My family moved, when I was 12, to a small town where many of the kids had grown up together and gone to school together their whole lives. I was therefore an outsider, more invisible than outcast. I wanted, like most kids, to be “popular”. But to this day, looking back, I don’t really know what made some of the kids popular. Some weren’t very bright, some were bullies, and looking at them now nearly 20 years later, many of them have never had more glory-days to their lives than their 4 years of high school.
So what is “popular”? Were you popular in your high school? And what did it mean in your school, anyway?
Haha. I was never popular. I had done the same thing, move a lot, and I wasn’t white, so that immediately precluded any popularity in my high school, predominantly white.
The popular kids were, as usual, the football jocks, the cheerleaders, and the girls who put out. I was none of the above.
I was popular for a while in grade 4. Of course I just started a new school, spoke no English at all and didn’t understand anything anybody said to me. The class bully decided to pick me as a target and I didn’t understand enough to know he was the class bully. I beat the snot out of him the first time he tried to push me around and I got instant respect (or was it fear?) from the entire grade 4. To be fair, as far as bullies go, he wasn’t much of a bully compared to the real mean bastards from my school in the old country. Now those guys were as mean as they were stupid.
Was never a Beautiful Person™ in high school, but I had many acquaintances and people know my name. Being both clever enough to correct my more annoying teachers and dumb enough to do so publically and vocally builds a reputation and nerd cred at the same time.
I don’t think that ‘popularity’ even really applies in my school*. See, there are 4000 students at my school. But then, I wouldn’t really know about popularity, being completely socially inept.
*Note: this will change next year. Next year I will go to a school with only 300 or 400 students.
I was never popular. It was difficult for me to make friends as I was extremely shy. Also, I am a loner and always have been. Even when I was a kid a preferred to be by myself.
The popular kids at schools always seemed to be the jocks and cheerleaders.
In junior high I was perceived as gay (correctly, but I wasn’t about to admit it at the time). Everyone, from the “elite” on down, made it their personal mission to make my life a living hell.
Fortunately, because of the way the school districts were drawn, I ended up going to a different high school than most of them. There, I wasn’t tormented but was more like a non-entity. It was a welcome relief.
It wasn’t until I came out of the closet at age 24 and found acceptance with those like myself that I began to develop any confidence or self-esteem. I’m now almost a completely different person than I was as an adolescent, but the demons still lurk.
Not particularly, but things change. I now regularly correspond with the Homecoming Queen (and cutest girl in school) and a woman I went to kindergarten with and disliked as a stuck-uyp snob all the way through high school.
Somewhat, but maybe in a minor sort of way. My school was fairly large, almost 500 in my graduating class. I was often told that some girl whom I’d never even met “liked” me. I wasn’t a jock*, but that wasn’t the only criteria for popularity at our school, since most of our sports sort of sucked. There was also a lot of cross-mingling between the normal social strata. I changed high schools between 9th and 10th grades, but the school only opened the year before, and was sort of a mixing ground from across the county. I was a bit on the geeky side, but a lot of the jocks and cheerleaders were in the advanced courses and we got along just fine. I’m fairly self-confident, and was at least at the time reasonably attractive, probably one of the smartest kids in the school, and adequately athletic. If there is an aristocracy at school I’d have probably been an earl or count or something, not a king or prince or duke. If I’d had more money and maybe a flash car I might have moved up a rung or two on the ladder.
*I did swim team and soccer, but swim team was not a big sport at our school and soccer was not a school sport at the time.
I was popular in high school, participated in tons of activities, and enjoyed myself. It’s unfortunate that lots of people seem to have bad high school experiences.
Pretty much sums me up. Iwasn’t invited to all the “cool” parties, but I could show up and not get thrown out. I wanted to be popular, but I was still too insecure and shy, thanks to some bad experiences in junior high.
