My friends and I noticed this phenomenon, and then began to make fun of it. So we would sit at a table way off in the corner sometimes to watch people come in and decide where to sit. As they came in and decided we would give them inner-dialog. Made for some real good lunch times. I think John Candy had a similar bit in a movie.
Such silliness. But once you realize how silly something is, you can have alot of laughs making fun of it. That realization has made my life alot more fun.
DaLovin’ Dj
I don’t remember having much of a problem with the popular kids. I left them alone, they left me alone.
I did get harrassed, both verbally and physically, but the perpetrators were usually other unpopular kids. There were a number of Neanderthal thugs of both sexes who thought it was amusing to hit or stalk me, and several computer-geeky guys who specialized in rumor-spreading and public humiliation (luckily most of them went off to the science magnet school after eighth grade – so much for smart kids being above it all). Most of them had been bullied themselves, and ended up taking it out on somebody weaker.
I have never, personally, felt the desire to retaliate against someone else, and I didn’t understand at the time how they could treat me so badly when they knew what it felt like. Now, I think I do. I learned much later that at least one of them had been abused by a parent; I suspect that this was true for many of the others as well.
Sometimes violence begets violence, and sometimes it begets empathy. The choice belongs to the victim, but what makes the difference, in most cases, is whether he or she knows any other way of living. Because I came from a home with loving (though occasionally clueless) parents, the violence I experienced from my classmates came as a shock; I didn’t know exactly how to react, but I firmly believed that this was not how people should act, and that it was wrong to respond in kind. A kid from an abusive home doesn’t grow up with these convictions (unless there is another sympathetic adult to reinforce them); their first instinct, when they are hurt, is to hurt somebody else in return.
(Sorry – long, rambling, doesn’t really answer the question, and I don’t mean to imply that all kids who are cruel come from abusive backgrounds, but most of the others seem to grow out of it after a year or two. The really determined ones, particularly those who are physically violent, have generally been on the receiving end.)
I was yelled at by a popular girl for asking her out. I wasn’t old enough to drink and I was more interested in knowing her than screwing her like a piece of meat and tossing her aside. I hope she found the man she was looking for.
I was a blend of redneck and geek, but didn’t want to associate with either of those groups. As a result, I became a philosopher. I often wondered why popular people were so popular. I concluded that it all rode on one thing: lack of shyness. Most of the time, the popular people were very stupid, and hardly what I’d call witty. But they were treated as such because they were so vocal. I’d often sit in the room with a priceless comment on my tongue, but I always had the decency and respect to keep my mouth shut. A friend of mine hung out with the popular crowd. He didn’t understand that they were evil. I think he had fallen into the understanding that they made the rules, and he was trying to win their favor. Fair enough, so I played along a little. Got about 2 points on the board.
One time I told the (probably) most popular guy in school that I didn’t think he was funny. He decided to fight me over it. Really. After class, he pushed me a couple of times and one of his friends said “leave him alone.” A few days later I heard that he had beaten the crap out of me and that his buddy grabbed his arm to stop a punch and was lifted off the ground. Hmm, I’ll be damned. I didn’t remember that. I later had a few classes with the same guy. I don’t think he remembered me, but we got along great, but I secretly thought he was a dick, even though he became a friendly one.
I have a ten year reunion coming next summer. I’m anxious to see the popular crowd that has thrown their lives away. Especially to see that girl and ask her, “How do you like me now?” (Thank you Toby Keith).
I am at the moment living through my senior year in high school. Maybe I can gie some modern insight…
My school’s about 350 big, a New England prep school. There are very few truly popular kids in the school. The few that exist are kids who are able to be friends with people in a wide variety of groups. There are people (among the guys) who are popular with the only jocks, or just the geeky people, or just the pothead, etc.
Same thing is among the girls. There are one’s popular with just the artsy, just the snotty, and just the athletic. (odd little side note about the groups. girl and guy groups have different names, but they often have a similar crowd. for the record. jock=athletic, geeky=artsy, and, oddly,pothead=snotty).
Anyway, thoe people I don’t consider popular, because they can only be described as that among their unique clique. The only people who are popular are those who find the time to enter into ALL the cliques. That is a select few. They tend to be very nice and outgoing. The nicest people always end up being the most popular. People always say “Nice guys finish last,” but from my experience the opposite is true, at least in hih school.
My highschool was a lot like Hamadryad’s, except not evil. Same size, same social strata, same lily-white student body (three black students in my four years of attendence, none of them in my class) but it was very non-cliqish. I can’t say that I particularly recognize anything in John Hughes’ movies from my own life. There were some people who were ostracized, although not always the people you’d expect. For example, the starting forward for the Football team had almost no friends, because he had such a bad steroid habit no one could stand to be around him for more than five minutes. That changed a lot when he got cleaned up senior year. Hell, in HS I was the shy, geeky kid in coke bottle-glasses who always had his nose stuck in a book. I was in the chess club, f’chrissake. And I had lots of friends, never got beaten up, got invited to parties. Hell, I kinda miss highschool.
