) After my interview with these four young people, I reflected on the quiet sense of "difference" I sensed with many of these Upward Bound students. (2) As a college teacher who has also taught seventh-grade science, I have some experience with the faces and attitudes of adolescence. (3) Upward Bound students had those faces. (4) There was the puzzled coping with changing bodies—hormone hell. (5) There was ambivalence about "authority figures" and uncertainties about whether or not the world would have some place for them. (6) There were the studied rationalizations about lapses on homework assignments, moments of despair, adolescent angst—all of that. (7) But there was also that "difference." (8) Maybe it's one part knowing people care and one part beginning to trust the future. (9) I wasn't sure.
(Turner, "Onward and Upward: Upward Bound Helps Open College Doors," Virginia Journal of Education, June 1992. Adapted as fair usage.)