High school cliches

[coldcut]

Kind of random thought. It's been almost ten years since I was in high school, and I was curious if the same sort of social structures in high school are still going strong in the 00's as they were in the late 90's. And since we've got folks in high school or right out of high school, I figured I'd make a query. Back in my day, we had:

preps - wore pretty exclusively khakis and polo-style shirts. They made up the majority of the high school population. This was the cliche of the popular kids, although not every prep was a popular kid, if that makes sense.
jocks - essentially the same as the preps, except that they either played sports, or were just plain more aggressive.
skaters - Baggy black jeans, probably the first people to start wearing the chain wallets. Basically the chain wallet identified a skater more than an actual skateboard. Really, skating had little to do with whether you were a skater or not.
punks - Kind of a more hard core version of skaters. Punks were more into music than the skaters, and were maybe a bit more aggressive. The ska kids kind of fell into this category by default.
grungers - Less hip version of the skaters and punks. I suspect that I was sent to boarding school right before this group morphed into the goths.
smart kids - Not really a clear cut cliche. They mostly camoflauged themselves as preps or occasionally punks, but everyone knew who they were.

[Jade]

Lets not forget the band nerds.... and the **** ups and trash

[Stalking Shadow]

Firstly, they're cliques.

Secondly, well, lemme give you a brief of my high school experience:

I went to high school, and graduated at about this time last year.
I work in high schools in San Francisco as an intern at this (http://www.826valencia.org) organization.

However, for the most part, I work at inner city schools where they primary cliques are Crips and Bloods. Gnomesayin'?

The school that I went to generally had these cliques. However: you forgot:

Drama kids: You see them dress funny and talk funny and speak in silly outrageous accents. They put on your school plays.

The A/V Club: A catch-all for the gadget folks. Our A/V club was the school Robotics team. Some of them are in BC Calculus.

BC Calculus: People in the higher level math courses kept to themselves. Identified by button-up shirts. Large calculators.

Marching Band: I think these are the people who had the most sex in high school, or maybe they just talked about it the most. Either way, there you have it.

The Aneemay Club: Naruto headbands. Acne. Usually enrolled in Japanese 1 to 2. Quit by Japanese 3 because the teacher doesn't seem interested in talking about their J-Pop.

LARPers: F-ing LARPers...

[iggy880]

Not gonna add details but there are

Smart Kids

Emo's

Rock Guys

Gangsta's(wannabes really though)

Skaters


In my school, jocks are kinda phased out, few are true 'jocks' by the old terms, many are in the AP(advanced placement) classes, and by smart kids, they're just smart, not necessarily own group, like friendly enough, just kinda quiet. May be more, but I'm tired.

[Gaia]

Ah the drama clique. Well actually there were (when I was in high school back when we banged rocks together to make fire and used typewriters) three divisions of the drama clique. The ultra popular group were the "actors"--These were the kids that no matter how awful they were always got the leads in the play or played second fiddle to each other. Next you had the casual actor clique. These were always no matter what in the ensamble or had minor speaking parts in all the plays. Then there were the techs (my group) we got along well with the skate punks, goths, stoners, always dressed in black, worked 6 days a week in the theater crafting the show without complaint. Were treated like crap by the "actors" who thumbed their noses at us because we were usually up to our elbows in sawdust, knew our way around a skill saw, the paint shop, props room, stage managed/gripped the shows and could really screw up their lives by making sure props and sets did not arrive on time in their place (also duct taped one jerk with his "I'm an ACTOR you are only here to please me" attitude to a set of curtains and let the brake off the fly lines. And I didn't instigate that. Nope. never. :notme: )

[Kinetix]

I noticed at my school that many of the groups overlapped and blended. There were a lot of floaters (like myself) who'd move between groups and be comfortable.

It didn't seem very rigid, or as much as I've seen on tv, heard from stories, etc.

[Heather]

I lived in the boonies for the last three years of high school, my graduating class was less then 40 people. There were two groups:

Preps and Stoners.

Some preps were stoners, but stoners were never preps.

There were so few of us that we all hung out anyway. Very cool high school experiance :D

[Yin]

Senior year in Beaver Falls High School was a downright mess. It was like Mean Girls. We had these cliques, but all of the cliques had names:

The PGs [Pretty Gangstas]: What started to be a group of 6 girls (mostly black, 1 was white) grew to about 20 or so members. All of the pretty girls were in this clique. They had chants, and even had "PG names" [G-Beezy, Jane Doe, A-Meezy, etc). This started the phenomenon.

