Bronx Science?
WeR Sauron -
Well, there are a number of factors.
First off, public education tends to be hideously underfunded. Meaning that most places simply can’t afford decent staff. Nowhere was this more evident at my high school than the counseling department, which consisted of babbling numbnuts with the compassion and tact of a battering ram. Honestly, in no other field of work that I’ve witnessed in my life have I seen such absolute, naked incompetence. It’s like they dragged guys off the street and threw them into whatever vacancies they had at the time.
Also, as you may have notice if you’ve spent about, oh, two weeks, the rules are never, ever enforced. Ever. It can be a public hellhole with crumbling walls and graffiti everywhere, or it can be a $1,500-a-semester Catholic institution (that’s where I was, BTW)…there’s no difference whatsoever. Rules don’t exist. Any “codes of conduct” or “standards of behavior” or whatever are empty verbiage and a complete waste of paper. The one ironclad mandate I heard was “ignore it”. Over and over and over, and no surprise, since that was the one response to any problem. Teasing? Ignore it! Violence? Ignore it! Rampant vandalism? Ignore it! Smuggling knives into school, picking fights with strangers outside, setting fires in the bathroom, throwing wads of paper and erasers and rocks? Ignore it! High school students are supposed to have the mental fortitutde of a freaking CIA operatives. (For the record, I’ve participated in a number of youth activites during my high school years, and not one of them expected me to have this kind of mental fortitude.) The only time you hear about a rule being enforced is when someone enforces some piddling little rule (“Hey, that shirt doesn’t have a collar!”) so the school can make a huge show about how orderly it is, but most places aren’t too concerned about image, so that’s not common.
And parents. Did I mention parents? On the one-in-a-million occasions when the standards of behavior are actually enforced, you can count on a parent screaming about how poor junior is being unfairly restrained by the oh-so-restrictive system to anyone who’ll listen. I’ve been to a number of high schools for job interviews, meaning that I got to see some of these cretins in action, and the kind of crap (and sheer volume of crap) these schools get from said cretins is mind-blowing. IMHO, protesting even the slightest restraints on one’s child is absolutely psychotic, and I’ve seen it just about every single place I went.
And of course, there’s the truly horrifying lack of compassion from just about everyone for the ones who do suffer the most. For any doctor, social worker, police officer, or professional counselor (as in the kind that actually meets qualifications), treating troubled teens with a tenth as much contempt as parents and faculty alike do would be grounds for a lawsuit. I heard a never-ending stream of crap about how it was all my fault and I had to stop being bothered by anything from every teacher I spoke to, and a fat lot of help my perpetually bass-ackwards parents were. (Seriously, they’re smart, they work hard, they throw great parties, they made a nice, clean home for me, and I’m grateful for all that, but they wouldn’t know sympathy from a hole in the ground.)
So yeah, I can see where you’re coming from.
P.S.: Don’t even try to pin all this on “teen drama”. I’m 30 years old now, I have a decent job, wonderful people, my mental state is at its most stable point ever, and looking back on my high school experience…I still say it still sucked beyond belief and everyone responsible is the worst order of scum. Hey, I can’t argue the facts.
Argh, sorry. To answer the OP’s question:
I have been attending a public high school as a sophomore for this year, and based on my observations, WeRSauron is partly correct.
In my highschool, the bullying/teasing is not really that bad, but it can get very annoying very quickly. I happen to dress in the manner **Silver Serpentine** dressed, and the most I've gotten were stupid questions and dirty looks. It depends on how you look, also. I've also noticed that they don't *care* how other people look.
Sure, you will get the odd "What the fuck is she wearing *that* for?", but as a whole, people couldn't care less what you wear. A good retort I've used often when someone asks me why I wear what I do is, "What, are you willing to buy me new clothes?"
