High School Labels

I found the essay on High School labels to be somewhat comical and rediculous. "I don't go around the other group because I'm scared of being one or getting kicked off the team." Yes that would be sarcasm. My high school days were in a bogus Chicago suburb called Plainfield, many know this city because it got tore up by a tornado in 1990.

At my school all the labeled people meshed together and quite often the jocks were themselves burnouts. I know, I partied with them. Yet I was not a jock, I was not a burnout either. I simply hung around the kids that pissed everyone off by listening to metal music and wearing black, rebelious yes. .and some of us were burnouts. I know, the cool house to hang out at had a kid that grew hydro in his basement. From what I remember he had little success with it.

Even though I was rebelious metal head that hung out with burnouts I still had many friends on the cheerleading squad, football team and in the band. The whole deal with lunch room's was not apparent at my school as well. We chose a table that was free on the first days of school then claimed it ours for the rest of the term, no matter where it was in the lunch room. And on a final note any uprising between the jocks/ burnouts were easily settled.

I know because a friend of mine called the jocks battling apes in the homecoming news paper and when I heard them plot to jump him after school I told them they weren't going to do it. One big guy turns from talking to his honey and asks why so then I explained his ties with the school wouldn't allow him to fight because then he'd get kicked off his precious football team.

Title

High School as I knew it was divided in the extreme into the music students and students who did not do choir or band. Each sect had individual lunches and seperate sheduals. There was also a tendency among the music group to enjoy school more and excel in the classroom. These "overgroups" gave way to smaller units. In the non-music crowd there were the Jocks, Hicks, and Pot-heads. Inversely, the other half of the student body was made up of Drama Students, English Nerds, Preps, and Band Geeks.

In my school these cliques were inforced by the shirts you wore. Drama students wore production t-shirts, sporting the many productions they'd been in. Hicks wore flannel polos with the sleeves torn off and a john deer hat perched on their temple. Jocks wore shirts from the championships. But none were as obvious as the Preps, with their American Eagle, Hollister, Calvin Klein, and Aeropostale clothing.

Humans have an inherent need to label everything. It seems we have a problem with ambiguity. The undefineable scares us, its the same reason we have externalized our fears throughout history in order to explain the unexplainable. I am talking about the concept of witches, devil-worhsipers, ghosts, and all other supernatural extrema. These are examples of what happens, witches in primary, when individuals do not fall into "popular" categories. Yes, the example is quite archaic, but the same pathology holds true in society today. We are much more accepting of an individual if they fit nicely into a stereotype of some sort.

Labels in Croton Harmon High School

The town that I lived in for high school was a very small suburb of the New York City.  The city was only a half hour away, and I spent a lot of time there.  The city is crazy, and filled with so many different people everywhere you look.  Well only a half hour away in Croton-on-Hudson NY, the Croton Harmon High School is entirely different.  Rather than seeing many people all interacting, you see small groups that keep secluded.  There were the few exceptions who either did not belong to a group, or those who did but still branched out to others, but for the most part, we would keep very secluded.  I was one of the kids who reached out to other groups, but "label" that I had was a "theatre kid".  I was also considered a problem,.  I kept fighting for Croton Harmon High School to be even better than it currently is.  I would argue that we need to spend less of frivolous things, and put that money towards, say, a better arts program.  This gained me the label of being "anti-school spirited".  In actuality I cared greatly about the school, but felt that it could, and should be better than it was.  But those are the labels that I gained, and even though I branched out to other groups of friends, some groups would have nothing to do with me because of my anti-school spirit label.  I would argue that I care greatly, and just want there to be improvements, but due to the label, they would hear none of it.  I was not the only person to hit road blocks due to my labial, manny were.  But the separation of groups by these labels is very real, and very bad.  High school would be a much better place if people let go of those labels.     

cliques

152 graduates walked onto our football field next to me the day of graduation, all of which I would consider my friends. It would be ridiculous to pretend that they were all my very good friends, however friends nonetheless. We didn't have much of an outcasted group. I could tell you the names of all 152 students in my graduating class, and I'd like to beleive they would be able to tell you mine. We of course had some that loved their weed, and some others that made their clarinets their bffs, but the majority of people didn't look down on anyone else for what they chose to do in their spare time. I'm not ignorant, there of course the couple students who felt the need to make themeselves feel better through others humility, but they didn't belong to a certain class and there certainly were only a few of them. Up until after I graduated I had never smoked weed a day in my life, but throughout high school nearly all of my good friends may have been considered "pot heads", while some others may have been looked at as "book worms" but never did any of them feel segregated from one another.

Chicago on the other hand is a different story, Columbia is a story in and of itself. I walk into the school everyday and feel like an outcast, I think maybe we all do. Every person here is pretty different from the next; film students, photography students, fashion students, tv students, etc. In theory the school does the segregating for us (or we to ourselves because we choose our majors). I still don't feel an animosity to other people for being within their own "clique", but I do feel as though I am different from the other students, and with everyone coming from different backgrounds (unlike in high school where we were all virtually the same) we are bound to feel different and sometimes like an outcast. I guess that's a part of life, it helps us grow and adapt to new things.

