Essay

A Baltimore County student who created an award-winning investment strategy that started with a comparison of balanced portfolios and balanced meals was recognized for his efforts Wednesday. Abhinav Khushalani, a fifth-grade student at Cromwell Valley Elementary in Towson, wrote an essay outlining his plan to build a diversified portfolio with stocks, mutual funds and bonds in much the same way he would put together a meal with the five basic food groups. The piece, one of more than 9,000 entries from across the country, won first prize for the 11-year-old in a nationwide competition sponsored by the SIFMA Foundation for Investor Education.

It's a tradition that began at St. John's College about 50 years ago, and if you are anywhere near the Annapolis school in the early hours Sunday, you can hear the unusual celebration. That is when the bell in McDowell Hall is rung over and over, as scores of seniors announce that they have turned in their class essays to the St. John's dean and president. It is an annual rite of passage that sums up students' time at a school noted for its "great books" curriculum centering on the study of classic works in such disciplines as philosophy, history and music.

It is almost impossible to miss the similarities — and stark differences — between Jared Loughner, the suspect in the Arizona murders, and Charles Whittington, the Iraq War veteran from Baltimore who expressed violent thoughts in a published essay. Saturday afternoon, authorities identified Mr. Loughner, 22, as the Tucson gunman. Soon after that, the news media started reporting details of his life in Arizona: He had been rejected by the Army after flunking a drug test and he had been banned from the campus of Pima Community College; officials of the school had considered him mentally imbalanced and a threat to other students and to faculty.

An Iraq war veteran who was barred from the Community College of Baltimore County after publishing a provocative essay on killing says he no longer wants to return to the Catonsville campus. Charles Whittington, a Baltimore resident, says he provided the psychological evaluation requested by college officials as a condition for letting him return. But in a Dec. 27 letter to Whittington, the college's vice president of enrollment management said the evaluation was "not the documentation that was requested" and that the proper records had to be mailed by a "mental health professional.

It's perfectly reasonable that officials at the Community College of Baltimore County were concerned when they read Iraq War veteran Charles Whittington's essay in the school newspaper. What Mr. Whittington wrote, including an admission that he had become addicted to the violence of war, is truly disturbing. And ultimately, what the college is asking of him — a psychological evaluation to make sure the zeal for killing he describes acquiring in combat doesn't translate to civilian life — is not so onerous.

The following is the essay that Iraq war veteran Charles Whittington wrote for his English class at the Community College of Baltimore County. It was published in the campus newspaper Oct. 26: War is a drug. When soldiers enter the military from day one, they begin to train and are brain washed to fight and to handle situations in battle. We train and train for combat, and then when we actually go to war, it is reality and worse than what we have trained for. We suffer through different kinds of situations.

By writing the paper, Charles Whittington thought he would confront the anxieties that had tormented him since he returned from war. He knew it wasn't normal to dwell on the pleasure of sticking his knife between an enemy soldier's ribs. But by recording his words, maybe he'd begin to purge the fixation. So Whittington, an Iraq veteran, submitted an essay on the allure of combat for his English class at the Community College of Baltimore County in Catonsville. He called war a drug and wrote that killing "is something that I do not just want but something I really need so I can feel like myself.

One snip at a time, the black veils that covered 10 columns on the University of Virginia's historic Rotunda fell to the ground late Friday afternoon. They had been installed last week to honor the memory of Yeardley Love, the Cockeysville woman and lacrosse player killed in her off-campus apartment last spring. As he watched fellow students and school employees cut down the fabric, fourth-year architecture student A.J. Artemel said the coverings had represented "a re-examination of the past events," and removing them symbolized "the restoration of hope" on a campus traumatized by violence.

-- The piece wasn't some naked confession about the difficulties of growing up with cerebral palsy. Instead, Hailey Reissman came at her story from the side, with a twist of humor and a touch of the profane. She called it, "I Have Cerebral Palsy and David Mamet Reveals What I Imagine The Friends Of The Guy I Am Dating Will Say When He Tells Them About Me, In Three Brief Monologues." The title encapsulates the wit and inventiveness that so impressed Reissman's professors at Washington College.

The Joan Lauffer breast cancer Scholarship Fund will award up to $1,000 to a college-bound high school senior who has or had a parent with breast cancer. The student should attend public or private school in Anne Arundel County. Write an essay of one to three paragraphs explaining how cancer has affected your family and how the scholarship will help. Deadline is May 31. Send the essay to wm.lauffer@gmail.com with name, age, phone number, e-mail address, high school, college/university hoping to attend (either two- or four-year)