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- Nick's Diary: Home School to High School
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Nick chronicles a turbulent year in his life. He’s 15-years-old and hates school, but somehow he must learn to make friends.
“If you could give me any advice or give me some potion that would make people my age start liking me, or, I don’t know… I just need to know how to socialize or I’m gonna go nuts. As a child I was really happy, and I was really enthusiastic about everything I did; about cello, about my writing, about drawing, about school, friends, about everything. And since the beginning of Junior High, since I’ve gotten older, I’m not as idealistic as I used to be. I think I see life more as it is now and I’m not as dreamy and creative as I used to be. But, maybe it’s just still in my brain, in storage.”
This story is part of the Teenage Diaries series produced by Radio Diaries for NPR. Since 1996, Executive Producer Joe Richman has been giving tape recorders to young people around the country to document their lives. In December of 2012, Radio Diaries will revisit five of the original diarists 16 years after their first recordings. The series is broadcast on NPR's All Things Considered.
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Piece Description
Nick chronicles a turbulent year in his life. He’s 15-years-old and hates school, but somehow he must learn to make friends.
“If you could give me any advice or give me some potion that would make people my age start liking me, or, I don’t know… I just need to know how to socialize or I’m gonna go nuts. As a child I was really happy, and I was really enthusiastic about everything I did; about cello, about my writing, about drawing, about school, friends, about everything. And since the beginning of Junior High, since I’ve gotten older, I’m not as idealistic as I used to be. I think I see life more as it is now and I’m not as dreamy and creative as I used to be. But, maybe it’s just still in my brain, in storage.”
This story is part of the Teenage Diaries series produced by Radio Diaries for NPR. Since 1996, Executive Producer Joe Richman has been giving tape recorders to young people around the country to document their lives. In December of 2012, Radio Diaries will revisit five of the original diarists 16 years after their first recordings. The series is broadcast on NPR's All Things Considered.
3 Comments
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Review of Nick: Home School to High SchoolI heard this piece before; I think it was on Weekend-All Things Considered. It tells a story of Nick who is trying to reach out and get a handle on his feelings of desperation and isolation. This is a well-done diary piece that follows Nick over several months. I especially like the scenes where Nick talks about how he loves to play cello when he’s feeling disgusted with himself, where he talks about the transformative quality of plain music and when he talks with his family at dinner on how much he hates school. The scene where his voice starts changing is also heart warming and touching. Overall, I found this piece to be just a great slice of this adolescent’s view of the world and his efforts to fit in. |
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Review of Nick: Home School to High School
Could someone please get the word out: when offering a piece on PRX that has previously appeared on another program please cut out the original host lead-in for the piece. This is soooo annoying and the 30-seconds it would take the producer to cut this out will save each individual licensor for doing the same.
That said, this is a typical Richman piece: brilliant. It's an audio diary from a teenage boy that makes the transition from home schooling to public schools. The piece is slow to reveal itself, but the young man's observations are worth the wait. The boy's teen angst is a common experience, which is both a plus and minus to the piece. Though amplified by his shyness and unfamiliarity with public schools, almost anyone who has suffered through their teens can relate to Nick's feelings of alienation and being a square peg. While this commonality with register with many listeners, so will the desire to see the piece explore a little uncharted territory. While far from predictable, the piece did not contain as many unexpected moments as a listener may expect from this series. The piece's most powerful moments where the "audio yearbook" Nick kept at the end of the year. This section felt rushed and it would have been nice to wrap the piece with a few more of these anecdotes from Nick's new friends. |
Broadcast History
This story originally aired on NPR’s All Things Considered.
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Colette Colfer
Posted on September 01, 2006 at 01:48 PM | Permalink
Review of Nick: Home School to High School
This is the first radio diary I've ever heard and it's blown me away. The story of adolesence, of the sense of not belonging, of searching and questioning and the exploration of boundaries and reaching out and finally finding and getting a grasp on the sense of it all. You can almost hear the hiss of fears evaporating as the metamorphosis takes place. Great use of music and rhythm to convey the change.