(1) 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