The popular people in my school really weren’t that bad. They were the usual collection of jocks, preppies, and beautiful people. One of my sadder memories of the time was finding out that one of the “Beautifuls” had a pretty major crush on me. She moved away in her junior year, and one of her friends grudgingly showed me a folder she had left behind. She had entwined my name and hers in hearts all through the folder. I was crushed! She was so far out of my league, that I had never even admired her from afar, much less look for signs she was interested.
My story’s pretty much identical to Nordic’s, minus being perceived as gay. I moved in the middle of middle school, and I’m pretty sure I was just perceived as being weak enough to just keep on taking abuse indefinitely.
Again, like him, I ended up in a different high school from most of them and got to be pretty much ignored (such a relief!) by everybody except my small group of friends and their acquaintance.
I always perceived being popular as having a peculiar kind of social power. I can’t really define it, but I know it was not something I ever wanted–I cherished my invisibility once it was granted me.
The regular world is so much nicer. No pressure cooker of a social system.
I never have and still don’t understand the desire to be popular in High School. I mean, look at those people. You want to be friends with them?
I had a small group of friends and I was satisfied with that. The ironic thing is that now that I work in a field where everyone has very similar interests to mine, I’m quite popular without even trying. Makes me think that I could have been very popular in high school if I had wanted to.
I’m still trying to come up with a definition of what ‘popularity’ is. Is it a bit like celebrity? That baffles me too. God, who’d want to have their wedding, and honeymoon pictures, and every little up or down in a relationship splashed about the front covers of every magazine in the grocery-store checkout line?
I knew I wanted to be popular, but I guess more accurately, I wanted to be visible*. To have more than one friend. Mind you, she was a very good friend, and 20+ years later we’re still very good friends (how many people can claim such a blessing?) but there was only her. It was lonely. Were the ‘popular’ kids lonely? Did they feel like freaks on the inside, covering it up by activities and boyfriends or girlfriends, and sports…or were they genuinely happy in their social groups (or cliques), attracting attention because they were gregarious?
I dunno.
I do know this much: the president of my class (from 6th grade onward, every single year) wound up becoming a priest and retiring from public life. He had been too much in the public eye, he said, and he was through with it.
I guess I’m looking forward to my 20 year reunion, which is this summer. I want to sit down with people I’d never have dared to talk to back then (if I was not their “equal” then, being a social outcast, then I certainly am their social “equal” now) …you know, the captain of the football team, who now teaches kindergarten, and so on, and say “What was it like for you in high school? How did you choose the career you have now? What would you do differently if you could go back in time?”
I know a number of things I wish I could have done differently. But I’d have had to know then, the things I know now.
So - sorry for the ramble - what do you folks think “popularity” consists of in a high school setting? And what makes it desirable?
Huh. I was popular enough that I was easily elected to class officer and then school officer for all four years, and I was on the Snowball Court, our school’s winter version of homecoming court, but I wasn’t big time popular. I was more popular by association - my best friends were some of the super popular kids in school.
I don’t understand the generalization that all popular people are terrible people. Many popular people are popular for exactly the opposie reason. My best friends were very nice, friends to almost everybody in the school (average class size was between 400-500). They just happened to be very good looking, very intelligent, and good at sports.
Nono, I understand her point of view. The popular people were not nice people. On the contrary, they were quite mean. For example:
The jocks had this “game” of going around and…well, putting their hands up between every girl’s legs and squeezing. Just once, and they usually never did it again, but how humiliating. The jocks were the most popular people in our school.
As for the cheerleaders, etc., they could be quite cruel. Girls often can be crueler than guys, I think, or at least in deeper ways. She’s just asking, is that what you wanted to be like?
I think we can all acknowledge that within any label there is room for differences. In the “popular” group there are probably some genuinely nice people and also some real dicks. The popular people at my school really tried to get everyone involved in school activities that wanted to be. I wouldn’t consider people like the ones you mention, Anaamika, to be popular, since they’re assholes and the only other people who would really like them are also assholes.
