Wild parties, late nights, and lots of sex, drugs, and alcohol. Many assume these are the things that define an American teenager’s first year after high school. But the reality is really quite different. As Tim Clydesdale reports in The First Year Out, teenagers generally manage the increased responsibilities of everyday life immediately after graduation effectively. But, like many good things, this comes at a cost.
Tracking the daily lives of fifty young people making the transition to life after high school, Clydesdale reveals how teens settle into manageable patterns of substance use and sexual activity; how they meet the requirements of postsecondary education; and how they cope with new financial expectations. Most of them, we learn, handle the changes well because they make a priority of everyday life. But Clydesdale finds that teens also stow away their identities—religious, racial, political, or otherwise—during this period in exchange for acceptance into mainstream culture. This results in the absence of a long-range purpose for their lives and imposes limits on their desire to understand national politics and global issues, sometimes even affecting the ability to reconstruct their lives when tragedies occur.
The First Year Out is an invaluable resource for anyone caught up in the storm and stress of working with these young adults.
While high school drop-out rates have steadily declined among white and African American students over the 1970s and 1980s a constant 35 percent of Latino students continued to quit school before graduation. In this pioneering work, Harriett Romo and Toni Falbo reveal how a group of at-risk Latino students defied the odds and earned a high school diploma.
Romo and Falbo tracked the progress of 100 students in Austin, Texas, from 1989 to 1993. Drawing on interviews with the students and their parents, school records, and fieldwork in the schools and communities, the authors identify both the obstacles that caused many students to drop out and the successful strategies that other students and their parents pursued to ensure high school graduation.
The authors conclude with seven far-reaching recommendations for changes in the public schools. Sure to provoke debate among all school constituencies, this book will be required reading for school administrators, teachers, parents, legislators, and community leaders.
Ortner tracked down nearly all 304 of her classmates. She interviewedabout 100 in person and spoke with most of the rest by phone, recording her classmates’ vivid memories of time, place, and identity. Ortner shows how social class affected people’s livesin many hidden and unexamined ways. She also demonstrates that the Class of ‘58’s extreme upward mobility must be understood in relation to the major identity movements of the twentieth century—the campaign against anti-Semitism, the Civil Rights movement, and feminism.
A multisited study combining field research with an interdisciplinary analytical framework, New Jersey Dreaming is a masterly integration of developments at the vanguard of contemporary anthropology. Engaging excerpts from Ortner's field notes are interspersed throughout the book. Whether recording the difficulties and pleasures of studying one's own peer group, the cultures of driving in different parts of the country, or the contrasting experiences of appointment-making in Los Angeles and New York, they provide a rare glimpse into the actual doing of ethnographic research.
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