The kids are alright
My newspaper column
You know that dream in which you arrive at school to discover you have an exam in a course you never attended?
That's me on the day in April when the 12 finalists in the News & Record Scholastic Achievement Program came for their interviews.
They'rre top of their class. I was a straight-B student on my better days. They've got it all going on. The only thing I've got going on is Marvin Gaye on an eight-track.
There's Kira Mengistu of the Early College at Guilford who has lived in Belarus, Ethiopia and the United States. She is going to major in either international relations or bio-chemistry. At Harvard. I became an English major specifically to avoid chemistry.
There's Aarti Sarin of Western Guilford who speaks authoritatively about the virtues of the blue crab. I can do that, too, having spent many summer days crabbing at the beach. Of course,
she talks about blue crab DNA.
There's Troy Shelton of North Davidson, who occasionally stumbles when pronouncing some words. Heck, don't worry about it, Troy, so do I. Of course, he does it when switching tenses among Greek, Latin and Spanish.
OK, I know this isn't about me. But the embarrassing thing about it is, they make it all look easy. That makes them model students for our Scholastic Achievement Program.
The News & Record started the program in 1990 to recognize the hard work of high school students in our area. This year, a panel of three judges -- Theresa Miller, Paul Smith and Robert Redmond -- selected the four winners from 31 nominees to receive a total of $14,000 in scholarships.
Inside the paper today, we have published a special section announcing the winners and featuring about 350 students nominated by their schools to participate in the program.
Each year, we ask guidance counselors at the public schools in our circulation area to select teams of outstanding scholars from the 10th, 11th and 12th grades. Those students make up their school’s academic team. One senior is chosen as the school’s nominee. Each nominee submits dossiers with his or her high school transcript, a summary of extra curricular and community activities, and a report on financial needs. A team of independent judges then selects the winners. This year, 35 schools participated.
As a result, not only is our "all-academic team" larger than our "all-area" sports teams. It gets more attention with today's special section.
But it's not all about a teenager’s gray matter. They hold down jobs at restaurants and stores. They volunteer at hospitals, schools and retirement homes.
In previous years I've been surprised at the demeanor of the students. They are teenagers, after all. No longer. Each of the finalists was on time. Each was well-dressed. Each answered respectfully, and most said "sir" and "ma'am."
Parents, your kids do pay attention to you, even though you may not think so sometimes. During the interviews, many of them said they followed your example and listened to your advice.
The best line about this came from Winnie Quick of Dudley who was asked about her participation in sports: "I played basketball to start with and my dad was my assistant coach... so I decided to get into tennis.”
The rest of her sentence -- "and now my dad is my tennis coach" -- was drowned out by the judges' laughter. By the way, she was captain and MVP of the tennis team.
I have a daughter who is graduating from high school next Sunday. I know many, if not most, high school students work hard at school, volunteer in the community and try to make the lives of others better. The image of petulant, troublemaking teenagers -- propelled by television and movies -- simply doesn't ring true.
Some of the students on the academic teams will leave the state for college. Some won't return to the Piedmont. But my hope is that most of them will. That is a comforting thought. The future will be in good hands.