How was your school divided?

[Skwink]

How was your school divided? By divided, I mean social groups, such as the cool kids, the emo/goths, and the nerds/geeks. At my school, we have the Cool Kids, the Nerds/Geeks, the couple of what I'd call Gothic Revival people, the Hipsters, the Kids Who go to Court and Smoke and etc., and people like me are like the Middle Class. We don't really belong to any specific groups but just hang with our friends. I've heard at some schools, these different groups almost function as rival gangs, but at my school, people of different groups commonly give each other compliments, and talk to each other.

What was it, or what is it, like at you're High School?

 

[GenMarshall]

I would not know. I was a loner for most of my High School years.

 

[pi-r8]

and people like me are like the Middle Class. We don't really belong to any specific groups but just hang with our friends.

I think everyone thinks of themselves like that. It's easy to stereotype others when you don't know them very well, especially when you're forced into close proximity like in high school.

 

[PeteAtoms]

There was the "preppy" clique. I actually don't know much about them. They were kind of hipster/partiers and popular to a certain extent. They were also the "jocks".

I was part of the geek/athlete amalgam. We had ties to pretty much everybody and AFAIK, on good standing w/ pretty much everybody. We also made up about 2/3 of the homecoming court (My twin brother and I were both in it, but didn't get King)

I think my group was more popular than the 'preps' but I can't be certain, plus no one cared in our group. Oh, and I called our group athletes (instead of 'jocks') because we did sports for the college applications as much as we did it for recreation.

There were a few nerds, I used to hang with them and chat about video games and nerd stuff often.

We had a 7-12 person goth group. I had a crush on one of them at some point.

I had at least one friend in any given group/clique, but I wasn't too savvy on the overall dynamics goin' on.

 

[jtb1127]

There are no real divisions. Cliques don't exist. Dorky kids sit with football players at lunch and many of the football players are dorky. This is for the most part. There are a few few rare exceptions (like the girls who only wear 1800s dresses).

 

[Godwynn]

The women Godwynn slept with, and the women Godwynn did not want to sleep with.

 

[PeteAtoms]

The women Godwynn slept with, and the women Godwynn did not want to sleep with.

*wonders which list was shorter. . .

 

[ZeletDude]

Uhh.. the artistic people, popular people, gamers, Hispanics, School-Spirit People, and just general people, I have some friends in each of the groups

 

[JollyRoger]

the Muslims, the gangsters, the Latinos, the Italians, The Irish, the Aryans, the bikers, the Christians, the gays, and the Others

 

[Jehoshua]

In my school the only clear groups were the more intellectual people, the bogans (sportish, non-academic people distinctly lacking in good manners ) and the others who were basically the people no one liked.

However the divisions were not really that great and everyone sort of fused into a single millieu more often than not rather than keeping to a strict separation of social spheres. Thats likely due to the fact that I went to a small school, so everyone knew each other quite well (21 [I think] people in my graduating class for the school)

 

[Ajidica]

Pretty standard divisions. Nothing particularly specialy except our Hipster Trash was good at speach. And by good I mean "routinely go to Nationals".

 

[civ_king]

Hispanics, Other Hispanics, Filipinos, blacks, nerds/dorks/LGBTQ, gaggle of giggling girls, Manga freaks

 

[Boundless]

By money mostly - if you had the best car, you'd be in the coolest group. If you had the nicest handbag etc etc - it was an all girls private school. Go figure. There was no one alternative/emo etc, and the boarders just spend all their time together in a little group.

 

[History_Buff]

We all had our only social groups, but they never divided along the lines one often sees on TV. The strongest division by far would be which grade you were in.

 

[Winner]

Huh, this must be an American thing. We didn't have any such clearly defined cliques, and I attended an 8-year gymnasium. The girls were more divided than the boys though.

 

[Leifmk]

Going back twenty years and more here... we didn't really have any of the stereotypical divisions, the closest thing we had to cliques was "this group of friends, that other group of friends, and then those guys over there who often hang out together". Sure you'd get groups with similar interests and inclinations naturally gravitating together, but there were no sharp boundaries; for example I was a gamer/computer type nerd but also into martial arts (in secondary school and beyond) and rock and heavy metal music. Most of the people I hung out with had at least one of those interests in common, but might otherwise be into different stuff -- for example my high school D&D group included among its regular membership not just the predictable pasty, bespectacled nerds but also one soccer player and a couple of guys who were otherwise all about sex, drugs and rock'n'roll.

