Beatrice Motamedi

<p>It's third period at Castlemont Business and Information Technology School in East Oakland. A visitor begins a discussion about poverty, bad food and crime. Tough times? Tough streets? These high school students aren't stressing.</p>

<p>To a teen living in the rough areas of East Oakland, sorrow is no stranger. Random violence, worry about the future and a constant battle for basics such as healthy food or good schools add up to a kind of life that can make an East Oakland teen far older than his or her chronological age.</p>

<p>Interviews with and writings by nearly 100 students at the Castlemont Campus of Small Schools reveal three major stressors jeopardize their health: academic anxiety, lack of healthy food and an environment that limits their freedom and imprisons them indoors. Even more alarming, factors such as a

<p class="articleParagraph enarticleParagraph">Ditiyan Franklin was a B student with college aspirations and a big, dimpled smile. Just last week he went to his senior prom, dressed in an impeccable white suit -- a memory stored in a key chain photo his father now carries in his pocket. Had he l

<p>Among the social determinants of stress for teens living in the inner city is the fear of random violence — gunshots that ring out and take a life unexpectedly and tragically. Marquis Woolfolk, 18, was on track to graduate in June after a spotty academic career with one bright light, a four-day internship on the Bay Bridge retrofit construction project in September 2009. That experience resulted in a page one story for the Oaktown Teen Times, a nonprofit, citywide newspaper by, for and about Oakland teens. Co-Managing Editor Beatrice Motamedi, who worked with Marquis on his story, remembers what it was like to see a teen imagine his future.</p>