. You make monthly payments on your law school loans and go to step aerobics after work. Because you can, you buy yourself a Saab. Is there anything to question? It doesn’t seem that way. You’re a lawyer now. You’ve taken everything ever given to you—the love of your parents, the faith of your teachers, the music from Southside and Robbie, the meals from Aunt Sis, the vocabulary words drilled into you by Dandy—and converted it to this. You’ve climbed the mountain. And part of your job, aside from parsing abstract intellectual property issues for big corporations, is to help cultivate the next set of young lawyers being courted by the firm. A senior partner asks if you’ll mentor an incoming summer associate, and the answer is easy: Of course you will. You have yet to understand the altering force of a simple yes. You don’t know that when a memo arrives to confirm the assignment, some deep and unseen fault line in your life has begun to tremble, that some hold is already starting to slip. Next to your name is another name, that of some hotshot law student who’s busy climbing his own ladder. Like you, he’s black and from Harvard. Other than that, you know nothing—just the name, and it’s an odd one. Barack.

High-quality national surveys of high school seniors confirm that kids from less educated homes are less knowledgeable about and interested in politics, less likely to trust the government, less likely to vote, and much less likely to be civically engaged in local affairs than their counterparts from college-educated homes.

One study, for example, published in 2000 by the National Institute on Drug Abuse reported that white students use cocaine at seven times the rate of black students, use crack cocaine at eight times the rate of black students, and use heroin at seven times the rate of black students.12 That same survey revealed that nearly identical percentages of white and black high school seniors use marijuana. The National Household Survey on Drug Abuse reported in 2000 that white youth aged 12–17 are more than a third more likely to have sold illegal drugs than African American youth.13 Thus the very same year Human Rights Watch was reporting that African Americans were being arrested and imprisoned at unprecedented rates, government data revealed that blacks were no more likely to be guilty of drug crimes than whites and that white youth were actually the most likely of any racial or ethnic group to be guilty of illegal drug possession and sales. Any notion that drug use among blacks is more severe or dangerous is belied by the data; white youth have about three times the number of drug-related emergency room visits as their African American counterparts.14

My senior year in high school, Mom and Dad went through a divorce. After I graduated, my mother took my brother and moved to Wisconsin. We had relatives there. My dad was always busy at work, and I was left alone most of the time. I had the house all to myself. I never really had any close friends in school; I was kind of a loner and pretty shy around people. My parents were not big drinkers, but they kept a fully stocked bar in the home. I was lonely and started to drink. It made me feel better; I could talk to people and fit in, but I wasn’t that good at it and I’d usually end up drunk and alone in my house. I’m sure it was at this time that I began to develop feelings of not wanting to be alone, especially at night. It seemed as if everybody was leaving me. My father had started a new relationship with my current stepmother and spent a lot of time at her house. He said that I was old enough to take care of myself, so I ended up alone. I hated it. I didn’t like sleeping alone in that big house. It made me angry. I started to have fleeting fantasies of killing someone. I don’t know where they came from, but they did. They were always intertwined, sex and killing. I tried to get them out of my mind, but the sexual fantasy was powerful and I masturbated for hours thinking about it. The fantasy was always the same. I met a good-looking man, brought him home, had sex with him, and then killed him.

She left her mother in the living room and headed for her childhood bedroom, with its canopy bed and pink ruffles. Most kids had posters in their rooms, but Mom hadn’t allowed tacks to be stuck into her expensive wallpaper, so Frankie had framed art on her walls. A row of old stuffed animals sat along the top of her bookshelf. A pink ballerina jewelry box on the bedside table held junior and high school trinkets, probably a stack of senior pictures and prom memorabilia. You knew what was expected of a girl who slept in a room like this.

In 1931, Césaire left for Paris to attend the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, a highly selective public school founded by Jesuits in the sixteenth century, in the heart of the Latin Quarter. One of the first people he met was a young African man standing in a student dorm in a gray jacket with a string belt holding up his trousers. Léopold Sédar Senghor, a student at the Sorbonne from a wealthy Catholic family in Senegal, seven years Césaire’s senior, was writing a thesis about “exotic” motifs in Baudelaire’s poetry.

I also learned that it would be best to keep that version of me separate from the real version. Lucca Marino is a seventeen-year-old high school senior who sews dresses and makes costume jewelry to help her mother pay the bills. The girl at the flower store has different hair, different makeup, and answers to a different name.

Oh. Liam." Madison cut her off, smirking when Liam walked out of the restroom behind her, still adjusting his tie. "Nice to see you again." Totally nonplussed, Liam smiled. "Madison." "Men's room closed?" "Not at all." He put an arm around Daisy's shoulder and pressed a kiss to her cheek. "Just needed a little alone time with may fiancée." Madison's smile faded. "You're still engaged?" "Yes, we are." He held up Daisy's hand to show off the diamond ring he'd bought her to replace the Sharks ring he'd given her at the bus stop. "When you meet the woman you want to spend the rest of your life with, you don't let her go." Daisy slipped an arm through Liam's. "How's Orson?" "Orson?" Madison frowned as if she had no idea who Daisy was talking about. "Oh. He's gone. Maybe New York?" "I'm sorry to hear that." "I was sorry to hear that Organicare was going under." Madison's smirk returned. "I was wondering if you were interested in coming back to work for me. I need a senior software engineer and---" "Organicare isn't going under," Daisy said. "We've given the company a total overhaul and we've just secured our Series B funding. I've had interest from other investors and I'm here to meet some of them right now. So, if you'll excuse me..." "She's the CEO," Liam said, beaming. "She saved the company and now she's running the whole show." "Congratulations." Madison's voice was flat as she checked her watch. "You're right about the time. I've got a meeting in five minutes. I'd better go." "You didn't have to do that," Daisy said to Liam. "It was a little bit petty." "You enjoyed every second of it." Her lips tipped in a smile. "Okay. I did. She was like every mean girl in high school who mocked me, and now the tables have turned and not only am I running a company, I got the coolest guy in school.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!” Chloe shrieked. “We’re looking at YEARS of detention! Our classmates will be seniors in high school and WE’LL still be in eighth grade, serving DETENTION! Do you have any idea how EMBARRASSING that is going to be?!