Oh, God, YES! If you are a newcomer to the school, with other sophomores, it seems everybody knows everybody else. For the lunch period, if you've haven't chosen someone with which to sit in the beginning of the year, more often than not, you will have to sit by yourself, if the lunchroom isn't too crowded. If it is, you'll have to sit with another group who doesn't know you.
If you're lucky enough to find a person with whom you were fairly amiable in the earlier years (as I was with somebody I knew in the seventh grade), you can sit with them and meet their friends. I dislike meeting people, and am nervous around them, but sitting with someone you know can have its benefits, such as letting them watch your personal articles while you do something if they are trustworthy enough.
I cannot speak for anybody else’s school, but hazing is not common here. However, fighting is.
Yes, as I have said before, I cannot speak for other American public high schools, but in my school, this is most definitely true. The people with whom I consort (not necessarily my friends, though) often ostracise virgins. Nobody would dare to sell drugs in the school building, but a lot of people take them.
In my school, this isn't true.
During my Euro class, there was a fight going on outside the classroom, which my teacher saw. He left the room, and physically broke the two up and put them both in headlocks.
The prevelence of security guards strategically placed around the school (such as in the T-area, a wide space where it seems fights occur mostly) helps to cut down on fights. However, it happens anyway.
I hope this post answers some of your questions.
Ugh, prevAlence
I just wrote a long post only to have it eaten.
Suffice it to say, WeRSauron, that my high school in a fairly affluent suburb in Maryland was and is not much like your impression of U.S. high schools. It was safe, there wasn’t a whole lot of student-student abuse (though of course there was some; there always will be where a large number of human beings are thrown together through no desire of their own), and we were viewed as a mecca for dedicated teachers and administrators.
My middle school fit the bill much better. I’m willing to bet that the socioeconomic factor is mostly responsible (I was with mostly working class kids in middle school but mostly middle and upper class kids in high school, due to a little bit of weirdness with school districts). Like it or not, it seems that students coming from a financially safe background are a lot more likely to have grown up with the value of education as an absolute, and to have parents who take more than a passing interest in what’s going on at school. And students who want to learn, or at least have grown up with the expectation that they will learn, are much more likely to draw caring teachers to them.
Oh, and there’s more funding for public schools in rich counties than in poor ones, because the former generate more tax revenue.
(I apologize if this post is disjointed or goes off topic. I’ve been writing it in between doing other stuff.)
I graduated in 2001, BTW.
I went to a suburban public high school with about a thousand students. While there were definitely groups of friends who hung out regularly, it was not overly clique-ish, and there was not the obsession with popularity and conformity that is typically depicted on prime-time dramas. Bullying existed but was not commonplace, and the administration was good about discipline. There were probably more people on weed than off.
Interestingly, that article mentions a Hyde charter school and its success with discipline in the same area. I went to one of Hyde’s prep schools for two years, and while discipline was not a major problem, I found their academic standards to be laughable.
I went to a medium sized school in a downtrodden suburb in California and I graduated about five years ago.
I could see this happening at my school.
There was a lot of crime at our school. Probably about twenty-five percent of the people I knew were addicted to speed. Drug dealing was no-big-deal and everyone knew the dealers on campus. We had an undercover agent or two, and occasionally a kid would get busted, but nothing really made a dent. Even some of the janitorial staff was involved in drugs. Speed was a huge problem in school and in the neighborhood at large- most people I know have at least one parent that has done it. Only the preppies drank a lot, though. I’ve seen people do stuff like sip water bottles of vodka through class.
I could picture someone being beat up in the back of class. Fights were pretty common- maybe one big fight every two weeks or so. I can still remember the image of sitting in the grass at lunch and suddenly noticing all two-thousand someodd people suddenly streaming to one spot to watch the fight. There were occasional stabbings, but I don’t remember any guns. Gangs were out of fashion by this point, and most of the fights were personal. I never felt like I was in danger.