Cranky: In my HS, the blanket term was “art fags.” Mostly self-applied.
I was sort-of popular in high school, and could have been more so if I hadn’t been quite as uptight as I was at the time. The interesting thing is that while my high school definitely had cliques it wasn’t a very big deal - you had the crowd you normally hung out with, but the people in other crowds were typically friendly with some rare exceptions.
The most popular group in school was the basketball player/cheerleader crowd (basketball because our school was too small to field a football team), but they were all pretty cool. I was a band geek, and while they certainly wouldn’t go out of their way to invite me to a party or something neither would they shun me if I happened to be there. I even played in pickup basketball games with some of the ball players a few times and even with the rather large gap in skill between us they were actually very nice - making suggestions on how to improve my game instead of just yelling at me for the mistakes I made.
There does seem to be a theme here that smaller schools have fewer cliques/less rigid boundaries between them. My school was small enough that I knew pretty much everybody in highschool by the time I was a senior, and had known most of them for several years. I think that makes a big difference.
Quoth jr8:
Y’know, I couldn’t stand that movie. You see, I was identifying with the wrong character: Everyone else gets a love interest, while the nerd gets to do everyone else’s homework for them. So much for breaking down the stereotype barriers.
Hama - got it in one. What really added insult to injury is that they knew I was uncomfortable and they continued to laugh at the character who was being picked on. This revival of an old social dynamic that I thought I’d escaped was surprisingly traumatic. It was like going through it all over again.
On a much happier note, I’m looking forward to seeing you in January. 
Sounds exactly like my high school. We had five long tables, each with its own character. There was a “popular” table, a “redneck” table, a “geek” table, a “black” table, and then a table for everyone else. I was at the geek table mostly, though I could pass back and forth among the tables without raising too many eyebrows.
The popular table was mostly jocks and cheerleaders, plus a few of the prettier girls from band. I could maybe get away with sitting at the “popular” table (at least I wouldn’t have been run off), but was never comfortable there. I saw other kids (mostly freshmen who didn’t yet know the “rules”) get driven from the popular table by jocks.
There was a similar division by clique of the various hallways in our school. If you were cool, you hung out in the AB crosshall between classes.
There was a fair amount of cruelty, but not all of the popular kids were cruel. In fact, most were OK, and just a handful would routinely get vicious. Still, if you weren’t popular, you weren’t getting invited to the parties.
I’d say the stereotypes in the teen movies rang pretty true for me.
Wait, wait, wait. I thought you said you were one of the popular people in high school.
You know, this has always been a really interesting subject to me, because I think the movies have it all wrong. I went to a fairly small high school (about 1000 students). I was in a specialized learning center (there were 20 of us per grade year), and we certainly were not popular, at least, not by the “Sixteen Candles” definition - by that definition, we were the geeks. The usual assortment of athletes and student council presidents and pretty people mocked us, of course, and those who were not strong or aggressive enough to defend themselves were also subject to some physical bullying.
But here’s the thing, that the movies miss and I think a lot of people don’t really understand. Listen up, popular people. We didn’t envy you. We didn’t want to be you. We didn’t stay up nights thinking of ways to join your social circle. On the rare occassions when we even thought about you, it was mostly with the same scorn with which you considered us. We laughed at you when your backs were turned, same as you did to us. All the movies make it seem like the athletes and cheerleaders and prom queens and rich kids had some exclusive club, to which everyone else wanted and would give anything to have access. Not true.
Oh, and now we’re mostly making more money than you are
Interesting question.
FWIW, I went to a large high school - about 2,000 kids in three grades. There isn’t any way that any movie could possibly get the atmosphere of a school that size right. My school wasn’t very diverse when it came to income levels - it ranged pretty much from lower middle to comfortably middle class, with very few kids outside those boundaries. We did have a bit of diversity, however, in race, religion, and nationality, and a large variety of academic tracks and extracurricular activities.
Movies like “Pretty in Pink” only have two types of kids - “popular/cool kids” vs. “unpopular/misfits.” There’s never anything in between, and it’s ever so desirable to try and a make the leap from the “uncool” group to the “cool” one. I find this premise to be closer to my own reality in junior high, where there were less kids, a lot less maturity, and not much to do other than rag on each other about taste in clothes/hair/music, but in high school, this premise was complete and utter BS.