Thomas Sowell was born in North Carolina and grew up in Harlem. He moved out from home at an early age and did not finish high school. After a few tough years … read morehe joined the Marine Corps and became a photographer in the Korean War. After leaving the service, Sowell entered Harvard University, worked a part-time job as a photographer and studied the science that would become his passion and profession: economics. Sowell received his bachelor’s degree in economics (magna cum laude) from Harvard in 1958. He went on to receive his master’s in economics from Columbia University in 1959, and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1968. In the early ’60s, Sowell held jobs as an economist with the Department of Labor and AT&T. But his real interest was in teaching and scholarship. In 1965, at Cornell University, Sowell began the first of many professorships. His other teaching assignments have included Rutgers, Amherst, Brandeis and the UCLA. In addition, Sowell was project director at the Urban Institute, 1972-1974; a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, 1976–77; and was an adjunct scholar of the American Enterprise Institute, 1975-76. Dr. Sowell has published a large volume of writing, much of which is considered ground-breaking. His has written over 30 books and hundreds of articles and essays. His work covers a wide range of topics, Including: classic economic theory, judicial activism, social policy, ethnicity, civil rights, education, and the history of ideas to name only a few. Sowell has earned international acclaim for his unmatched reputation for academic integrity. His scholarship places him as one of the greatest thinkers of the second half of the twenty century. Thomas Sowell began contributing to newspapers in the late ’70s, and he became a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist 1984. Sowell has brought common sense economic thinking to the masses by his ability to write for the general public with a voice that get to the heart of issues in plain English. Today his columns appear in more than 150 newspapers. In 2003, Thomas Sowell received the Bradley Prize for intellectual achievement. Sowell was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2002. In 1990, he won the prestigious Francis Boyer Award, presented by The American Enterprise Institute. Currently, Thomas Sowell is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. —Dean Kalahar

Look, I didn't want to be a high school senior. I was hoping my dad could write me a note: Dear Whoever, Please excuse Percy Jackson from school forever and just give him the diploma. Thanks, Poseidon

That June, in the summer before my senior year in high school, I reported to Scripps as a junior trainee for a series of three excursions. I celebrated my 17th birthday at sea. Our initial work was part of a study looking at why sardines—immortalized in John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row—had disappeared off the California coast.

So you don't want to tell me about how Lucas is actually an eighteen-year-old high school senior at Shadow Prep?" I'd been taking a sip of my coffee when he said that and promptly choked on it.

As I look up at him, I see the sadness in his eyes. I see the pain that he still feels. Amelia was Jake’s high school sweetheart. Their senior year, while he and Blake were on vacation with their family, he got a call from a friend that her and her parents died in a house fire. I don’t remember much about Amelia, but I do remember how much they were in love. And what it did to him.

Years ago, I was invited to be on a panel at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I’d never set foot in a university lecture hall as a student. I’d barely graduated high school, yet I was at one of the most prestigious institutions in the country to discuss mental toughness with a handful of others. At some point in the discussion an esteemed MIT professor said that we each have genetic limitations. Hard ceilings. That there are some things we just can’t do no matter how mentally tough we are. When we hit our genetic ceiling, he said, mental toughness doesn’t enter into the equation. Everyone in that room seemed to accept his version of reality because this senior, tenured professor was known for researching mental toughness. It was his life’s work. It was also a bunch of bullshit, and to me he was using science to let us all off the hook.

Daniel Inouye, a nisei senior at McKinley High School long before he became a U.S. senator, furiously pedaled his bike to help at an aid station. He looked up into the sky and said to himself: “You dirty Japs!” On cruiser San Francisco an engineer came topside to join Ensign John Parrott. “I thought I’d come up and die with you.” Rear Admiral William Furlong stood on the bridge wing on Helena. A gunner called: “Excuse me, admiral, would you mind moving so we can shoot through here?” An officer playing golf went into a sand trap after his ball to find a soldier there shooting a rifle into the air. A bomb blew off a comer of a guardhouse. The inmates rushed out to help set up a .50 caliber machine gun. The phone rang in a Hickam hangar and someone reflexively picked it up. The caller wanted to know what all the noise was about. Kimmel stood in a window at his headquarters as a spent bullet tumbled in the window and hit him on the chest, smudging his whites. “It would have been better if it killed me,” he said. Down the hall Layton, Kimmel’s intelligence officer, caught sight of Admiral Bye who the day before had said the Japanese would never attack the United States. He was wearing a life jacket, his whites smeared with oil, staring wordlessly into the middle distance. “Soc” McMorris appeared: “Well, Layton, if it’s any satisfaction to you, we were wrong and you were right.” •

I have a complicated spiritual history. Here's the short version: I was born into a Mass-going Roman Catholic family, but my parents left the church when I was in the fifth grade and joined a Southern Baptist church—yes, in Connecticut. I am an alumnus of Wheaton College—Billy Graham's alma mater in Illinois, not the Seven Sisters school in Massachusetts—and the summer between my junior and senior year of (Christian) high school, I spent a couple of months on a missions trip performing in whiteface as a mime-for-the-Lord on the streets of London's West End. Once I left home for Wheaton, I ended up worshiping variously (and when I could haul my lazy tuckus out of bed) at the nondenominational Bible church next to the college, a Christian hippie commune in inner-city Chicago left over from the Jesus Freak movement of the 1960s, and an artsy-fartsy suburban Episcopal parish that ended up splitting over same-sex issues. My husband of more than a decade likes to describe himself as a “collapsed Catholic,” and for more than twenty-five years, I have been a born-again Christian. Groan, I know. But there's really no better term in the current popular lexicon to describe my seminal spiritual experience. It happened in the summer of 1980 when I was about to turn ten years old. My parents had both had born-again experiences themselves about six months earlier, shortly before our family left the Catholic church—much to the shock and dismay of the rest of our extended Irish and/or Italian Catholic family—and started worshiping in a rented public grade school gymnasium with the Southern Baptists. My mother had told me all about what she'd experienced with God and how I needed to give my heart to Jesus so I could spend eternity with him in heaven and not frying in hell. I was an intellectually stubborn and precocious child, so I didn't just kneel down with her and pray the first time she told me about what was going on with her and Daddy and Jesus. If something similar was going to happen to me, it was going to happen in my own sweet time. A few months into our family's new spiritual adventure, after hearing many lectures from Mom and sitting through any number of sermons at the Baptist church—each ending with an altar call and an invitation to make Jesus the Lord of my life—I got up from bed late one Sunday night and went downstairs to the den where my mother was watching television. I couldn't sleep, which was unusual for me as a child. I was a champion snoozer. In hindsight I realize something must have been troubling my spirit. Mom went into the kitchen for a cup of tea and left me alone with the television, which she had tuned to a church service. I don't remember exactly what the preacher said in his impassioned, sweaty sermon, but I do recall three things crystal clearly: The preacher was Jimmy Swaggart; he gave an altar call, inviting the folks in the congregation in front of him and at home in TV land to pray a simple prayer asking Jesus to come into their hearts; and that I prayed that prayer then and there, alone in the den in front of the idiot box. Seriously. That is precisely how I got “saved.” Alone. Watching Jimmy Swaggart on late-night TV. I also spent a painful vacation with my family one summer at Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's Heritage USA Christian theme park in South Carolina. But that's a whole other book…

Why are you staring at my boobs? My face is up here,” Trudy exclaims. Jack, the hotel employees, and I jump back like we’ve been electrocuted while the seniors don’t skip a beat. No. She. Didn’t. These geriatric devils are so bad.

Standing in front of my bathroom mirror while music blares from my speakers, I wipe away the third crooked line I’ve drawn beneath my eye. My hands are shaking, damn it. Starting senior year of high school and seeing my boyfriend after a summer apart shouldn’t be so nerve-racking, but I’ve gotten off to a disastrous start. First, my curling iron sent up smoke signals and died. Then the button on my favorite shirt popped off. Now, my eyeliner decides it has a mind of its own. If I had any choice in the matter, I’d stay in my comfy bed and eat warm chocolate chip cookies all day.