There was a lot of bullying in middle school, but it petered out in high school. My high school was extremely diverse (67 different languages were spoken there- it was like a mini UN meeting every day) and there were so many different kinds of people that cliques and being different were not really a problem. I knew a lot of openly gay people and it was never an issue. Theres just no way to be that different when the kid to the left of you if from Azerbaijan and the kid to the right is from Fiji.
Sex was common, and a lot of kids got pregnant. We had kind of a sister-school for pregnant girls, although some just continued on at my school. Most kids were smarter than that, though. Condoms were widely availible and I think most people used them. The amount of sex being had never approuched the goings-on at my relatively middle class college.
The facilities were horrible. They wanted to put in ceiling fans to battle the 100+ degree heat, but discovered the weight of fans would pull down the roofs. Many classes were in portable trailers. We really did use textbooks from the fourties. Many teachers- especially art and science teachers- bought supplies from their own salaries so we could do stuff like experiements. All after school activities were expected to be financially self-suffiecient (my drama club had to all do play without royalties because we were funded by our dismal ticket sales).
That said, I had a great time and wouldn’t change it for anything. I love the sheer diversity I was exposed to. I love that I never got shit for being a geeky punk rocker. I met some great friends, and got to know some amazing teachers. And I learned to be headstrong and streetwise and resourceful in a way thats stayed with me through the years.
I graduated from a catholic (jesuit) school in the mid west back in '84.
There was a pretty well-defined pecking order at my school with all the standard cliques: jocks/cute girls, preppies, student council types, geeks/nerds, stoners, drama/art kids, and outcasts. I was sort of in the middle of the social strata being a band geek and all. We weren’t ever outright picked on, mostly we were ignored. There was some mixing within cliques but not a lot. For example, I ran cross country and track and got to be friends with some of the really popular girls that way. I didn’t hang out with them that much, but I was invited to their parties. One girl was really an outcast but a good (went to state) distance runner. She never got invited to sit with the popular kids at their lunch table or to their parties, but they spoke to her in the halls and stood up for her when some of the other popular girls tried to pick on her. Even as late as the early 80’s, a lot of our cliques were set up along racial lines. The black, Asian, and hispanic kids all had their own cliques. We had some minorities in our group and there were one or two that had some affiliation with the more popular crowds, but that was the exception.
There was some bullying among the guys. From what I remember, the top crowd didn’t do much bullying, but some of the guys in the lesser status cliques were ruthless to the outcasts. One poor guy really got the worst of it. He left school after 2 years. I remember we all paired off to be lab partners in chemestry. No one would let him onto their team (we were groups of 3 or 4). The teacher finally stuck him in a group and they resented the hell out of that. There was no physical bullying with the girls. Mostly it was mental games. Some of the guys would get into it too: asking a girl if she was doing anything Friday night then saying “have fun by yourself!” It didn’t really happen to anyone but those in the lowest groups. However, for them, it must have sucked.
There was a lot of pot and alcohol. The preppies were the biggest drinkers. The stoners (obviously) did the most pot. The outcasts had some who did either or both. My group was pretty goody-goody.
There was some sex, but not like you hear about today. Some girls were known as easy and they came in all cliques. Guys talked a good game, but I wonder how much sex they were having. I was a virgin when I graduated as were most of my girl friends. I suspect most of my guy friends were as well.
We had no openly gay students. None. That would have been social suicide. Derogatory terms for gays were frequent insults. One of the guys I dated in high school later came out as a gay man. I had no clue (we broke up because he was pressuring me for sex and I wasn’t ready). It must have been hell for him back in those years. I remember we had a discussion about homosexuality in one of our government classes (I can’t recall how it came up). Some of the things said I can’t repeat here. There was a lot of talk about how sick and perverted it was. I remember our teacher asking what we would do if one of our best friends said he or she was gay. A lot of the guys said they’d beat his face in. The girls mostly just snickered. I really hope that, and the racial thing, have changed for kids today.