J.A.D.A.: Jessica Ashley Diesel and Ashley. 4 girls who had been friends for a long time. A mix of pretty, a band geek, and 2 wannabes.

C-Unit: "Cracka Unit" - a group of white boys (hilarious, at that) who were known to be the "Jackass wannabes". Funny group of guys. They're all on pot and weed now though, but in college!

The Crew: 6 friends in band. This was my group. I pirated this name from a clique on Yahoo! RP groups. We had Crewer cellphones, shirts, etc. We also had names like the PGs.

Needless to say this tore apart the senior class. LOL! It was a mess! And I'm crazy, so I actually made a notion to have an official "PG Day" (I loved messin' wit them), and I had banners and things made. It never fell through, but it was wild.

[RedSwitchblade]

Pot AND weed?!

Those two are different?!

[Kinetix]

Senior year in Beaver Falls High School was a downright mess. It was like Mean Girls. We had these cliques, but all of the cliques had names:

The PGs [Pretty Gangstas]: What started to be a group of 6 girls (mostly black, 1 was white) grew to about 20 or so members. All of the pretty girls were in this clique. They had chants, and even had "PG names" [G-Beezy, Jane Doe, A-Meezy, etc). This started the phenomenon.

J.A.D.A.: Jessica Ashley Diesel and Ashley. 4 girls who had been friends for a long time. A mix of pretty, a band geek, and 2 wannabes.

C-Unit: "Cracka Unit" - a group of white boys (hilarious, at that) who were known to be the "Jackass wannabes". Funny group of guys. They're all on pot and weed now though, but in college!

The Crew: 6 friends in band. This was my group. I pirated this name from a clique on Yahoo! RP groups. We had Crewer cellphones, shirts, etc. We also had names like the PGs.

Needless to say this tore apart the senior class. LOL! It was a mess! And I'm crazy, so I actually made a notion to have an official "PG Day" (I loved messin' wit them), and I had banners and things made. It never fell through, but it was wild.

Hahaha, that's funny to think of everything all segregated, cut-throat and messed up. I wonder what all the teachers knew and though about it.

[Plasma Wisp]

Pot is not as good as weed.

Pot is the scrap. weed is better.

As explained by my stoner friend, Whopper.

[Seadevil]

The Crew: 6 friends in band. This was my group. I pirated this name from a clique on Yahoo! RP groups...

You should feel bad. :p

[Solario]

The whole clique segregation sort of disipated when I became a sophomore. Previous to that there were a few cliques, but usually no real defining traits with about two exceptions, The Steroid Crew and the Gucci Girls. Mostly it was just a mig mishmash of styles, ideologies and the sort.

I think the generations at my school after me is a little more divided though. I know there are the Gangsta bitches (their wording, not mine. And it's a little embarassing considering most of them are as white as snow and doesn't even listen to the music,) the Indie/Emo crowd and the Footballers (as in the American style.) Though I'd be surprised if these groups and the "general public" didn't associate pretty openly.

[Dark AngelHawk]

when I was in HS there were so many groups here and there. I honestly didn't care, I belonged to no group and had friends in all. I hate all that stupid BS and glad my sister has decided to go the sameway I did except better.(Though I wish she would have never cut her hair argh...)

However I do worry a lot about her being in highschool. She goes to the same one I went to and I know that the system there is really messed up. Not too mention there are some really bad kids running amuck there as well. I was friends with them as well back then so I know what goes on(or did back then).

The groups though, have and will always exsist. That's just how humans are.

[Charon]

At my school, there are actually no real defined groups, everyone seems to just mingle with everybody else and while there are groups divided by what music they listen to, etc, most people will talk to each other regardless of style/music taste. I guess the only huge groups you'd see sticking out are Indie Kids, Chavs and the 'Social Elite'.

[Yin]

And Band Geeks do have the most sex. They caught one couple in the band room storage knockin' boots, and I don't know how many times someone got play in their. Freaks. LOL! And while everyone was sexin' I was the one turnin' over chairs and music stands. I was horrible in high school...

[Hydrothermia]

I was just about everywhere. Now I was a geek in my own right, but I wasn't associated with a particular group. I was the geek that played football in Middle and High, not very good, but I played. My best friend was a band geek. I was also in the Jesus Freak group. One of the guys on my football team always said, "What Would Jess Do?" instead of the usual "W. W. J. D."

[Masked Revenger]

Well, when I went to high-school, the cliques surely existed, but they weren't that strickt on who you could talk to, per se.

For example, some jocks hung out with the nerds (of which I was one), but it wasn't a huge deal.

