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"I don't remember high school being like this," I said to the young woman sitting next to me. We had dry erase boards and markers in our laps, surrounded by at least a hundred teenagers cheering wildly for a poet who had just taken the stage. This was the third bout in the Big Buddy Program's All City: The Wordplay Teen Poetry Slam at BREC's administrative building on Florida Boulevard. The 17-year-old next to me and I were selected to be judges for this particular battle of the urban bards. The dry erase boards were supposed to carry our scores as we judged each performance on content and delivery from zero to 10. But the lower end of that scale was weighted down in lyrical territory that we never got a glimpse of. No one got below an 8.5 and it wasn't rare that a poet walked off with a couple of tens.

The fact that the students were so impressive can be partially attributed to the crew of adults who MC these rounds of adolescent slams. The cast of mentors and volunteers largely consists of those familiar faces found at Chelsea's Cafe on Monday nights for the Eclectic Truth Poetry Slam: Chancelier "Xero" Skidmore, Latasha Weatherspoon, Anna Hirsch, Anna West, Donnie Brasco and others. On these nights, however, they pass the mic to their younger counterparts.

The energy, sincerity and utter beauty with which these students strung the English language together, embracing dialect and colloquial terms, is amazing. At times, the sentiment was delivered with the anxiety I normally associate with being a teenager, which by no means subtracts from the poem, quite the opposite. But more often these kids threw down a complex series of analogy and metaphor with a confidence I've yet to muster in my adult years. And the topics went far beyond the typical drama of life in the dawn of puberty; rape, drugs, single mothers, race and pregnancy are common themes. Even more than that, the support and enthusiasm that greeted every performer was incredible. The only time I witnessed a comparable swell of mass excitement in the apathetic and unaffected cool cruelness of my high school years was at pep rallies, and I certainly wasn't a part of it.

These teenage poets are a far cry from the angst-ridden, anemic, woe-is-me stereotype. They are bold and multi-layered, talented and engaging. Now, the only interaction I have with this segment of the population is when I shamelessly wander into Charlotte Russe or the teen section of Target thinking I too could pull off a mini jean skirt with footless leggings. So my perception is certainly from a distance, about 11 years or so from my first day of ninth grade, but I can recall enough to know that if I had that kind of outlet and support, both emotionally and intellectually, I wouldn't have spent the first couple years of college in an insecure haze of alcohol and drugs.

If anyone should doubt the positive effects of the arts on children, even those kids with one foot in the armor of adulthood, I encourage you to attend the upcoming All City competitions. These rounds will climax at the Manship Theatre at 7 p.m. May 3. You can get tickets online or at the door. But be sure to leave your worn, prematurely gray, judgmental attitude in your cubicle.