Our teachers were mostly pretty good. The jesuits were the among the best, but my government teacher was tops. We’d have some really good discussions in his class. He was known for being extremely conservative, but was respectful of all viewpoints. Looking back, he was the one telling us how repugnant our attitudes towards homosexuals was.
There was no fear of a Columbine type incident or of extreme violence. Even the bullying consisted mostly of tripping someone or pushing. Not that that’s okay or easy to deal with–but no one was in danger of seriously being hurt.
I’m attending a high school in Florida now. I’m in a somewhat unique position. I’m a member of the I.B. program, which involves taking much harder classes than the standard regiment. Every one of my classes is an I.B. class except Orchestra. The I.B. kids are mostly seperated from the non-I.B. kids. We have entirely different classes in a different area of the school.The only time we’re near the non-I.B. students is during lunch and in our elective class.
So far most of my classmates have been smart, nice people. There are a few jerks and a few ignorant people, but I respect nearly everyone. I’m quite short for my age, and used to be picked on all through elementary and middle school. I was pleasently surprised to see that in high school my height has been mostly ignored. I’m made fun of about 300 times less than I was in middle school. I know a few people that do pot, but I haven’t ever heard anything more serious mentioned. I don’t know anyone that’s pregnant either. So far my high school experience has been mostly the opposite of the stereotypes.
Bullying and victimisation are also big problems in Australian schools. Both now and back in the 70s when I was in school.
1989 graduate of a suburban public high school here. Remember the media motto “If it bleeds it leads”. The kids who don’t shoot/burn/etc their school don’t make headlines.
Cliques? Yes, but they were more affiliations than rigid castes. I had friends among the more intellectual of the athletes as well as the more level-headed of the stoners, and I was the typical computer geek.
Sex? Well, only one girl in my yearbook had her photo taken with her child (I didn’t know her). Lots of girls had “reputations” and while sex certainly happened it wasn’t the people talking about it who were getting any.
Bullying? Grade school and junior high were worse actually. By high school you’re taking classes with different kids so you don’t see the same people all day long.
Drugs/Alcohol? Pot and beer were common, but nobody really cared if others did or didn’t. If you wanted it you could get it easily enough, but there were plenty who abstained.
Diversity? Race & religion were non-issues, and any degrogatory reference to them earned you a one-way ticket to Assholistan. On the other hand “gay” was the all-purpose insult and nobody came out of the closet. Why so tolerant of the obvious and so spiteful of the more easily hidden is beyond me.
Teachers? If you wanted to learn they’d help you. If you wanted to cruise for four years and have your parents read your diploma to you just keep quiet in the back of the class & they’d leave you alone.
American schools overseas, as in exchanges?
American high schools come in all different flavors. Especially if you count the private ones. I wouldn’t try to characterize them all in one short post, especially since I only went to one.
At mine, however, the beater and the filmer would have been expelled–and they wouldn’t have gotten very far in the commission of their crime, either.
I went to a suburban high school in Iowa. Student body population was 1200, with 300 in my class. The teachers were veterans, well-educated, and involved with the students. They cared (mostly).
Jocks and sports got the most attention and got cut the most slack. Cliques were of about moderate strength and tended to form around activities (band, choir, sports, etc.). The total outcasts were mostly picked on as freshmen and got a (relatively) easy ride after that. However, “smart kid” and “square kid” activities like debate, speech, Quiz Bowl, chess club, SADD, student newspaper, etc. got a fair amount of support, respect, and attention.
They tended to aim for the middle a little too much, but I thought it was pretty good when I was there. Of course, that was 10 years ago.