My high school had cliques that were directly related to whatever interests you had, so I don’t recall anyone having a burning desire to cross from one group to another or any feelings that one group was more desirable than another. You wanted to be with other people who shared your interests and ideas, and you could certainly belong to more than one if your interests were in overlapping areas. The closest I can get to what would be considered an exclusionary attitude would be that there was a tendency to hang with other kids in the same grade, and the upperclassmen would pretty much ignore the underclassmen. At the end of my senior year, I did have a good friend of mine mention to me that she had been talking with a sophomore during rehearsal for the spring play, and this girl thought our group of virtually all seniors and a couple juniors was pretty cool, but she had felt intimidated all year about speaking with any of us because she felt she’d be rejected. We never intended to project any sort of attitude like this, but neither did any of us go out of our way to make the younger kids feel welcome either, and we never realized the effect that it had.
I can’t really tell you what (or who) would have constituted “popular” in my high school, if you define “popular” as “most desirable.” There were certainly kids that were more widely liked than others, but a lot of that had to do with what other people have said here - they just happened to be unusually outgoing and got to know a lot of people. At my high school, this was a lot of work. When I graduated, there were kids who got up to get their diplomas that I swear I’d never even seen before. If you were in the college prep track like I was, then you never went over to the parts of the school that had the cosmetology labs, the auto shop, the metal working or wood shops, the home ec labs and distributive ed. Those kids would come over to the academic classrooms to get their required courses and then vanish back into the opposite side of the school again, which might as well have been the other side of the world.
Probably the kids that suffered were the ones that really had no interests - the ones that just went to class, did their minimums and really weren’t involved in any particular aspect of the school. The only group for them would have been the stoners, and if you weren’t into drugs, not a good fit at all. It would have been very hard to make friends that way.
If you want to catch the biggest fish in the pond,
you have to be as attractive as possible.
Remember to keep you hair spotlessly clean.
Wash it at least once every two weeks!
I was in high school until 9th grade, and then I started homeschooling. I still go to high school for one class (I’m a junior now) but mostly I homeschool and take some college classes.
I went to a small fairly rural school for Elementary, and then a larger junior high/high school that combined 3 different elementary schools. I’m not sure how many people it is, but it wasn’t that large. It was VERY white, probably only 2-3 black people in the whole junior high/high school, and none of them were in my grade. There were more hispanic & asian people, but a lot of them, especially the girls, hung out together. Basically anyone who wasn’t white was automatically in that little group.
Since my high school was so small, I knew a lot of the people there since kindergarten, especially a lot of the popular kids. I was friends with them when I was younger, but as I grew older and more “nerdy” I became gradually more alienated.
I wasn’t -that- bad looking, though I was certainly not that great looking either, and I wasn’t stupid or too smart or too annoying, so I wasn’t really hated, just not popular. It’s not fair, but a lot of the outcasts, the people who were REALLY hated, were either obviously from abusive/foster homes or had some mental disabilities. Not really retarded but just slower. People were cruel to them, but it was mostly guys who did it, the girls were pretty nice, except for the girls I think of as (pardon my language) sluts; the females who dated older guys who treated them like trash, wore ultra-skimpy clothes, obviously did drugs, cussed constantly, and didn’t care in the slightest about schoolwork (no offense to anyone on the board who may have fulfilled some/all of these descriptions, I’m sure you were wonderful people.)
There were also more traditional girls I would call “preps,” who were mostly pretty intelligent, dressed all the same, and were pretty (or at least obviously tried to be pretty, with perfectly crimped hair and nice make-up, I personally thought some of them were ugly.)
There were other people who weren’t ultra popular, but not unpopular either, just not fashionable and outgoing enough to be friends with the top crowd. I don’t think there were really any “computer geeks,” there were some guys who played Magic the Gathering in the library every day, but that’s it.
I think the main ingredient in being popular was being very outgoing. Clothes and looks matter less then you would guess, though they did matter. Even though I wear “cool” clothes, and listen to “cool” music, and enjoy wear make-up, etc. I am very quiet and shy and thus never popular.
As most of us know, high school popularity does not necessarily translate into a successful career or life.
I think there are two kinds of popular people in high school.
People who are reasonably comfortable with themselves, who genuinely care about others, have a common touch, can be popular whether or not they are good-looking or have the ‘right’ clothes–and they will go on to live contented, productive lives. On the other side of Popularity Hill are the insecure people who may have the right wardrobe and haircut but lack self-confidence, they must pick on or exclude others to make themselves feel good.
If these second type of people do not learn and mature, it can be all downhill after highschool graduation.