Fpr ome aftermppm a week leading up to the formal, the entire senior school body would pile into our massive gymnasium and learn dances that we would NEVER DANCE AGAIN, except at our own children's formals, perhaps. Nevertheless, we threw ourselves into the task as if we were living in a Jane Austen novel and this was the only way we would ever fit into society. (from How to Be Happy: A Memoir of Love, Sex and Teenage Confusion)

I got a job teaching seniors at an inner-city high school. My task is to get them ready for college. This school doesn’t have that great a track record of graduating people from high school, let alone getting them into college, so my job can be intimidating to say the least. This is the most consuming job I’ve ever had. In fact, compared to this, my position at the megachurch was a walk in the park—but I wouldn’t trade my current job for anything.

Frank Fiorini, better known as Frank Sturgis, had an interesting career that started when he quit high school during his senior year to join the United States Marine Corps as an enlisted man. During World War II he served in the Pacific Theater of Operations with Edson’s Raiders, of the First Marine Raiders Battalion under Colonel “Red Mike.” In 1945 at the end of World War II, he received an honorable discharge and the following year joined the Norfolk, Virginia Police Department. Getting involved in an altercation with his sergeant, he resigned and found employment as the manager of the local Havana-Madrid Tavern, known to have had a clientele consisting primarily of Cuban seamen. In 1947 while still working at the tavern, he joined the U.S. Navy’s Flight Program. A year later, he received an honorable discharge and joined the U.S. Army as an Intelligence Officer. Again, in 1949, he received an honorable discharge, this time from the U.S. Army. Then in 1957, he moved to Miami where he met former Cuban President Carlos Prío, following which he joined a Cuban group opposing the Cuban dictator Batista. After this, Frank Sturgis went to Cuba and set up a training camp in the Sierra Maestra Mountains, teaching guerrilla warfare to Castro’s forces. He was appointed a Captain in Castro’s M 26 7 Brigade, and as such, he made use of some CIA connections that he apparently had cultivated, to supply Castro with weapons and ammunition. After they entered Havana as victors of the revolution, Sturgis was appointed to a high security, intelligence position within the reorganized Cuban air force. Strangely, Frank Sturgis returned to the United States after the Cuban Revolution, and mysteriously turned up as one of the Watergate burglars who were caught installing listening devices in the National Democratic Campaign offices. In 1973 Frank A. Sturgis, E. Howard Hunt, Eugenio R. Martínez, G. Gordon Liddy, Virgilio R. “Villo” González, Bernard L. Barker and James W. McCord, Jr. were convicted of conspiracy. While in prison, Sturgis feared for his life if anything he had done, regarding his associations and contacts, became public knowledge. In 1975, Sturgis admitted to being a spy, stating that he was involved in assassinations and plots to overthrow undisclosed foreign governments. However, at the Rockefeller Commission hearings in 1975, their concluding report stated that he was never a part of the CIA…. Go figure! In 1979, Sturgis surfaced in Angola where he trained and helped the rebels fight the Cuban-supported communists. Following this, he went to Honduras to train the Contras in their fight against the communist-supported Sandinista government. He also met with Yasser Arafat in Tunis, following which he was debriefed by the CIA. Furthermore, it is documented that he met and talked to the Venezuelan terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, or Carlos the Jackal, who is now serving a life sentence for murdering two French counter intelligence agents. On December 4, 1993, Sturgis suddenly died of lung cancer at the Veterans Hospital in Miami, Florida. He was buried in an unmarked grave south of Miami…. Or was he? In this murky underworld, anything is possible.

On March 31, 2016, Securities and Exchange Commission chair Mary Jo White said this to the students of Stanford Law School: Nearly all venture valuations are highly subjective. But, one must wonder whether the publicity and pressure to achieve the unicorn benchmark is analogous to that felt by public companies to meet projections they make to the market with the attendant risk of financial reporting problems. And, yes that remains a problem. We continue to see instances of public companies and their senior executives manipulating their accounting to meet various expectations and projections.1 We have reached a point in the world of technology startups where the fervor for building a company with a billion-dollar valuation — the elusive startup unicorn — is overshadowing the creation of real value. It is not the first time we have been here; the world of startups and venture capital has always run in cycles, from optimistic zeal to caution to post-catastrophe introspection and back again. But perhaps it is time that entrepreneurs and investors alike begin waking up to the fact that the “valuation-at-all-costs” model, with its relentless pressure, remote odds of success, and human cost, is not only unsustainable but bad business. At this point in the current cycle, the radically overvalued startup appears to be headed for the endangered species list. That is a good thing. While billion-dollar behemoths will always exist, and the high-wire act of chasing scale while also chasing the cash to fund that scale will occasionally produce a solid company, there are other ways to build a business. There are better ways to build a business.

Ramsey Rapist robberies and sexual assaults stopped. My encounter with the Ramsey Rapist brought me years of pain. I thought about him every night for at least five years—not most nights, every night—and I slept with a knife at hand for far longer. I couldn’t see it at the time, but the terrifying experience was, in its own way, also an incredible gift. Believing—knowing, in my mind—that I was going to die, and then surviving, made life seem like a precious, delicate miracle. As a high school senior, I started watching sunsets, looking at buds on trees, and noticing the beauty of our world. That feeling lasts to this day, though sometimes it expresses itself in ways that might seem corny to people who fortunately never had the experience of measuring their time on this earth in seconds. The Ramsey Rapist taught me at an early age that many of the things we think are valuable have no value.

My senior year flew by and before I knew it, I was graduating from high school. I was never really fired up about going to the Naval Academy, but that’s easy to say after bombing out on the math part of the entrance exam. Little did I know that eventually, I would become part of the Naval Academy’s “Blue & Gold Program!” In time I would become a Math Teacher and a part of the Naval Academy’s “Blue & Gold Program!” Never mind, I did make it into Maine Maritime Academy at Castine, Maine. My interest in the sea was always merchant ships like the blue ribbon ocean liners and the sea itself. I was never really interested in fighting wars, or in warships for that matter. Perhaps it was that I had lost so many of my family to war that I hated the thought of people killing each other for what they considered a righteous cause. In spite of these feelings, I wound up with over forty years of military service. I knew that I was on the right track and at last my parents were proud of me. I was about to graduate with good grades and was following in the footsteps of “those that go down to the sea in ships.

JazzyGirl: LOL. Since you and Alex kept in contact, I assume he knows your partner. Evilnbored: Alex is my partner. He didn't have to wait as long for her response this time. In fact, he could almost imagine her screaming through the computer. JazzyGirl: OMG, OMG, OMG. I had no idea. Were the two of you together in high school? Evilnbored: No, not at all. We've only been partners since our senior year in college. Back in high school ... I never admitted to myself I liked guys as well as I did girls, although I had some inkling. And Alex ... I'll let him tell you his story. JazzyGirl: I can't believe you guys never told me. I feel left out. Her words sounded so much like the old Jasmine he really did laugh out loud. 33 Coming Full Circle by Liz Andrews Evilnbored: Sorry? JazzyGirl: Unacceptable. I need to be completely caught up on all the news that's fit to print. And all the other stuff too. Evilnbored: Um, okay, what do you want to know exactly? JazzyGirl: Hehehe, oh, you don't know it, but you gave me the keys to the castle. Evilnbored: Should I be scared? JazzyGirl: I'm not the evil one, LOL. Evilnbored: Oh boy. Ask away before I regret offering to tell you anything. JazzyGirl: You can't see me right now, but I'm rubbing my hands gleefully

The girls were both high school seniors, both pretty in that coltish way. The one sitting on the corner of his old bed—the one he had met for the first time an hour ago—was named Erin. Myron had started dating Erin’s mother, a widow and freelance magazine writer named Ali Wilder, two months ago. This party, here at the house Myron had grown up in and now owned, was something of a “coming out” party for Myron and Ali as a couple. The

This drama was based on the true story of Constance Jeanne Sammarco, who, in 2012, was a 62-year-old, senior Caucasian teacher who was employed at Fairmont Heights High School, a 99% African American public school. She was charged with teacher incompetence by her Principal, Nakia Nicholson, who was an African American, and took leadership of the school when she was 35- years- old. In 2014, the 99% African American School Board of Prince George’s County in Maryland, officially fired Constance Jeanne Sammarco, an advanced placement teacher, and declared her an incompetent teacher.

