Two Revealing Looks at Teenage Life

In an inadvertent and fascinating juxtaposition, two documentaries on two networks today complement each other with two very different approaches to profiling the complex and risky life and times of teenagers.

If you can, tape this afternoon’s “ABC Afterschool Special: Miracle at Trapper Creek,” about teenagers who fit to a T society’s uneasy, negative stereotype of their age group and are being given a second chance to succeed.

Watch it after you’ve seen “The Class of 2000,” tonight’s CBS News special. This remarkably moving, frequently uplifting program captures the reality of what most teenagers are: prickly, maddening, delightful, rude, passionate, painfully vulnerable to hurt and danger and desperately in need of parental caring and guidance.

Few documentaries about teenagers have so vividly put adults in the shoes of “ordinary” kids as does CBS’ microcosm of American adolescence, shot at a racially, socially diverse high school in Harford County, Md.

Profiling a variety of students as they maneuver through the mine field that is the ninth grade, this documentary, anchored by “This Morning’s” Mark McEwen, reveals the pain and exuberance of being 14 years old.

You might cross the street if you saw Steve coming down the street, blasting his heavy-metal music and sporting a half-shaved head and dyed black hair. But you’d miss the fact that he’s sweet and articulate and a gentle, loving brother to his mentally disabled sister.

Handsome athlete Kris fits the image of a tough jock on the football field. You might not suspect how earnestly he works to overcome dyslexia, or how important his parents and siblings are to him, or what sustenance he takes from his church.

The students here--girls and boys from various backgrounds--talk about sex, the environment, peer pressure, loyalties to friends and their determination to succeed. They worry about loneliness, racism, grades and their parents’ well-being, no matter how defiantly they wrangle with them.

A brief segment that compares high school students in China with their American counterparts is interesting but shallow--the conclusion is that American youth may actually do better in the long run because they’re allowed to be creative and independent--and it’s almost an intrusion.

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Fundamentally, “The Class of 2000” is a reminder that “teenager” is not a dirty word, and that young people want and deserve to be cared about and to be helped to avoid the worst hurts and temptations of adolescence.

That feeling is locked home by ABC’s “Miracle at Trapper Creek,” about older youths who made all the wrong choices, or had wrong choices made for them. Now they are attempting to put deeply troubled lives behind them at a Job Corps facility in Montana. There, under strict discipline, young people with criminal records, histories of drug abuse, abusive families and other ills try to earn their high school diplomas, learn a trade and find some hope.

* “Miracle at Trapper Creek” airs from 3-4 p.m. today on ABC (Channel 7). “The Class of 2000” airs from 9-11 p.m. on CBS (Channel 2).