I thought the movie “Dazed and Confused” did an okay job displaying high school kids stereotypes. I graduated in '72 and I and my friends are fairly well sketched in this movie: there definitely were popular kids, but there was plenty of intermingling. I was the redheaded ironically self-aware hippie in that movie, my boyfriend was Pink. My high school was large, there were clicques, but the different circles of people definitely overlapped, just as in Dazed and Confused. (Good title, too, and not just for Led Zep fans.)
I went to three different highschools. The first one was the worst. The social cliques were very rigid, and if you didn’t have cool clothes, cool hair, and the same attitude, you wouldn’t get the time of day. The popular kids (jocks and the girls that hung off them)would talk to me in class, or if they were on their own, but if they were with their friends, they would pretend not to notice me. And even though I was pretty non-descript at the time (didn’t stand out in any way, good or bad) I was gossiped about and a few of the girls seemed to relish in telling me everything that was said behind my back. They were all very concerned about “colouring inside the lines”, and about appearing cool to their friends. And of course, they were pretty superficial in their friendships–always cutting down people once out of earshot. There were other cliques, like artsy people, and ethnic groups.
The second highschool was a pleasant change, because although there were distinct cliques (jocks, artsy people, skids), people mingled, and no one really harassed anyone. The first time I went into the school (to sign up) a girl actually struck up a conversation with me. I was shocked because in my first highschool, that wouldn’t have happened.
The third highschool had many richer kids in it, so the popular crowd had high standards. (I couldn’t believe some of the cars I saw parked in the student parking lot!) Those of the popular crowd did make fun of others, but it wasn’t the all-encompassing social isolation that was rampant at the first school. It was still pretty bad, though. I got bothered at this school, too, but by then it was because I did stand out (shaved head, weird clothes, big boots–before Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails were popular and in the media.) By that point it didn’t bother me anymore because I wanted to separate myself from those kinds of attitudes. There were various cliques at this school too.
I would like to second what someone else said–I never wanted to be one of the popular crowd because so much of it seemed to be an act, and many of them didn’t even seem to like their friends. Obviously, there has existed, and does exist, popular people that are nice, but I didn’t want to have anything to do with the whole scene. I would still like to deck one of the girls I went to highschool with. Heh.
I got a phone call for my 10-year high school reunion. The exceeding cheerful woman on the other end, talking to me like a long lost friend, told me her name and about the reunion. “It’s been so long since anyone has seen you, I sure hope you can come.”
I said,“You never talked to me in high school. Why do you think I’d want to talk to you now? Bye!”
Storyteller said it best.
"Listen up, popular people. We didn’t envy you.
We didn’t want to be you. We didn’t stay up nights thinking of ways to join your social circle. On the rare occassions when we even thought
about you, it was mostly with the same scorn with which you considered us. We laughed at you when your backs were turned, same as you
did to us. All the movies make it seem like the athletes and cheerleaders and prom queens and rich kids had some exclusive club, to which
everyone else wanted and would give anything to have access. Not true.
Oh, and now we're mostly making more money than you are :-)"
I love that last line.
So I don’t know how to post a quote. Sue me. I’ll figure it out eventually. The rye and coke isn’t helping.
I was very popular in high school, if knowing lots of people and belonging to a zillion clubs constitutes popularity. I was a weird-ass geek, but people seemed to accept that in my high school; probably because I was good natured and loved being a clown. My class size was just under 400 and my school was situated in a working class neighorhood. I should mention, however, that I was pretty damned innocent in HS and very prone to be oblivious to lots of stuff. There probably was a jock/cheerleader clique in our school, but I certainly wasn’t aware of it.
Regarding transitioning to the “real-world”, I have found that the drive and passion that motivated me to study hard and participate in lots of activities has been very helpful professionally. The oddball weirdness has been harmful, and has gotten me into trouble on occasion. Since HS, I have had to do alot of growing up (maturing) in order to better fit in with others at work. I am an engineer, and the technical people with whom I have worked have tended to be conservative and relatively narrow in their interests. I have found it essential to segregate my social life from my professional life, which is very different from the HS environment.
I always thought the whole “popularity” boodoggle was kind of ridiculous. Check out every ham-handed parody or indictment of adolescence, and there will be a long diatribe on the shallowness of the “popular” kids. As well, there will be some sort of hand-wringing over the supposed truth that “being popular is all that matters to these kids”.
In my opinion, these observations are greatly exaggerated. Poll a bunch of high-school students, and they’ll tell you how they’re iconoclasts, that they hate this kind of thing, and so on and so forth. Nobody wants to be the stereotypical, empty “Popular Guy/Girl”.
Yes, people like to be accepted by their peers. Yes, they do things like put others down to raise their social standing. Will they kill for popularity? Hardly. Such behavior seems relegated to numerous bad “black comedies”.