All wrote letters to their parents about their problems at home.īut the biggest bonding experience took place when they spent a weekend in the wilderness, where they had to rely upon each other to accomplish physical challenges. The students went to San Francisco where they talked with a fashion model who had battled bulimia and then visited a suicide prevention clinic. Two of the most popular students learned how it felt to be outsiders when they spent a day attending another high school. Over the three months, the 11 were brought face to face with the consequences of their actions. I wanted them to look at the truth at how they look at each other.” What was probably my bigger concern was that I didn’t want them to pretend to be friends or do the phony getting along. “After a couple of weeks of this, they really started to bond. “They weren’t on their own a lot,” she says. Grodner acknowledges that at first she worried about tensions within the group. “This high school society that we have-they can’t get past that.”
“People can’t get past the fact that we are actually human-that there are humans here,” Melissa says. She says the main reason students are intolerant of other groups is immaturity. Overweight, Melissa used to dress entirely in black and was an outcast at the high school before “Teen Files.” “But it ended up a lot of crying,” she says. Melissa, a 16-year-old junior at Yuba City, got involved in “Teen Files” because it sounded like fun.
#SURVIVING HIGH SCHOOL APP IPHONE SERIES#
The students were brought together over time and presented with a series of situations that would encourage interaction, with Grodner’s crew filming the process. Grodner and her staff tried to get a cross section of these groups in the 11 students they selected. You can’t go out and see a real division, but those are the lines that divide us.” “If a kid comes on campus they can connect up with somebody,” Zappetini says. Intermixing between the groups is practically nonexistent. “The other diversity we offered, which really ‘The Teen Files’ played upon, are our groups,” says assistant principal Joan Zappetini, who was the liaison between the students and “Teen Files.” The cliques included, among others: the jocks, the scrubs, the cowboys, the skateboarders, the prima donnas and the cheerleaders. The school also had the diversity “Teen Files” wanted-53% of the student body are white, 23% are Latino, 18% are East Indian, and the remaining 18% are African American or from other groups. It happens to be the only high school in the city which was interesting to me.” They were really open to try something a little more radical. With a student body of 2,900, Yuba City High was small enough, Grodner says, that they “weren’t caught up in a lot of bureaucracy. But Yuba City High School in Yuba City, Calif., a suburban town of more than 27,000, east of Sacramento, quickly emerged because administrators in the school district were so open about talking about their problems. “We had considered high schools across the country,” she says. Grodner and her staff then set out to find an average American high school. “I said, ‘Let’s go into a school and see what the average high school student really deals with and let’s break it down and look at those issues.’ ” “A lot of kids looked at the drug show and the violence show and said, ‘That’s not me.’ We wanted to do something that everyone could relate to-just trying to find where you fit in in school and dealing with those pressures,” recalls Grodner. Previous installments of “The Teen Files” have covered such hot-button issues as drugs, violence and smoking, but with “Surviving High School,” producer-writer-director Allison Grodner wanted to examine the everyday pressures teenagers deal with. In “The Teen Files: Surviving High School,” which airs Tuesday on UPN, filmmakers follow 11 students struggling to fit in at a Northern California high school. The latest edition of producer Arnold Shapiro’s award-winning series of specials, “The Teen Files,” looks at just how teenagers are trying to cope with high school. And more and more young people are contemplating suicide, with current research indicating that every minute, a person under the age of 24 tries to end his or her life. Depression is also taking a firm hold of teenagers, with 1 in 8 adolescents suffering from the affliction. Eighty percent of teenage girls say they are unhappy with their body image and 45% of teen males are equally displeased with theirs. It’s now estimated, for example, that 75% of teens have been either bullied or harassed by their classmates. Most teenagers today deserve a diploma just for surviving the pressures of high school.
0 kommentar(er)