DarkSide, yep. I didn’t mean to make it sound too rosy–there were plenty of groups, and clubs like the Math were filled with Asians while the cheerleaders (for our seventh-rate basketball team, and nobody bothered to come to the games at all) was all black girls. Drugs were dealt in a certain corner of the schoolyard, and we all had to run the gamut of gangs on the way there, but basically if you didn’t bother those people, they didn’t bother you. The sex education was clinical and non-judgemental but fairly stern, as AIDS was starting to really really take off. But we weren’t coddled or counseled much–we were there to learn, and our social and gender and substance abuse issues were something that we were supposed to take care of in our own time, it wasn’t the school’s problem. So if, like me, you didn’t really have those issues (nothing like seeing your city overrun by junkies when you’re a kid to deglamorize drugs and alcohol for life) you just didn’t think about it much.
The school was horribly underfunded, we had no heat on Fridays after noon, the food was Grade D and most kids brought sandwiches with them, everything leaked and was patched–but the main point is that three kids in my homeroom class went to Harvard, seven to MIT, and two of us to Wellesley. And there were only two college counselers even at Science; the admissions process wasn’t quite as high-pressure back then but it was something you and your parents were responsible for.
Sure, most of us needed financial aid up the wazoo and jobs when we got there.
But the point is that the school worked as an American Dream factory. I wasn’t the first one in my family to go to college, but I was the first to be able to go to a four-year one away from home. So, while I wished in college I had had a more interesting social life in HS, it worked for me.
Oh yeah, there were 759 kids in my graduating class and we got to graduate from the Felt Forum (the smaller auditorium under Madison Square Garden) and had a Nobel Laureate graduate as the speaker! 
And my homeroom had about 38 kids, and those numbers of people who went to top colleges weren’t the whole class, just my homeroom. I think we had about 35 Harvard folks total, and four of us went to Wellesley (although MIT was the Holy Grail for us, and 55 went there).
I am currently a senior at an urban, inner city public school. It’s really not bad at all. Our building is kind of falling down in some places, and there isn’t much funding, but the academics are really good. I’m also an IB student, and even though there are only about 12 kids going for the full IB diploma at my school, most of the kids take the IB classes. The AP classes are the easy ones at my school.
We have three or four security guards, and they check our bags every morning while we go through the metal detectors. This is a huge pain in the ass and I don’t think it’s particularly effective, because there’s no way the guards can check everyone’s bag and because the metal detectors go off even if you don’t have any metal on you.
There’s not a lot of cliques or bullying, or at least I haven’t seen any. There’s some, of course, but not witch hunts or anything like that. Our student body is really diverse, it’s about 60% black and 40% everything else (white, Asian, Hispanic, Pacific Islander, international, etc). Interracial relationships are not even commented on, and there are a few openly gay students (although I don’t think there are any openly gay couples).
There is a fair amount of pot use, and people come to class obviously stoned sometimes, but I don’t think there are any harder drugs being used, at least at school. I know plenty of kids get drunk on the weekends, but there’s hardly any drinking at school (one kid brought a water bottle full of some kind of alcohol once).
A few girls have gotten pregnant, and there was one couple who was suspended for having sex in the teachers’ bathroom. I’ve never been teased for being a virgin. I know that most of my friends are also virgins, even though there are plenty of my classmates who have had sex, but I’ve never heard of anyone with an STD.
The teachers are, by and large, wonderful. There are a few total dipsticks, but most of them are friendly and involved with the students. Even the ones who are crappy teachers tend to be pretty nice people, even if you don’t learn much in their classes. Most fights take place in the halls, because no teacher would let a fight happen in their classroom.
And, just to give you an alternate view, I went to a suburban, all girls’, private, Catholic school my freshman year, and I found that one to be much more full of cliques and bullying, along with more drinking and drug use. That was the terrible soul-sucking hellhole, not the inner city public school.
I graduated a medium-sized suburban public high school in June. It’s a good school, people who can move to our town exclusively so their kids can go to our schools. I didn’t have the most normal experience; I was in a mostly-self contained program similar to IB. However, I did occasionally pop into the ‘real’ world of high school. There was a decent mix, about 70% white, with about 10% each of black, hispanic, and asian (including a sizable Indian population). MOst people are either straining at the upper limit of ‘middle-class’, or fighting to get within the bottom limit.
