I haven’t been a teenager for decades, and really have little to do with kids that age. However, the other night I was at my local casino here in Las Vegas and they have a multiplex cinema with 10 screens and a food court. You don’t have to be 21 to go to the movies or eat at the food court. I happened to be there having a burger and casually observed about 50 or so teenagers hanging out before, or after one of the films. It brought back all the memories of high school, and the horror of it all.
It was obvious who the “cool” kids were; who the “in” girls and “cute” guys were. It was also obvious how much this seemed to matter. I had forgotten that. Little fringe pockets of less attractive, less popular kids stood on the sidelines, watching the others. You could see it in their faces – they were not up to par; they were not equals. The cool kids knew they were being watched by the others even as they pretended not to notice.
Just like when I was in high school, the cool guys were the tallest, best looking and most athletic; the cool girls all had the perfect hair, figure, makeup and hip-hugger jeans with exposed belly (and quite a few had belly button piercing). But even in that group, you could see the shorter girls checking out the taller ones; all the while the class studs were busy impressing their guy friends and pretending not to notice the Britney Spears look-alike fan club standing about three feet away.
A couple of nerdish guys seemed oblivious to it all, but for the rest of them, it didn’t take a sociologist to figure out the social status of the various groups. The only thing I did notice is that there was at least a nice racial mix in each of the groups. I guess that is progress, but otherwise it all seemed so sadly familiar.
I suppose this is a rite of passage. Nothing has changed since the days I was there. If only these kids had a clue how unimportant this was all going to be in just a few years.
Those that don’t get killed in a drunken car crash on prom night will figure it out eventually. It is sad that the teenage years are like that. Even people that were “popular” often report later what hell it was for them too. Teenagers truly live in this bizarre world of social rules and status that just goes away one day. I am glad I am long out of it too. I have had nightmares where I was back in high school but I still knew what I know today. It sounds good but it was terrible because everyone else was still the same and I still had to play by the old rules while knowing better.
Having just recently left teenager-dom (I’m 20), I can say that it was much, much worse in middle school (early teenage years) than in high school (later teenage years). At least at my particular schools. The groups seemed way more separated and everyone tried way harder to be cool. At my particular high school, everyone seemed to find a group that worked for them, and there were only a few people who were really dying for that certain “cool” status.
My sister’s at that age where your entire life depends on being cool. And she looks like every single one of her friends. Ugh. I echo what you say about being glad that I’m not part of that.
If I were offered the choice of going back to high school (returning to my teenage self) or stepping into the Great Void, I would opt of oblivion every time. My teen years were the worst time of my life. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.
If I could go back to being a teen knowing what I do now, I’d take it, if only because I’d be able to destroy the high school at age 13 and not be tried as an adult.
As the OP noted, what’s funny {or sad} is that they don’t even know that it won’t matter in 10 years time: the jocks will be pumping gas somewhere, divorced from the alcoholic prom queen and saddled with maintenance payments for their 3 children, while the nerds will be qualified engineers and able to buy and sell them.
My time at high school {20 years ago now} wasn’t too bad, the quality of my education excepted, but I definitely fell into the nerd camp, and had my share of bullying. {I suspect NZ high schools aren’t quite as cliquey as American ones} I avoid organised re-unions like the plague - I stay in touch with my friends, and I don’t care about anyone else - but it’s always fun catching up on the gossip. The captain of the First XV? In jail now - he was driving a truck, but took to drink after his second divorce, got fired, and was then busted after his third DIC.
Meanwhile, your humble correspondent has had a fantastic time working, studying, travelling the world, spending 7 years in Japan, and now has a beautiful wife and son, and a well-paying job he enjoys. Truly, happiness is the best form of revenge. Mind you, I’m 5’11" now {I was always the short spotty one in school} and lift weights, so childish fantasies of attending a reunion and exacting a more direct form of revenge occasionally entertain me…
If only you could take the “uncool” kids aside and explain this to them…
I don’t even like to go to the movies and mall on weekend nights because I know they’ll be full of teenagers and I still hate being around them, after all the years since high school. I guess it hasn’t been long enough since graduation, maybe I’ll be desensitized to it after another five years.
I’d love to say that I’m one of those uncool kids that made a success of herself, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. They may have a job pumping gas, but I’m unemployed. They may spend all their time with drunken loser friends, but I’ve got no real friends. Can’t wait for that “success” thing to catch up with me.
I’m 22 and remember it much the same way. Thankfully, I didn’t care and didn’t let my unpopularity, or apopularity to coin a phrase, bother me and hence I don’t hold any bitter memories towards those six years like some in this thread seem to. It was just something I did in the mornings before coming home to watch TV to me.
Of course, that’s hurting me now as I goofed off, didn’t prepare for the real world, and am now very very lucky to have the job and boss I have instead of having the skills and education to find a better one. Not to mention the total dearth of friends.
Same here, grades 6-8 were alot more clique-ish than 9-12. The cliques in high school were not that strong where I went, but the middle school cliques were really strong. I even inventend a rating system of 1-4.5 of coolness since it was so obvious in the air. I was a 2.5.