The biggest division on my school was money. The rich kids only hung out with themselves.

Oh, wait, there was one other division. The Africian American Student Union. For some reason, all the kids in that group only hung out with themselves, despite the fact that many of them had non-black friends before joining. Once the joined, all non-African-American friends were left behind. It was weird.

For the most part, though, my school was so big tht these "cliques" weren't really cliques like you guys are talking about, though. I had 2,000 people in my graduating class (yes, really), so the "cliques" were really more groups of friends. Very few of them had names. The only one that sticks out as having a name was the Heathers (a group of 4 girls all named Heather. Before the movie, even). Otherwise, people just hung with their friends. Our class was too big to do anything else.

Oh, and the band geeks in my school were the LAST people to have sex. Nerds got laid before band geeks.

Chris

[Grae Knight]

We had

Rednecks - These people went hunting before school!

Christians - Had prayer meetings before school in the courtyard.

Marching Band - The marched around playing instruments.

Teenage Prego - These girls disappeared about mid semester and reappeared a couple months later with alot less weight and horny.

ROTC - These kids wore uniforms to school once a week and hung out in the ROTC wing of the school.

Young Liberals - Future Clinton generation, they were ragged mercilessly. These guys would now be called EMO or Goth.

Of course all intermingled since one person could be categorized as all 4!

[Graphite]

We existed in a Caste system: Regents or AP

Regent Students were there just to cause trouble, pay their dues, and get the fk out of school. They new the admins on a first name basis and often skipped as many classes as they could. AP Students took their course mostly serious, fought hard to be the smartest in class, and were looking to advance in college. They new the best teachers in school on a first name basis. If you were in sports, a starter, especially football, AND an AP student, then you were not just cool but a God among men.

Everything else came secondary. As a transfer student, I refused to be apart of the system, which basically ment I participated in all three, known by many, loved by none, who viewed the entire high school experience as a job to get some where better. In other words, your basic Geek Loner. I was "too good" for the school, hated where I was with a passion, and didn't care that it ment more nights in front of the TV or school book, then hangin' with the social crowd.

When I mean a Caste system, I mean exactly that. It had complete control over your destiny and out look on life with little regard of who you were as a person or what potentially you could become. All this was preplanned and scheduled out by the end of 7th grade. You were ether going to suceed or be a failure. If you were determined to be a collosual failure, then you were kicked out of school as soon as possible so as to not hurt the bottom line. We lived in a jail and knew it, just some of us were treated with a little more respect.

By time I reached 10th grade, I had already been in two other high schools, so it was a serious challange on what to do with me. The soccer team didn't want me: I had been on a near european championship team, actually knew how to play the game, had the arrogance to tell the coach he was wrong, but didn't have the physical skills or team leadership to back it up. Regents was a joke, and the bar sooo below par that there was no challenge. With only eight months into a two year course I scored a perfect grade for Global Studies. However, I didn't care to be the best student in school or have a competivie enough spirit, nor viewed myself as such with weak areas in English and Arts, so only half my classes were AP. The rest went into Tech classes, cause I was curious about things like Autocad, electronics and Engineering.

Basically, I was the only person who did "cross polinization" and while it resulted in a strong education and excellent prep work for myself, I hated practically every moment of it socially. This I should say was the only time I never adapted to my new environment or ever stopped being the "New Guy." It often felt like I had no friends and no one had interest in becoming one, or at least an indication that I could. Did I have a massive chip on my shoulder? Yeah, but I also felt so out of sink that I didn't dare join in. Extremely extremely frustrating, and I wished so many times we never left either of the other two schools, but hey the past is the past and I guess I should stop ranting...

[Joe Schmoe]

Mine had pretty much jocks, drama club, the screw ups, the freaks (random mix of geeks, anime fans, and video gamers), and extremely obese bisexual goth chicks. :lol: And by bisexual, I mean they couldn't get dudes, so they started having sex with each other.

[coldcut]

If I had posted this when I was a little less tired I'd like to think I would have caught the misspelling. I knew something was off, I just thought it was that I wasn't using the little ` thing.

It's interesting that most people are saying that their high schools weren't that stratified. I remember mine being incredibly segregated in terms of social cliques. You'd be hard pressed to have friends outside of a clique, and inter-clique dating was out of the question. I know my generation was sort of bizarre, stuck smack in between GenX and GenY. (Generation XY: The manliest generation) But high school's always been pretty polarized. Teenagers are extremists by nature, and social interaction is rarely an exception.

Maybe it says something about large public schools or The South more than anything.