We had our undesirables, yes, and you saw their actions. Once someone broke into the school and flooded the new science wing. Once someone broke in and spray-painted swastikas and other racist things all over (the town has a huge Jewish population). We once had a beating in the cafeteria before the first bell; it was mostly random and the victim was in a coma for two days after getting repeatedly kicked in the head. Fights - nowhere near that bad - happened about once a month in the hallways.
Theft was a big, never-addressed problem. I had my gym locker broken into and my new CD player stolen. A friend of mine had their entire bookbag stolen from the band room.
Gangs had a minor, negligble presence.
At the other high school in town we once had a student bring a gun to a football game. We had two bomb threats in my 4 years there, and pulled fire alarms happened almost weekly, on average. They finally got doors they can lock without chaining them, so we don’t violate fire codes as badly anymore. :rolleyes:
There’s a lot of bad stuff, but that’s what jumps out at you. The vast majority of people in public high schools in the US, IMO, have very dull, boring lives, which aren’t emotionally scarring or anything like that.
Ack, more thoughts.
Teachers. Obviously, a big part of the high school experience. In my experience, there are three groups of teachers.
- They’re young, fresh from college, love teaching, and want to change the world. They want to be you friend. Unfortunately, they have no way of controlling the classroom, either give too much or too little work. Solution: let a couple years of students suffer through them. Hopefully, they’ll settle down.
- They’ve been teaching for a while, and are disillusioned. THey spend their days counting days until retirement. I’ve had a lot of these. They’re not motivated, they’re not interested in new teaching methods. Their classes are boring, dull, and they’re often mean.
- The good teachers, generally towards the middle of their career. I had an excellent math teacher sophomore year, who every single years swears he’s going to retire. He finally did when he fell ill last year; before then, we were sure he’d teach until the day he died. Teachers who really, really love teaching, and are good at it. I was lucky and had at least one of these teachers every year. I still keep in touch with most of them.
The problem is, if you’ve got an unmotivated teacher, you’re not going to have motivated students, which leads to a vicious cycle. I’d say that, really, the weight is on the teachers to motivate the students. The students are stuck there; for many people, public school is the only option.
As you no doubt have noticed by the replies it varies from school to school. At my high school there was no way in hell a student could be assaulted during class without the teacher noticing. I would imagine it is the unusal high school where these things can happen.
Cliques are just a fact of life and I don’t see anything inherently negative about them. Most human beings prefer being in the company of those they have something in common with. So a lot of the drama kids end up hanging out with one another and eating at the same table. Cliques can be rather destructive but I don’t think that just depends on the particular clique and not on cliques themselves.
Bullying does occur but I don’t know how bad it is for most students. By the time I got into high school bullying dropped off signifigantly. In fact I faced and observed worse bullying in grades 6-8 then I ever did in 9-12.
Marc
There were fights at my school, but it wasn’t like people ignored what was happening. Two guys got in a fistfight in an art class once, but it was quickly broken up and security escorted the two guys away.
People were not victims of random violence. People that got into scuffles were generally affiliated wtih gangs/cliques- I never feared getting attacked.
If I were to do it again, I’d probably want to go to a private school or something better than the High School I attended but mainly to be around peers that were more motivated to succeed. That was the biggest problem at my school- hardly anybody seemed to care about succeeding and unfortunately it really brought me down.
I was kind of trapped between two worlds at school: Many of my peers were put off/intimidated by my intelligence and the way I talked, and would mock me for it. Many of my teachers were disappointed in how lazy I was and wished I applied myself more. I wish I did too 
I know that if I ignored what my peers thought, I probably would have done much better in school, but I was really insecure and trying to fit in somewhere, this left me just kind of running around in circles in terms of both trying to make friends and be liked, and do well in school. In the end, I kind of landed somewhere between, having a few friends and doing average in High School.