Essay

FOLLOW THE LEADER is good advice when looking to a mentor for leadership and guidance.Students throughout the Baltimore area were recently encouraged to write an essay about the area's business and community leaders in the "Follow the Leader" essay contest.In the essays, students in grades four to 12 chose a leader in whose footsteps they might want to follow and how education can help them achieve this goal. Eight first-prize winners were selected to receive $1,000, with one grand-prize winner's school being awarded $5,000.

WASHINGTON - So it's parents' night at school and I'm there on behalf of my youngest son. I look at him sometimes and see a toddler with a gap in his grin and a penchant for gnawing his toes. But that's just a memory lie. The toddler is a teen-ager 2 inches taller than I am, a youngster on the cusp of manhood. It hasn't been a fun passage. Last year, we went through a phase where he felt compelled to challenge everything I said, down to and including, "Hello." These days, he doesn't so much challenge me as endure me. My son has perfected the thousand-yard stare, eyes fixed on something beyond your line of sight while you're yammering on about a good work ethic, the importance of education or some other bit of useless arcana from the book of responsible adulthood.

AN ELOQUENT ESSAY written by Jessica Swiecicki about her mother's successful quest to reunite with her birth mother has brought local and national media attention to her extended Manchester family.Last fall, Jessica chose to write a true story for an assignment by language arts teacher Deborah Calhoun at North Carroll Middle School, and began by interviewing members of her family.Jessica wrote about how her mother, Claudia Swiecicki, spent 10 years searching for the mother who had allowed her to be adopted at birth.

The October day Chief Warrant Officer Michael Durant was released by his Somalian captors was the day Columbia resident Joanna Bush had her brush with fame.It came in the form of Cokie Roberts, ABC journalist and National Public Radio broadcaster, with whom Joanna spent an entire day at work.The 17-year-old Wilde Lake High School junior was one of 22 Baltimore-Washington area students who won an essay contest in which the prize was spending a day with a role model.The department store Woodward & Lothrop and a Washington, D.C., television station sponsored the contest, offering students a list of national figures as role models to choose from.

WHEN I was a freshman in college in the early 1970s, female students had an 11 p.m. weeknight curfew that was extended only until 1 a.m. on weekends. Men were not permitted in our rooms at any time, and we were not permitted in theirs. Violations could result in expulsion. My sophomore year, I moved to an on-campus apartment and had three female roommates. One of them had a boyfriend who became, de facto, a roommate, too. When they had sex, they were so noisy the rest of us could not study or sleep.

For Jeffrey T. Painter, ethical hunting is more than obeying game laws; it is following his conscience about what's best for the animals and the environment.That opinion, voiced in a 1,200-word essay with some research on pronghorn antelope, has earned him one of two big-game hunting trips this fall in Wyoming."It's so cool," said Jeffrey, 14, an eighth-grader at North Carroll Middle School. "I never win anything. I'm real excited, and I can't wait to go."For three days in September, Jeffrey will be hunting pronghorn antelope on a trip sponsored by Safari Club International, a nationwide hunting organization devoted to preserving wildlife and hunters' rights.

IT IS SO important to take good care of our pets. It is a commitment I feel strongly about, and, apparently, quite a few Carroll County youngsters share my feelings.The youngsters expressed themselves well in essays they wrote for the "What My Pet Means To Me" contest, sponsored by the Humane Society of Carroll County in Westminster, in memory of the late Col. Donald W. Thackery.Scott Laczowski, an eighth-grade student at West Middle School, took first place with his essay about his beagle Buttons.

HAD THE FAIR Housing Act existed in the 1950s, Lorraine Hansberry's "A Raisin in the Sun" might have been significantly different. The Youngers, a fictional family based on Hansberry's, would have had an easier time leaving a Chicago slum area and moving to an all-white neighborhood, improving their standard of living and helping their dreams come true. Such was the connection Francis Scott Key graduate Kim Mathias made in the essay that won her a $500 scholarship from Carroll County Association of Realtors.

"Got it," Towson High School English teacher Bill Jones often says during his creative writing classes, to show students that he understands their stories about a great-grandfather's Civil War research or a daughter-and-dad road trip to Las Vegas.He wants to encourage students to perfect their writing, not just for a better grade, but so juniors and seniors can use their writing to get into the college of their choice.Jones "gets" what some of his students miss -- that the essay is the one thing an applicant can control in his or her college admissions packet.

THE LAWYER for Cory Lee Lafon says his client did not understand the meaning of the racial epithets he spray-painted on four Howard County schools.If that is true, maybe a written assignment from a judge will give him a clue as to why his actions were so deplorable.The judge ordered Cory, 18, to research and write a 500-word essay on how the community is enriched by racial and cultural diversity, among other requirements of his sentence.This lesson should be obvious to any 18-year-old American who understands that it took various groups of races and ethnic groups to build this country over hundreds of years.