Editor’s note: This story, published at 11:31 a.m. on June 25, was updated at 10:49 a.m. on June 26 to correct that Amelia Muñoz’s mother was a student visiting Russia.
As the school year wound down, a Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School classroom was transformed into an expression of what it’s like to be a teen in 2025 — with the desks replaced by a pool table representing a lack of social spaces, a student-made mini-golf course with exhibits highlighting a range of cultural issues, and other interactive experiences.
The games and interactive projects were completed by students in cultural studies and anthropology classes at the Bethesda school, with the help of teacher David Lopilato. Some of the projects developed during the school year will be shown from July 2-7 at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary American Teenagers (MoCAT). This year’s festival theme is youth and the future of culture.
“Especially with the political climate right now, there’s so many people making decisions for us without even getting our input, which is really annoying,” rising B-CC senior Amanda Ilunga, one of the participating students, told Bethesda Today during a June 16 tour of the classroom. “With something like this, we can have our voices heard.”
Projects examining the lives of teenagers are familiar territory for Lopilato and his pupils. B-CC students have been chronicling teenage culture since 2017, when they created MoCAT, a local pop-up museum with exhibits exploring phone addictions, love and mental health. While the MoCAT has grown and continued to explore teenage life throughout the years, Lopilato said he noticed something different about the projects that students produced this year.
“When you looked at all the projects put together, it kind of became glaringly evident that they’re growing up during very unusual times,” Lopilato told Bethesda Today recently. “I know it’s easy to say that teenagers always struggle with the culture they grow up in but there’s something uniquely different. … They’re coming across incoherency on every aspect on what they’re supposed to trust, their sources of knowledge, to what they’re supposed to believe, to what they’re supposed to strive for.”
Complex issues, pressures
As the collection of projects titled “Coming of Age in Incoherency” highlighted, today’s teens are navigating complicated issues ranging from a lack of social spaces and unrelenting college-admissions pressure to book bans and relying on social media websites for news while those same sites also foster dangerous trends. Amid it all, there’s the allure of not caring about, well, anything.
Ilunga described how students set up the pool table in the classroom showcase to explore teenagers’ lack of third spaces, or spaces aside from home, work or school that can foster social connections.
Spaces such as malls and arcades are no longer available for students due to their closure or lack of popularity, she said, making teens feel like they have limited options on where to spend time with friends.
Some students said this contributes to the feeling that they must grow up quickly, which is compounded by the perennial pressure throughout high school to focus on getting into a good college. Rising senior Lucia Bermudez noted that succumbing to the pressure means students often strive to participate in activities that will look good on their college résumés instead of following their passions.
That feeling is embodied in a game designed by students like Bermudez, which includes a fan propelling toy cars, representing teenagers, away from “their true selves” along the path to college.
“College admission is no longer a meritocracy,” Bermudez said. “It’s a, like, performing art.”
Even the desire to get into a good college results in contradictory feelings, according to Lopilato.
“They’ve been told, so many of them, ‘Hunker down, get into a selective college, and everything will work out,’” he said. “I don’t even know if they buy that narrative anymore.”
A mini golf course includes exhibits about book bans and nonchalance. Photo credit: Ashlyn Campbell 
A pool table represents the lack of third spaces for students to make social connections. Photo credit: Ashlyn Campbell 
A project about rites of passage for teenagers discusses the impacts of gun violence on students. Photo credit: Ashlyn Campbell 
Students created a variety of projects about teen life. Photo credit: Ashlyn Campbell
While the projects provided an opportunity for students to dive deeper into what they may be experiencing, they also focused on creating solutions. From fall 2024 to May 2025, Ilunga said, some B-CC students worked to develop more third spaces in Friendship Heights, a neighborhood where some B-CC students live.
The students also organized a Battle of the Bands with 20 bands from across the area to revive third spaces throughout the Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., area, according to rising senior Ben Katz, one of the students in charge of the event. High school bands have performed at spaces including a local skate shop, Bethesda Boards, and a DIY music venue called The Garage in Boyds.
“We’re just doing different venues across the area, trying to raise some money for some of these [spaces],” Katz said. “It’s just cool to give these [bands] an opportunity to kind of express themselves in a way they wouldn’t otherwise.”
Outside of the classroom showcase, other students used lockers to explore topics that have influenced teenagers’ experiences throughout the years. Rising junior Amelia Muñoz’s project highlighted the differences between her mother’s experience with news as a university student visiting Russia in 1991 and 1992 and how students gather their news now with newspapers decorating the inside of a locker and an accompanying interview with her mother.
“She didn’t have access to real news; she only had access to what the Russian government was telling her. So she found a bar that played American CNN, and she would go there to get her, like, secret news,” Muñoz said. “[Now] the only way that teenagers really pay attention is through news platforms that have Instagram and stuff.”
Some student projects highlighted how those same social media platforms often promote trends that quickly become dangerous or illegal, such as the “devious licks” trend in which students would steal or vandalize school property like soap dispensers.
In one corner of the classroom showcase, students walked through a golf course that included smaller exhibits representing the holes in the golf course, including one on book banning occurring across the country and another with a grave site that says, “here lies nonchalance.”
The book banning exhibit highlights the draw of anti-intellectualism and a resulting lack of trust in knowledge, according to students who explained the project to Bethesda Today.
The allure of apathy
The student projects also touched on another topic: nonchalance, or the allure of apathy.
“The idea of just acting like you’re too cool for school, we just feel like it’s so prominent with people our age,” Ilunga said.
Accompanying the exhibits is a magazine with student written articles about similar topics. B-CC rising senior Noah Grosberg wrote in one article that nonchalance is a defense against failure and “less about actual apathy and more about projecting it.”
“In a world where dictators run rampant, information is censored, and hooking up is the new dating, we must speak up and say what we really feel,” Grosberg’s article said. “As we kids say nowadays, it’s time to get a little more chalant.”
For Katz and other students, creating projects for the “Coming of Age in Incoherency” provided an opportunity to understand themselves better as well as help the adults in their lives understand what it’s like to be a teen in 2025.
“Teens are often a misunderstood group. … Sometimes I feel like people are trying to explain our problems that they don’t really understand,” Katz said. “It’s important to give teens an opportunity to become themselves.”