Anoai played football for three years at Pensacola Catholic High School and one year at Escambia High School. In his senior year, he was named Defensive Player of the Year by the Pensacola News Journal. He then attended Georgia Institute of Technology, where he was a member of the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets football team along with Calvin Johnson, who later became a wide receiver in the National Football League (NFL). Anoai was a three-year

I never blindly roamed with a team just for the sake of social labeling or fitting in. I was never part of a particular group, scene or tribe. I was friends with everybody. My best friend in high school was prom queen, yet I was voted the biggest nonconformist of my senior class. I've lived all over the country, but my roots, views and attitude are very Midwestern. I was born in the Heartland, where there exists a true melting pot of religions, classes and cultures.

From kindergarten through senior year of high school, Evan attended Crossroads, an elite, coed private school in Santa Monica known for its progressive attitudes. Tuition at Crossroads runs north of $ 22,000 a year, and seemingly rises annually. Students address teachers by their first names, and classrooms are named after important historical figures, like Albert Einstein and George Mead, rather than numbered. The school devotes as significant a chunk of time to math and history as to Human Development, a curriculum meant to teach students maturity, tolerance, and confidence. Crossroads emphasizes creativity, personal communication, well-being, mental health, and the liberal arts. The school focuses on the arts much more than athletics; some of the school’s varsity games have fewer than a dozen spectators. 2 In 2005, when Evan was a high school freshman, Vanity Fair ran an exhaustive feature about the school titled “School for Cool.” 3 The school, named for Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken,” unsurprisingly attracts a large contingent of Hollywood types, counting among its alumni Emily and Zooey Deschanel, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jack Black, Kate Hudson, Jonah Hill, Michael Bay, Maya Rudolph, and Spencer Pratt. And that’s just the alumni—the parents of students fill out another page or two of who’s who A-listers. Actor Denzel Washington once served as the assistant eighth grade basketball coach, screenwriter Robert Towne spoke in a film class, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma talked shop with the school’s chamber orchestra.

In addition to saddling many young people with massive debt for decades, studies have shown that a college education really doesn’t guarantee success. And does a college degree guarantee high performance on the job? Not necessarily. Times are changing fast. While Internet giant Google looks at good grades in specific technical skills for positions requiring them, a 2014 New York Times article detailing an interview with Laszlo Bock, Google’s senior vice president of people operations, notes that college degrees aren’t as important as they once were. Bock states that “When you look at people who don’t go to school and make their way in the world, those are exceptional human beings. And we should do everything we can to find those people.” He noted in a 2013 New York Times article that the “proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time”—on certain teams comprising as much as 14 percent.

It’s beautiful to me now, both the ideal and the reality. I choose the reality and I choose the ideal: I hold them both. I believe in ministering within imperfect structures. I believe in teaching Sunday school and chaperoning youth lock-ins, in carpooling seniors and vacuuming the vestry. I believe in church libraries and “just checking on you” phone calls, in the mundane daily work that creates a community on purpose. I believe in taking college girls out for coffee, in showing up at weddings, in bringing enchiladas to new mothers, in hospital committees, in homemade dainties at the funeral reception. I believe we don’t give enough credit to the ones who stay put in slow-to-change structures and movements because they change within relationship, because they take a long and a high view of time. I believe in the ones who do the whole elder board and deacon election thing, in the ones who argue for church constitutional changes and consensus building. This is not work for the faint of heart. I believe the work of the ministry is often misunderstood, the Church is a convenient scapegoat. Heaven knows, church has been my favorite nebulous nonentity to blame, a diversionary tactic from the mirror perhaps. A lot of people in my generation might be giving up on Church, but there are a lot of us returning, redefining, reclaiming Church too. We aren’t foolish or blind or unconcerned or uneducated or unthinking. We have weighed our choices, more than anyone will know. We are choosing this and we will keep choosing each other. And sometimes our way of understanding or “doing” church looks very different, but we’re still here. I know some of us are meant to go, some are meant to stay, and most of us do a bit of both in a lifetime. Jesus doesn’t belong to church people. But church people belong to Him, in Him, and through Him. I hope we all wrestle. I hope we look deep into our hearts and sift through our theology, our methodology, our praxis, our ecclesiology, all of it. I hope we get angry and that we say true things. I hope we push back against celebrity and consumerism; I hope we live into our birthright as a prophetic outpost for the Kingdom. I hope we get our toes stepped on and then forgive. I hope we become open-hearted and open-armed. I hope we are known as the ones who love. I hope we change. I hope we grow. I hope we push against the darkness and let the light in and breathe into the Kingdom come. I hope we become a refuge for the weary and the pilgrim, for the child and the aged, for the ones who have been strong too long. And I hope we all live like we are loved. I hope we all become a bit more inclined to listen, to pray, to wait.

wave. “Hey, girls.” Myron Bolitar prided himself on big opening lines. The girls were both high school seniors, both pretty in that coltish way. The one sitting on the corner of his old bed—the one he had met for the first time an hour ago—was named Erin. Myron had started dating Erin’s mother, a widow and freelance magazine writer named Ali Wilder, two months ago. This party, here at the house Myron had grown up in and now owned, was something of a “coming out” party for Myron and Ali as a couple. The other girl, Aimee Biel, mimicked his wave and tone. “Hey, Myron.” More silence. He first saw Aimee Biel the day after she was born

Arnold was scapegoated from the moment he set foot in the school. He was laughed at, made fun of and ridiculed by one group of girls. Some days he was hit with water bombs and sacks of horse shit as he waited for the bus. This treatment continued until the middle of his senior year. For two years Arnold suffered almost chronic shaming. This was an excruciating experience. High school is the time of puberty. And puberty is a time of intense exposure and vulnerability. Whatever toxic shame a person carries from childhood will be tested in high school. Often teenage groups look for a scapegoat, someone everyone can dump and project their shame onto. This was Arnold’s fate. He was viciously shamed by his female peer group. This accounted for his problem with women.

Senior year. And then life. Maybe that’s the way it worked. High school was just a prologue to the real novel. Everybody got to write you—but when you graduated, you got to write yourself. At graduation you got to collect your teacher’s pens and your parents’ pens and you got your own pen. And you could do all the writing. Yeah. Wouldn’t that be sweet?

