09 May 2002
About This Issue
It shouldn't have been a surprise. We should have known what would happen. After all, we were once teenagers ourselves. A few of us, in fact, had even reared a teenager or two.
But, we were becoming increasingly anxious as weeks went by without a single reply to the message that we had sent out to secondary schools around the country, inviting students to submit essays about their lives and activities. The essays were to serve as the centerpiece of our journal about teenage life. We're going to have to cancel the issue, we thought. We quickly moved to salvage things by having our contributing writers interview some teenagers.
Then it happened, the equivalent of an e-mail tsunami. Essays from around the country flooded our mailbox on the day of the deadline we had given. And, of course, a few more trickled in over the days that followed. Procrastination, we then recalled, is one of the hallmarks of teenage behavior—others being energy and creativity. Suddenly we had a cornucopia of material in hand, and a new problem: What to do with it all.
After some discussion, we decided to group abridged excerpts under thematic sections. The resulting feature, along with the help of numerous photos, provides a wide variety of insights and perspectives into teenage life today in the United States.
There could be no one better to introduce our issue to international youth than First Lady Laura Bush. Since coming to the White House in January 2001, she has devoted considerable time and energy to issues of education, health, and human rights, traveling widely, and often speaking to young audiences. In a letter to readers, she writes, "Consider how to prepare yourself for the future. Think about the habits, skills, and knowledge that will help you succeed in school."
An educator we have admired over the years via the essays he often contributes to the Washington Post, USA Today, and other national publications is Patrick Welsh. He describes his experiences and observations as an English teacher at a suburban Washington, D.C., high school.
Associate editor Michael Bandler, always hard on the heels of a famous person to profile or to recruit for a State Department program abroad, arranged two interviews for this issue. His conversations with international football phenom Freddy Adu and National Teacher of the Year Jason Kamras provide inspiring stories of extraordinary accomplishments.
Hundreds of foreign exchange students enroll in U.S. secondary schools each year. Novelist Robert Taylor recorded the impressions of three of them who attended a high school in Ohio this past year. And since not all students actually enroll in an educational institution, we thought it would be interesting to profile a family engaged in homeschooling. Journalist Chuck Offenburger found such a family in South Carolina and tells us how they educated their four children almost entirely at home.
Photographer Barry Fitzgerald relishes just about any assignment that will take him out of the office, so we asked him to go to central Virginia to spend a few days following students around during their last week in school. The portfolio he produced rounds out our coverage, providing views common to the high school experience of teenagers in the United States.
The Editors
From the July 2005 edition of eJournal USA.