I guess one major difference between Norwegian and American schools is the total absence of sports as a regular school-related activity. Or indeed of extracurricular activities of any kind organized via the school. There are no school teams, no mascots or marching bands or pep rallies or "school spirit" BS or anything like that. All extracurricular activities are taken care of by organizations that are not part of the school -- sports activites for kids are generally organized by the local amateur-league adult sport organizations or as freestanding entities in their own right, the same thing goes for marching bands (which have strong local traditions in some places and not so much in others), things such as 4H clubs and scouting organizations and such are all over the place, etc. The end result being that whatever extracurriculars you are involved in does not define so much who you are in school, as it's something that belongs to a different sphere. (Even if many of those activities happen to include schoolteachers as adult leaders and may happen on school grounds after hours. Different roles, different hats.)

 

[amadeus]

Kids that grew up on the farm: not much else to say about them, really. They'll inherit the family farm, probably have a few kids of their own, and repeat the process.

White kids who thought they were black inner city kids: kind of a pathetic bunch, especially when you live in a small town.

Kids from poor white trash: lots of them. Alcoholism, methamphetamine abuse, always in and out of jail, pregnancies abound.

Kids with pushy parents: they probably were close only because their parents enrolled them in everything and made sure their faces were plastered all over the school yearbooks. Between them and the white trash kids, these two groups made up about 90% of the student body.

Anti-social computer/D&D geeks: most of the people I knew fit this group.

Fundamentalist Christians: only a couple of them, but they don't fit anywhere else.

Yeah, that was about it.

 

[Dachs]

Hmm. I can't remember most of the cliques being particularly insular in that fashion that everybody seems to stereotype them as. The Computer Systems Lab, band, two of the [East] Asian cliques (the fobby azn ones), and maybe the weeaboos were probably the only ones that were like that. Most of it was really class consciousness (har) like HistoryBuff said, or geographical, since my high school pulled students from such a wide area; people who shared the same "base" high school tended to be best acquainted with each other in freshman year for obvious reasons.

I mean, obviously, there were groups that you'd hang out with, but they had a helluva lot of overlap and it wasn't particularly hard to insinuate yourself into any given one, even the Group of People Who Actually Did What Most People Claim To Remember Doing In High School. That last group isn't the same thing as "popular kids" (har). Popularity was really kinda weird; we didn't have class rankings, so the student who addressed us at graduation was a guy who was known for being kinda nerdy, extremely goofy, and very funny, and who rode a groundswell of support as an upperclassman to randomly become the most well known and well liked guy in the class.

Of course, the problem arose when people overexaggerated how nerdy people actually were and it got trite. The principal, for instance, and the people who wrote for the school newspaper. According to madviking and a few others, the principal got even more annoying with some of his antics after I graduated; in my senior year, it was mostly limited to riding around in a Segway after school and pulling out a toy lightsaber in his address at graduation.

 

[CaptainF]

-Theater kids. Really into theater, and being weird to get noticed, usually in terms of fashion.

-Rednecks/Forestry kids. Always wearing John Deere/Stihl hats, usually with the camo pattern. Either that or a cowboy hat. Suspenders and boots were mandatory, as was the usual redneck trappings of being into guns and being very ignorant and racist, although some were cool people who avoided that nonsense. Very much into timber sports and whatnot. They were known to bust out cans of chew in the middle of class, and some teachers turned a blind eye.

-Jocks. Pretty much self-explanatory.

-Preps. Rich kids, always wearing polo shirts and usually driving a nice car courtesy of mom and pop. Either very religious/conservative, or very liberal, but always rich. Formed the majority of the "popular group", along with most of the jocks and party animals.

-Party Animals/Stoners. The dudes/girls who went to class high or drunk to varying degrees of frequency. Some were cool, usually the stoners a few of whom were smart and kept their activities discreet. Whereas others were total jackasses and got busted quite often, sometimes getting expelled. Frequent wild partying on the weekend, or after class on the weekdays.

-Nerds/Gamers/Outcasts. This was my group. Smart kids, socially awkward. You know the deal. We weren't necessarily bullied, some of us were well liked, like myself. Everyone just kind of regarded you as weird.

 

[Hygro]

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