Riding a wave of interest in technology, Stanford University has become America’s “it” school, by measures that Harvard once dominated. Stanford has had the nation’s lowest undergraduate acceptance rate for two years in a row; in five of the last six years, it has topped the Princeton Review survey asking high school seniors to name their “dream college”; and year in and year out, it raises more money from donors than any other university.

I need to do something about college, but I’m not sure what.” “Where have you decided to apply?” “Nowhere yet. Any time I think about the schools I’ve visited, I feel overwhelmed. The campuses are so big that I know I’ll get lost. I dread making new friends. And the professors acted too busy to deal with someone like me. My parents will be wasting a huge amount of money.” “Your fears are no different than most high school seniors.” He studied me thoughtfully. “Must you go to college?” I opened my mouth to say Of course, I must—and then shut it again. The concept didn’t bother me nearly as much as it should have. Skipping college would be crazy. Right? It was hard enough for a disabled person to find a job, but being disabled with no degree would make it hopeless. “I don’t have a choice.” “Perhaps you have more choices than you realize.

Sean had never stared into as many blank-eyed faces before. Throughout the high school civics talk, he felt as if he were speaking to the kids in a foreign language, one they had no intention of learning. Scrambling for a way to reach his audience, he ad-libbed, tossing out anecdotes about his own years at Coral Beach High. He confessed that as a teenager his decision to run for student government had been little more than a wily excuse to approach the best-looking girls. But what ultimately hooked his interest in student government was the startling discovery that the kids at school, all so different—jocks, nerds, preppies, and brains—could unite behind a common cause. During his senior year, when he’d been president of the student council, Coral Beach High raised seven thousand dollars to aid Florida’s hurricane victims. Wouldn’t that be something to feel good about? Sean asked his teenage audience. The response he received was as rousing as a herd of cows chewing their cud. Except this group was blowing big pink bubbles with their gum. The question and answer period, too, turned out to be a joke. The teens’ main preoccupation: his salary and whether he got driven around town in a chauffeured limo. When they learned he was willing to work for peanuts and that he drove an eight-year-old convertible, he might as well have stamped a big fat L on his forehead. He was weak-kneed with relief when at last the principal mounted the auditorium steps and thanked Sean for his electrifying speech. While Sean was politically seasoned enough to put the morning’s snafus behind him, and not worry overmuch that the apathetic bunch he’d just talked to represented America’s future voters, it was the high school principal’s long-winded enthusiasm, telling Sean how much of an inspiration he was for these kids, that truly set Sean’s teeth on edge. And made him even later for the final meeting of the day, the coral reef advisory panel.

After I was cheated on by ex, Chase, I just came to the conclusion a long time ago that niggas weren’t shit. I was with Chase on and off since I was in the 6th grade, up until my senior year in high school. He was the one I gave my virginity to, and when I found out he cheated on me, I ended up breaking up with him.

Today is the first day in the next chapter of my life.  My best friend, Ivy, and I are leaving home to finish college. We will be roommates and have the time of our lives. She has been staying at our house since November of our senior year in high school.  My parents agreed to help us both with college if we would take two years of basic courses at the local junior college.  Now we are moving to Springfield, Missouri to attend Missouri State University. 

The mother of a student in Europe who was between his junior and senior years of high school called Motto in a frantic state. She had just read somewhere that college admissions offices looked for kids who had spent their summers in enriching ways, ideally doing charity work, and her son was due to be on vacation with the rest of the family in August. “Should we ditch our plans,” she asked Motto, “and have him build dirt roads?” Motto reminded her that she lived in a well-paved European capital. “Where would these dirt roads be?” he said. “India?” she suggested. “Africa?” She hadn’t worked it out. But if Yale might be impressed by an image of her son with a small spade, large shovel, rake or jackhammer in his chafed hands, she was poised to find a third-world setting that would produce that sweaty and ennobling tableau.

I ran into similar, though less dramatic events after moving to Yale Law School, where I spent two years as a Senior Research Scholar. Hawaii’s two Democratic U.S. Senators once contacted the law school to complain about testimony that I gave before the Hawaii state legislature. They blamed me for somehow single-handedly scuttling the new gun registration laws that were being considered. The associate dean of the law school called me up about the complaints and grilled me about my testimony. I am certain that neither of these incidents would have occurred if I had been on the other side the gun debate. Over the years, many academics have told me that they would have studied gun control if not for fear of damage to their careers. They didn’t want to run the risk of coming out on the wrong side of the debate. From my experience, that is understandable. Eventually, I was forced out of academia. There is only an abundance of funding for those researchers who support gun control. There is a war on guns. Just like with any war there are real casualties. Police are probably the single most important factor in reducing crime, but police themselves understand that they almost always show up at the crime scene after the crime has been committed. When the police can’t be there, guns are by far the most effective way for people to protect themselves from criminals. And the most vulnerable people are the ones who benefit the most from being able to protect themselves: women and the elderly, people who are relatively weaker physically, as well as poor blacks who live in high crime urban areas—the most likely victims of violent crime. When gun control advocates can’t simply ban guns outright, they impose high fees and taxes on guns. When the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory, had their handgun ban struck down as unconstitutional by a federal judge in March 2016, they passed a $1,000 excise tax on guns—a tax they hoped would serve as a model for the rest of the U.S.8 I hope that this book provides the ammunition people need for some of the major battles ahead. We must fight to keep people safe.

All the creatures seemed happy to be at the library. The Headless Horseman gave horsey rides and the kids lined up! Someone brought out a ball and played fetch with the Hound of the Baskervilles. Dracula told jokes. The giant gently picked up some kids and lifted them high in the air. Everyone was enjoying the fun. The characters didn’t seem so scary now! Virginia Creeper’s happy smile suddenly changed to a worried frown when she looked out the window and saw the seniors’ book club coming up the walk. “Oh my,” said Ms. Creeper, “I almost forgot. It’s time for the book club! They can’t see this! It will give the seniors such a fright.” “Go and tidy up while I stall them at the door!” the librarian told Miss Smith. Virginia Creeper blocked the impatient readers from entering while Miss Smith ran around in a tizzy. She picked up overturned chairs and straightened the book shelves. Outside, the seniors were getting grouchy, but inside, the kids and the characters had become too silly to notice. “Can I help?” Zack asked Miss Smith. She handed the Incredible Storybook to Zack. “Remember,” Miss Smith said, “we have to finish each story so that the characters will go back into the book. Read the last page of each tale, while I deal with this mess!” Zack opened up the book and quickly finished all the stories. One by one, the characters went back into the Incredible Storybook. The puzzled book club burst into the room just as Zack finished the last page. “Okay, class, it’s time to check out your books,” Miss Smith said. She guided the class toward the big front desk. Everyone thanked Virginia Creeper before marching down the library steps and heading back to school. With borrowed books under their arms, the children were looking forward to reading more about all the characters they had just met. Zack smiled and wondered what they would read tomorrow.

I lost all airs of being a senior management executive – running around pouring coffee, taking orders, hefting gigantic platters laden with food and at times, working the cashier’s desk. My airs were not all that I lost. I also shed tons of weight and never felt fitter. Lighter on my feet and less thick in the head, the months I spent waitressing earned me the most valuable degree ever – in life management. It was just a high school degree, but it was still better than the unlettered so-and-so I was till then in the University of Life.