High School Social Groups 101

I went to a high school in the northern suburbs of Chicago. This school was huge. It consisted of six buildings with three floors connected together and around 4,000 students. Thankfully the school was large enough that we all got our own lockers. What caused us to not use our locker was not our social classification but class location. Anyways, The best place to see all the different social groups was the cafeterias (yes plural), student lounge, and courtyard. No matter which place you went to you could find a wide variety of social groups with the keyword being groups. Like any social group they didn't mix. They would all group together and socialize at any chance they got. The only terms I remember that we used to use for identifying the different groups is jocks, preps, artists, goths, druggies and weirdos. From what I remember female preps didn't sit with the male preps and female jocks only sometimes sat with the male jocks. But the male and female goths, druggies, weirdos and artists always sat together. It was the same with many other in between groups the males and female would sit together but the preps and jocks almost never mixed the two sexes in their groups. There is an exception to this though. When it would get warm out students would go out to the courtyard to eat and that is one of the few times that the male and female preps would come together. After school the common gathering place for the jocks was the gym wing, for the preps it was the student parking lots, artists gathered in the art wing, goths simply disappeared, druggies went to a park that they called 'the log', and the weirdos gathered in the main lobby. It has been so long since I have been in high school. I don't remember much more than that. The only other thing that I can tell you is that I started out as a mild form of a prep and slowly made my way to the weirdos. The weirdos were in to role playing games and anime.

Delaware Schools and Identities

I went to two different high schools in Delaware, a big public school called Caesar Rodney, and a tiny (200 people) Catholic private school called St. Thomas More Academy. At Caesar Rodney, the cliques were very true to their stereotypes. There were more of them, though. There was the jock clique, goth kids, the "gangsters" (if there is such a thing in Dover, Delaware), the scene/straight edge/hardcore kids, the theater kids, and the "nerds" or "inbetweens."  I was probably inbetween there, I got good grades, went to hardcore shows, and was involved in theater. At this school though, the jocks and goth cliques were very exclusive, just like the article's descriptions.

At the school I graduated from, St Thomas More, with only 50 of us in the graduating class, it was very different. Everyone had known eachother and gone to school with eachother since kindergarten since there was only one elementary/middle/high school in southern Delaware. So they did not conform as much to their social identities. There were the hippies who got stoned and listened to music every day, the rich kids who commuted from their beach houses in their new cars every day, the jocks, and the artsy students.

But no one was part of just one group. There were "hippies" on the lacrosse team, rich kids in the plays, jocks in choir, etc. For example, I was accepted as a cheerleader, actress, singer, honor roll student, and anything else I wanted to try or take part in. A girl who is now a senior won an award for her art and was the captain of the field hockey team. So it was easier to talk to everyone and there was less pressure to conform to any one identity. Practically everyone used the same slang and took part in multiple school functions and activities.

I think a big part (aside from everyone knowing eachother for so long) that played into the lack of social classes amongst the students at my private school was that, since we wore uniforms almost every day, we based judgement less on appearance. By the time of year that we could wear our own clothes to school (only on "tag days" and if you paid a certain amount towards a charity), people had already made their first impressions and their personalities were already known on some level.

I guess you could say, on a larger scale, that the St Thomas More students were a clique of their own. While waiting to take the SATs at my old school with people form my new school, I saw my current classmates mixed in with my old ones. I could tell that there was a definite difference that I cannot explain but the acknowledgement between schools was somewhat tense and uncomfortable.

Symbols of Category Membership

When I moved to Chicago to go to High School, I encountered a whole new system of life that I had not experienced before. I grew up in Singapore where drugs were extremely illegal and hard to get your hands on. The social dynamics of my class were more based on various hobbies and interests. For example, there were skateboarders, computer game geeks, jocks, as well as people who floated between the lines. Everyone sort of got along with each other since there weren't that many faces in each grade and it was not uncommon to see the peer groups coerced. When I moved to Chicago in the tenth grade, I attended a high school of around four thousand people, about a thousand per grade. I noticed right away that there definitely existed more boldly drawn lines between cliques. My homeroom was divided amongst jocks, nerds, potheads, metal heads and punk rockers. From the first day onwards, I made friends with the nerds, potheads, and punks. It was apparent that within each of the cliques there existed silent signs of identity. Whether two people from a certain category knew each other or not, it was almost possible to distinguish whether they could be friends just by looking at them. The punk rockers and metal heads would wear band shirts representing the music that they listened to. The potheads could be broken into multiple subcategories, but at the end of the day they would all get along. As for the jocks however, it seemed that they themselves were the ones keeping up their guards of social conformity. In many cases that I witnessed, the jocks tended to isolate themselves if they couldn't find a matching jock to socialize with. I think that many of these communication and compatibility issues associated with peer groups can be boiled down to the idea of interests. The so called "burnouts" seem to understand that they are on common ground with those around them. I believe that this makes it easier for them to relate and expand their ideas and influence across a wider ranged audience. For the jocks however, it is about status and competition, and those factors seem to be more important than really finding true satisfaction in your friendships. Through my experiences in high school, I made friends with people from all different cliques and identities. By the time it was over, we had managed to create a whole new group made up of mismatched personalities and it worked out great.