[Knightward]

I remember mine being divided into 3 distinct groups. Granted there were subdivisions and lines blurred in some cases, but in the end, you were one of three. Here it is as best I remember, but I'm also extremely biased:

Prep/Jock/Druggie/Wiggers: This was pretty much the majority. They were also usually disgustingly rich. Somehow getting SUV's for their 16th birthdays made them think they were toughing it up in the ghetto.
Koreans: Practically half the school. Whether they were nerdy or acting like thugs, they tended to stick together. Also, the more of them were together the more likely they were to pretend they didn't know English.
Nerds/Band Geeks: People who were generally nice or at the bottom of the social food chain usually wound up here. It was also the smallest of the general groups.

There were also no goths whatsoever in my school. I was the closest we had having gothed out at the prom.

[Istasi]

Well let's see.. I'm just a little (in the figurative sense, not actually small ;P) freshman in HS, but here's how it works in my school

"Popular" Kids: Your typical polo-wearing, sport playing crew. Different tiers within here, but these are the kids who go out and drink, smoke, and manage to stay "cool" through all the stupid stuff they do. Could care less about their grades.
Urban/Gangsta/Thugs: You know the deal. Very few of these are actually "off the streets" as I live in a very well off suburb, but you don't want to pick a fight with these kids.
"Normal" Kids: Pretty much where I fall in. Usually fairly intelligent, funny kids who are pretty chill. Play a sport or two, wear your typical t-shirt and jeans/shorts. Hard to quantify as we're a pretty diverse group, and we aren't gonna attack anyone because they hang out with different people than we do.
Goths/Emos: Don't like to talk to anyone but other goths/emos. Wear black, dye their hair, etc etc.
Drama People: They do plays. Usually very outgoing and often loud people. Very funny.
A/V Crew/Robotics: These kids know more about technology than the IT managers at our school. They set up projectors, win robotics competitions, and generally play a lot of video games.

However, these cliques aren't actually that prevalent. And I know it seems odd, but the girls seem to jump around MORE than the guy do.

[Graphite]

Rereading my post, thinking about the past, and my own personal studies, it really is amazing how much of my "fallout" in High School was singularly due to being a military brat. It was also the only school I lived that did not have a Air Force population, as my Dad had just retired. I was completely a fish out of water struggling to breath. Yeah, my post its a bit off topic but I just wanted to keep talkin'.

[Charon]

"Normal" Kids: Pretty much where I fall in. Usually fairly intelligent, funny kids who are pretty chill. Play a sport or two, wear your typical t-shirt and jeans/shorts. Hard to quantify as we're a pretty diverse group, and we aren't gonna attack anyone because they hang out with different people than we do.
It's all subjective. ;)

Also I didn't know wearing polo shirts made you a **** in America... Which is worrying because I have a lot of them.

[Stalking Shadow]

Also I didn't know wearing polo shirts made you a **** in America... Which is worrying because I have a lot of them.

Hahah. ****.

[Dr Jack Wolfe]

It's all subjective. ;)

Also I didn't know wearing polo shirts made you a **** in America... Which is worrying because I have a lot of them.

Depended more on how you carried yourself. My school, i guess, was very stratified. There was a group of rich kids who lived in early versions of the isolated "Gated Communities" and farm kids that surrounded those communities. The gated/country club kids went to one junior high, the farm kids the other. Huge sports rivalry between the junior high schools. Then in 9th grade both fed the High School. Nice conflicts those first few weeks, although summer football camp tended to make the guys friends pretty quick.

So you had a professional/blue collar rift

You also had the Jocks

The party folks

the braintrust

the drama/yearbook/news folks

student government

the smoking pit crew


You did get some independent mixed group, my group of close friends were a mix of Drama/Newsies/Braintrust/minor jocks/Rich/and Farm kids. We were all geeks too.

Dating outside of groups was not tolerated.

Now the jocks and the party folks thought they were popular, I suppose they were numbers wise (Great parties, beer, coke, public nudity), but they tended to do the "mean" things you see in teen movies. Pick on people, expect things. Interestingly enough, this group had rich kids and farm kids. It was also the group who I ended up in fights with the most. A lot of my friends were not that physical and targets, the advantage of our mixed group was we had enough physical guys that we could protect them. Unfortunately we had to at times. :(

Of course I'm sure no one ever thinks their group was wrong.

[Knightward]

Heh, and by the time I got into high school pretty much no one got into fights anymore. With all the crap they'd get into from the school it wasn't worth the effort. Didn't stop people from acting/thinking they were tough though. Shame too, I'd have probably put a lot of them in their place if it ever got that far...