High school seniors: 70 percent report that they have “above average” leadership skills, compared with 2 percent “below average”; in the ability to get along with others, 25 percent rate themselves in the top 1 percent, and 60 percent put themselves in the top 10 percent. • College professors: 94 percent rate themselves as doing above-average work. • Engineers: In two different companies, 32 percent and 42 percent rated themselves among the top 5 percent of performers. • Entrepreneurs: When 3,000 small-business owners rated the probability that different companies would succeed, on average they rated the prospects of their own businesses as 8.1 out of 10 but gave similar enterprises odds of only 5.9 out of 10.

A group of researchers asked ninety-nine college freshmen and sophomores to think back a few years and recall the grades they had received for high school classes in math, science, history, foreign language study, and English.44 The students had no incentive to lie because they were told that their recollections would be checked against their high school registrars’ records, and indeed all signed forms giving their permission. Altogether, the researchers checked on the students’ memories of 3,220 grades. A funny thing happened. You’d think that the handful of years that had passed would have had a big effect on the students’ grade recall, but they didn’t. The intervening years didn’t seem to affect the students’ memories very much at all—they remembered their grades from their freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior years all with the same accuracy, about 70 percent. And yet there were memory holes. What made the students forget? It was not the haze of years but the haze of poor performance: their accuracy of recall declined steadily from 89 percent for A’s to 64 percent for B’s, 51 percent for C’s, and 29 percent for D’s. So if you are ever depressed over being given a bad evaluation, cheer up. Chances are, if you just wait long enough, it’ll improve.

In one College Board survey of 829,000 high-school seniors, 0 percent rated themselves below average in “ability to get along with others,” 60 percent rated themselves in the top 10 percent, and 25 percent rated themselves in the top 1 percent. Compared with our average peer, most of us fancy ourselves as more intelligent, better-looking, less prejudiced, more ethical, healthier, and likely to live longer—a phenomenon recognized in Freud’s joke about the man who told his wife, “If one of us should die, I shall move to Paris.

No. You know what, forget about the spaceship,” I said, realizing maybe it was a poor analogy. “So Lupe just stopped coming around?” he asked. “She probably has too much homework. I can’t imagine going to the high school; I’m already buried in homework as it is! And I’m only in middle school!” I chuckled. “How are the kids at your school treating you? Tell them if they don’t leave you alone, I’ll totally write about them in my column!” “Thanks,” Shen said with a laugh. “And yeah, they’re leaving me alone. For now.” I smiled. “Good.” “Do you miss China?” Shen asked. “I miss everything! Lao Lao’s mantou and the jianbingguozi at breakfast. I miss the snow, the seniors exercising in the park, and Popsicle Grandpa. I even miss the squat toilets.” I chortled. “Okay, maybe I don’t miss those.” “Well, I miss pulling you out of them.” Shen giggled, and then we both sighed at the same time. “Wish you lived closer,” he said. “Me too.” “Mia, time to get off,” Mom said, tapping at an imaginary watch on her wrist. I groaned. “I gotta go,” I told Shen. “Awwww,” he said.

Was he thinking serial killer? She was but did not want to voice that opinion yet. This was different and the same. Very much the same as Gail and Charlie, her mother’s superiors, made inferior by Arleen’s knife. Her mom’s killing streak ran for twelve years, and would have continued indefinitely, if she had not taken Nadine’s classmate. Right after Nadine had told her mom that Sandra was terrorizing her, the high school senior went missing.

It’s probably an insult to your proud feminism, too.” “Dude, you have no idea.” He pauses. “Did you just call me ‘dude?’” “I grew up in San Diego. If you’re not properly programmed with surfer slang by your senior year in high school, they don’t let you graduate.

By her senior year in high school, she had managed to stay away from the boys and the drinking and the meth that had ruined just about every girl her age in her small hometown of Elba, Alabama. She wasn’t going to end up being one of those soulless, washed-out girls who worked the night shift and smoked Kools because they were elegant. She wasn’t going to end up with three kids by three different men before she hit thirty. She wasn’t going to ever wake up one morning unable to open her eyes because some man’s fist had beaten them shut the night before. She wasn’t going to end up dead and alone in a hospital bed like her mother

Summer vacation is a topic seldom mentioned in American educational debates. It is considered a permanent and inviolate feature of school life, like high school football or the senior prom.

he was always much stronger than me and anyone I’d ever met. He liked to play rough, push me, pin me to the floor, that sort of stuff. When I was a freshman in high school, Luke was a senior. At freshman orientation, some of Luke’s senior football friends came up to me. (Did I mention

Donald Disbro is a man with a wide range of interests. He grew up in Mission Viejo, California, playing baseball in high school and college. Donald Disbro earned his MBA at Chapman University in 2003. He is a family man, going on his 9th year of marriage to Suzanne Disbro. Donald Disbro is the father of two great sons who are college and high school athletes. He loves music, particularly live music, weightlifting, and wine tasting.

Choice of profession also no longer guarantees a high social status. This is bound up, among other things, with fragmented processes of downward mobility within occupational groups. A senior teacher earns a relatively comfortable income and need not worry about the future; they may even be able to retire early. In the same school and in the same class, however, there is possibly also a younger teacher on a temporary contract who has to claim unemployment benefit during the summer vacation and has no prospects for permanent employment. (Many German states now rely on a growing number of flexible teachers who are no longer guaranteed permanent positions.) In the postal service, too, although there are still many permanent employees, newly hired staff generally are not offered any job security (cf. Chapter 5). Among certain occupational groups the differences can be tremendous, as with journalists, for example. Those who began working at major German publications like Stern, Spiegel or Die Zeit ten or twenty years ago could expect a secure future. In the big publishing houses today, on the other hand, not only have precarious jobs and poorly paid groups of online writers proliferated, but not even the established staff can feel secure any more. A growing share belong to the ‘media precariat’ and earn less than €30,000 per year.99 Another example is that of lawyers, formerly the very model of status and prosperity. This professional group now divides into those who continue to earn good money and enjoy a high social prestige while employed in large offices or working for corporations, and a growing flock of precarious self-employed legal professionals, who fail to gain a steady footing in an over-filled market.

He was doing chinning exercies in the closet, using a bar clamped to the doorway. 'Where did you get that?' 'It's Mercator's.' 'Who's that?' 'He's this senior I hang around with now. He's almost nineteen and he's still in high school. To give you some idea.' 'Some idea of what?' 'How big he is. He bench-presses these awesome amounts.

Nelson knew when he started that he couldn't remake the entire high-school experience for his students. But he thought that perhaps he didn't need to. By helping his students develop the specific nonacademic skills that would lead most directly to college success, he believed he could compensate, relatively quickly, for the serious gap in academic ability that separated the average senior at a Chicago public high school from the average American college freshman. Nelson, using instinct more than research, identified five skills, which he called leadership principles, that he wanted OneGoal teachers to emphasize: resourcefulness, resilience, ambition, professionalism, and integrity. These words now permeate the program.