I hope real world work environments arent like this.
Yep, it is. But not to a huge degree. Everything from work, to adult recreational activities still form social groups. And if you don’t conform, you’re still the odd ball.
I’m still in the teen years, and am not one of the “Cool” kids, but to be honest I’m perfectly happy in the social standing I am. I have lots of friends, who are also not “cool,” and generally enjoy life. So what the hell, I’m not changing for a societal system that will bear no relevance to life in a couple of years.
I wonder if homeschooling does anything to dispel the social bullshit of teenhood. I have a friend who homeschools her kids because she swears that public schools are the source of the fascist social rules that cripple kids’ self esteem and/or empathy.
That said, I fondly remember my 10 year high school reunion… At 27, I was younger than everyone else, looked better than most of the formerly popular chicks, and was also the only one who didn’t bring a date. I’m not even sure, anymore, why I went. I think I was hoping to see the three people who’d been nice to me throughout school (none of them attended). But, what was cool was that the Most Picked On Girl At My School (me) got asked to dance by all the Popular Jock Dudes who mostly wouldn’t even look my way back in high school (except, occasionally, to ask to sit near me during a test, which I would always say no to), and propositioned by one of them.
I haven’t been a teenager in 26 years, thank Og and his brother! And I don’t miss it a bit. There were whole strata of people with whom I was unqualified to associate in high school. I never even knew who the really popular crowd was. But I grew up in a tiny little town, where cool had not reached yet. It wasn’t about being cool then. It was certainly about popularity, but there was nothing in the way of designer clothes or the latest electronic devices you carried to make you cooler than the next person. It just seems I was absent on the day when they explained to everyone how to “belong.” So I had to find ways to muddle through it without belonging. I survived. I knew deep down that that stuff didn’t matter in the long run, but try telling that to a bunch of kids. I can’t imagine being one today. For lots of them, it must be just awful running in the race to be somebody. And it doesn’t matter whether they make it, because one day it doesn’t matter anymore.
IME, the most popular kids at school were generally intelligent, had good interpersonal skills, high self-esteem and a confident manner. These qualities have enabled them to succeed in adulthood. For every brutish sportsman who failed, there’s a score of charming, outgoing and popular kids who grew up to become successful professionals.
Plenty of unpopular kids succeeded too. The difference being some of them still carry around a big ol’ chip on their shoulders.
Let’s not kid ourselves. Social cliques are a fact of life at every age. They just seem bigger in high school because: everything seems more important in adolescence; people learn to be more subtle as they get older; and cliques are freer to segregate themselves in adult enviroments.
Jervoise brings up a good point. A lot of the really popular kids at my old HS did very well in school, along with all the rest. I wouldn’t be surprised if several of them were doing a lot better than I am now. Of course we had the kids who were dumb as bricks and all of that, but in general everyone at my [public] school was fairly bright, and the popular ones were even moreso.
While I was bullied from kindergarten on, in grade six and before, I seem to remember being much more myself. I had a couple of friends, and things were sort of stable.
In grades 7 and 8, however… we were bussed from all over town to a senior public school that was only 7 and 8. And that school was an island of hell on earth. We ran up against kids we’d never seen before and would never see again, we were often far from our homes, trapped on the school grounds, and there was the freedom to do your worst. It really was like Lord of the Flies. In that school I was one of the lowest of the low, and I learned to run and hide from the bullies.
I think that the top-clique kids may have been decent–I don’t know. I do know that the ones immediately above me made my life hell.
I mostly agree with Wesley Clark: for me the effects of the cliques were a lot worse in grades 7 and 8 (and partly 9) than later in high school.
In high school I had a small circle of friends and life was tolerable. True, my family couldn’t afford to send me on any of the interesting overseas trips, I yearned after a certain cheerleader, I didn’t know how to be social or anything, etc, but once I had escaped phys-ed (and its mandatory team sports and the searing shame they brought), the actual school experience wasn’t that bad.
Relevant link: Kids Called Nerds, in which a doctor discusses cliques and kids who have difficulty with social skills.
If I could change one thing about my life in public and high school, it would be this: make team sports optional. Give us physical education, yes, but give us the option of something like a fitness club with trainers and individual self-competitive activities. Build our strengths and skills, and through this show us that our bodies were not sources of shame.
As a current teenager, I’ve gotta say that its really not too bad. Of course, I got extremely lucky. The popular kids at this school are the geeks. The theatre kids, the music kids, the politcal kids; most of them cross-class. Or maybe I’m just deluding myself, since there are so many of us. But at the same time, I think and realize that yes, most of us are known by a huge number of people throughout the school.
I dunno. All I know is that us geeks seem to have a pretty solid base at my school. shrugs
Pfft. Anyone who is really cool (and by that I mean happy with themselves, and is not going to change for anyone) wouldn’t even be at a casino like that anyway. They’d be at the indie movie theater, some little coffeshop, or an all nite diner. The kids who are obsessed with status will be sadly disappointed once they get out of school.