(Back to our halls) Like a dumb ass I went to college, (assuming I pass all my boards. Senior year is almost over, and the calculation is the final test I will take. For the past four months, I’ve had all my various board exams-math, science, oral magic, and written proficiency, sociology and psychology, and photography (a specialty elective)-and I must be getting my scores one-time in the next few weeks ago it was not long ago or so it seems to me. Solitary of them will become my husband after I graduate, girls who don’t pass get paired and married right out of high school.) The evaluators will do their best to match me with people who received a similar score in the evaluations. As much as possible they try to avoid any huge disparities in intelligence, temperament, social background, and age. Of development you do hear occasional horror stories: cases, where a poor seventeen-year-old girl is given to a wealthy old man, is the delirium dream, which is dumb, dumb, dumb. The stairs let out their awful moaning, Jenny, appears before me. She is nine and tall for her age, but very thin: all angles and elbows, her chest caving in like a warped sheet pan. It’s terrible to say, but I don’t like her very much. She has the same pinched look as her mother did. The assessment is the last step, so I can get paired, paid, and laid, in the coming months, the evaluators will send me a list of four or five approved matches.

by the time your child is a senior in high school you will want to have the bulk of your account in conservative investments; it is too risky to have your money invested in stocks when you know you will need that money in one to five years.

The spirit of the place is not not friendly. Meals begin in silence; once everyone is seated, someone slaps the wooden clackers and leads a little chant. The food is often amazingly good, and despite the growing number of vegans in the ranks, heaps of delicious cheese are often melted and sprinkled and layered into the hot things that come out of the kitchen. At breakfast, watch the very senior people deal with rice gruel, and you'll know enough to spike yours with brown sugar and stir in some whole milk or cream, and you could do much worse on a morning in March. ("You can't change your karma, but you can sweeten your cereal," whispered an elderly priest when I nobly and foolishly added nothing to that blob in my bowl during my first stay at the farm.) Once eating is under way, the common dining room looks rather like a high school cafeteria; there are insider and outsider tables, and it is often easy to spot the new students and short-term guests—they're a few minutes late because they haven't memorized the schedule; they're smiling bravely, wielding their dinner trays like steering wheels, weaving around, desperately looking for a public parking space, hoping someone will wave or smile or otherwise signal them to safety I asked a practice leader about this, and she said she knew it was hard but people have to get over their self consciousness; for some newcomers, she said, that's zazen, that's their meditative practice. I think that's what I mean by not not friendly

NNHS students discussed Americanness in their everyday interactions. For example, Mr Ford, a popular White teacher, made a jocular reference to the title of a popular television show when he told a classroom full of seniors who had not completed an assignment that they ‘should be called America’s biggest losers!’ A Mexican girl (Gen 3, Grade 12) retorted, ‘But we’re not even American!’ This kind of comment reflects Latinx students’ awareness that they were positioned as somehow un-American.

Star prodigy quarterback. I had broken every high school record when I “suddenly” transferred into Belmont High for my senior year of high school.

disinformation. Our classrooms don’t do much better: a 2018 Southern Poverty Law Center report examined the curriculum standards in fifteen states and found that “none addresses how the ideology of white supremacy rose to justify the institution of slavery; most fail to lay out meaningful requirements for learning about slavery…or about how [enslaved people’s] labor was essential to the American economy.” What’s more, the organization surveyed high school seniors from across the country and found that only 8 percent knew that slavery was a primary cause of the Civil War.

In design school, professional practices are usually grouped together and referred to as “soft skills,” taught in something called a “portfolio class” by whichever professor drew the short straw that semester. Unpacking professional practice is less glamorous than holding forth about creativity. To be fair, I doubt many high school seniors are excited to choose a design school based on how well they teach professional services. I certainly wasn’t. We choose design schools based on how amazingly creative and special they make us feel.

You’re not that big!” she exclaims, exasperated. I pause, mid-thrust, staring at her with horror. I know I am. I have statistics to prove it. We even used a ruler in the locker room back when I was a junior in high school. What kind of bullshit is this? Knight Senior doesn’t need this negativity from the love of its life.

THE HORROR OF THE UNPROFESSIONAL I was surprised to learn that when Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter wanted to scold Russia for its campaign of airstrikes in Syria in the fall of 2015, the word he chose to apply was “unprofessional.” Given the magnitude of the provocation, it seemed a little strange—as though he thought there were an International Association of Smartbomb Deployment Executives that might, once alerted by American officials, hold an inquiry into Russia’s behavior and hand down a stern reprimand. On reflection, slighting foes for their lack of professionalism was something of a theme of the Obama years. An Iowa Democrat became notorious in 2014, for example, when he tried to insult an Iowa Republican by calling him “a farmer from Iowa who never went to law school.” Similarly, it was “unprofessionalism” (in the description of Thomas Friedman) that embarrassed the insubordinate Afghan-war General Stanley McChrystal, who made ill-considered remarks about the president to Rolling Stone magazine. And in the summer of 2013, when National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden exposed his employer’s mass surveillance of email and phone calls, the aspect of his past that his detractors chose to emphasize was … his failure to graduate from high school.14 How could such a no-account person challenge this intensely social-science-oriented administration? But it was public school teachers who made the most obvious target for professional reprimand by the administration. They are, after all, pointedly different from other highly educated professions: Teachers are represented by trade unions, not proper professional associations, and their values of seniority and solidarity conflict with the cult of merit embraced by other professions. For years, the school reform movement has worked to replace or weaken teachers’ unions with remedies like standardized testing, charter schools, and tactical deployment of the cadres of Teach for America, a corps of enthusiastic graduates from highly ranked colleges who take on teaching duties in classrooms across the country after only minimal training.

a mechanic at the local garage down the street and usually finishes around 6 p.m. I know he’ll be home soon, even if it is only to check that I’m here waiting for him. He’s always had a slight possessive streak; it used to make me feel wanted and needed, but it seems to have kicked up a notch in the past six months. Beau and I met in high school in our senior year. He was a late transfer student who started with only a few months left before graduation. He pursued me fervently, and despite my parents being concerned about their somewhat sheltered daughter going out with the neighborhood’s new resident bad boy, we fell in love,

Listen Corporal… Turner,” she whispered into his ear. He turned very white. Samantha wasn’t tall, but she acted tall. Tall and dangerous. She passed for a high school senior but she felt older. “Have you seen what happens when the Marines send their best teams into Compton?

By the time Natalie realized what Viola was doing, it was too late. She was a senior in high school, and nothing whatsoever about music made her happy. Music was something to win, to be first and best at. She snapped at her parents and was too proud to apologize. She shrank from Uncle Kevin because it was easier than admitting the truth. She listened to all of Hunky Dory, to Ziggy Stardust and Heroes, and tried to feel lovely and strange and weightless, but she couldn’t; she played the piano, she listened to music, and nothing stirred, nothing sang inside. Natalie was earthbound and ordinary, marooned, alone.

In my senior year of high school, a friend’s father died suddenly of heart failure. I sat at the funeral and sobbed. I sobbed for her loss, of course, but I also sobbed for the deeply shameful pang of envy I felt for a brief moment. At least with death, you can mourn. It feels much hollower when someone simply disappears. Perhaps it was the loss of so much that made me want so little. The less I had, the less I’d have to inevitably part with. When I lay there inside that old rusted van on those exquisitely manicured Salt Lake City streets, it felt as though I knew something all those people didn’t.

See, I failed to realize that by loving him, by pouring every ounce of energy I had into our lives and his future, I didn’t leave room for more, something I didn’t realize until after I had my first stroke Noah’s senior year in high school. From that day on, in the back of my mind has been fear.

/If there was a single experience behind the Commandments, it was the insight that I had as I walked into the stadium for the student awards ceremony at the end of my senior year at my high school. It occurred to me at that moment that I was so happy about what I had done that year, and I felt so good about what I had learned and whom I had helped, that I didn’t need any awards. I had already been rewarded. I already had the sense of meaning and satisfaction that came from doing a good job. The meaning and satisfaction were mine, whether or not anybody gave me an award. That realization was a major breakthrough for me. I felt completely liberated and completely at peace. I knew that if I did what was right and good and true, my actions would have their own intrinsic value. I would always find meaning. I didn’t need to have glory.

It would be my last chance to see Rory. He’d just worked his last day bussing tables at the Eatery the week before. He was going to spend the summer staffing a camp for aspiring soccer stars in California. Then in the fall he would start college at Michigan State University, majoring in kinesiology, the first step on his path to becoming a doctor for a professional sports team. And I would stay in Magnolia and finish my senior year of high school.

the staggering truth is that 40 to 50 percent of students who are active in the church in their senior year of high school will drift away from the church as young adults. Did you catch that? Not 40 to 50 percent of kids, but 40 to 50 percent of kids who are active in their final year of high school will walk away.

Um, so you're in love with Frankie, right?" "Yes." "How do you know?" She thought about it for a minute, then said, "I'm happier when I'm with him. I'm stronger, more daring, more open. You know how when you're ten, you are so much who you are? When I was ten I was like the senior of being a kid. I was into sports, of course, but I was also into politics, I read the paper, I organized a recycling drive, I did cartwheels just because I felt happy. Didn't you?" "Well," I said, "I have never done a cartwheel. Maybe I've never been that happy." "No, you know what I mean. I was strong." ... "When I'm not with him," she went on, the words rushing out of her, "I think about him all the time- what he would think, or say, how he would calm me down and help me roll with it, whatever. And when I'm with him, it's just- easy. This might sound weird, but I'm more like I was when I was ten. Minus the cartwheels, plus a little, you know, different kind of physical stuff. I guess I know I'm in love with Frankie because I'm more like myself when I'm with him.

A belly laugh A toy from your childhood Your favorite song from high school The number 222 A beach ball A senior citizen in a fashionable hat A smile from a baby A billboard with a message for you

I climbed a tree when I was a senior in high school. My mom, my dad, and I went back home to the Dominican Republic and I climbed a tree to get some mangoes.

Once in my senior year of high school, when I didn’t want to attend an early-morning Mass with her, I snarled, in typical teenager style, “What’s your deal? Why do you love a church so much that doesn’t love anyone? It rejected you when you left Oldenburg. It rejected you when Dad divorced you. How can you still love it so much?

a police official in SS uniform, probably a member of the Gestapo, turned up in a senior high school class in the Stuttgart area. He was there to explain the background of ‘shootings “because of resistance” one could read about from time to time in the press’. He said simply, that while courts worked well when hard evidence could be found, the police had to act when there was insufficient evidence. They knew how to recognize guilt and were not bound by rules of evidence as were judges, so that the police could become the proverbial judge, jury, and executioner. Lest students worry unduly, they were assured that the police did not execute anyone without ‘previously thoroughly examining’ the case.

For almost a century, the school had been home to creative geniuses, radical thinkers, and innovators. Ellingham had no application, no list of requirements, no instructions other than, "If you would like to be considered for Ellingham Academy, please get in touch." That was it. One simple sentence that drove every high-flying student frantic. What did they want? What were they looking for? This was like a riddle from a fantasy story or fairy tale - something the wizard makes you do before you are allowed into the Cave of Secrets. Applications were supposed to be rigid lists of requirements and test scores and essays and recommendations and maybe a blood sample and a few bars from a popular musical. Not Elllingham. Just knock on the door. Just knock on the door in the special, correct way they would not describe. You just had to get in touch with something. They looked for a spark. If they saw such a spark in you, you could be one of the fifty students they took each year. The program was only two years long, just the junior and senior years of high school. There were no tuition fees. If you got in, it was free. You just had to get in.

With this in mind, I’d started a leadership and mentoring program at the White House, inviting twenty sophomore and junior girls from high schools around Greater D.C. to join us for monthly get-togethers that included informal chats, field trips, and sessions on things like financial literacy and choosing a career. We kept the program largely behind closed doors, rather than thrusting these girls into the media fray. We paired each teen with a female mentor who would foster a personal relationship with her, sharing her resources and her life story. Valerie was a mentor. Cris Comerford, the White House’s first female executive chef, was a mentor. Jill Biden was, too, as were a number of senior women from both the East and the West Wing staffs. The students were nominated by their principals or guidance counselors and would stay with us until they graduated. We had girls from military families, girls from immigrant families, a teen mom, a girl who’d lived in a homeless shelter. They were smart, curious young women, all of them. No different from me. No different from my daughters. I watched over time as the girls formed friendships, finding a rapport with one another and with the adults around them. I spent hours talking with them in a big circle, munching popcorn and trading our thoughts about college applications, body image, and boys. No topic was off-limits. We ended up laughing a lot. More than anything, I hoped this was what they’d carry forward into the future—the ease, the sense of community, the encouragement to speak and be heard. My wish for them was the same one I had for Sasha and Malia—that in learning to feel comfortable at the White House, they’d go on to feel comfortable and confident in any room, sitting at any table, raising their voices inside any group.

College Board’s own research, then, for about two-thirds of high school seniors, the SAT doesn’t matter much

The original Romeo, Coby Reid, had driven his car into a tree only a few hours earlier, though no one was sure if it was on purpose or not, and no one seemed interested in knowing for certain. Since Coby was not dead but merely in the hospital with a broken collarbone and a collapsed lung and spectacular damage to his wonderful smile, the cast and crew decided that the show need not be canceled but rather recast. That Buster, the stage manager, had memorized every line of the entire play seemed to make the decision fairly obvious. That his sister, two years his senior and in her final performance as a high school student, would be playing the role of Juliet was seen as only a minor inconvenience.

waiting for my boyfriend Beau to get home from work. He works as a mechanic at the local garage down the street and usually finishes around 6 p.m. I know he’ll be home soon, even if it is only to check that I’m here waiting for him. He’s always had a slight possessive streak; it used to make me feel wanted and needed, but it seems to have kicked up a notch in the past six months. Beau and I met in high school in our senior year. He was a late transfer student who started with only a few months left before graduation. He pursued me fervently, and despite my parents being concerned about their somewhat sheltered daughter going out with the neighborhood’s new resident bad boy, we fell in love,

The Senior Ball was upon us and I didn’t have a date. Having spent my high school years attending this school didn’t help. Perhaps I should have invited Thelma. Now, that would have been something! Looking back I wonder what would have happened if I had? Everyone at the school knew Thelma, and Ridell High, being a snobbish school in a snobbish town, would certainly have ostracized the two of us. Besides, Thelma was just a little too old for me and I was just too chicken to bring the town’s hottest girl to the schools biggest function.

Jeremy Sanders was my boyfriend during our senior year of high school, which is the very first year when boyfriends might start to mean something