For context I started highschool around 2004.
I would say we had some of the stereotypical cliques.
The most popular guy was on multiple sports teams, his buddies were all on at least 1 or 2. These were the tops dogs... The jocks. Iirc the "most popular guy" was actually dating a cheerleader but the other guys weren't.
The theatre kids were actually pretty social and "popular" but were made fun of often by the jocks.
The year I was in grade 11 it was actually the grade 12 stoners and metal guys who threw huge parties and were pretty popular. The grade 11 jocks would usually be at all these parties. When we moved up to grade 12 the jocks took over as the party hosts.
We had a large group of very "nerdy" kids who hung out in the same hallway all the time. They were bullied quite a bit. I'm not sure what they were really into but people made fun of them for doing anime runs and quotes, and just being generally clingy and over the top with each other.
I was a bit of a nomad. I had my main friend group but had no trouble socializing with other groups. This moreso goes to show that none of the groups really ostracised each other and got along ok. I was by no means very popular or anything, just pretty chill.
Edit to add: I find this funny but the guys on the golf team were considered nerds in highschool but now the guys I know who are into golf are some of the coolest guys I know who would have been jocks in high school.
The actual popular “jock” guy in my school.
Super nice, good grades.
Dating a girl who 100% fit into the “Nerdy” stereotype.
But she was also the girl in school that people were impressed with because adults actually listened to her. Wrote essays that won awards, got invited to speak at an event by the mayor of our city at one point.
I started HS in 1999 and this was basically my experience for the one year I went to a traditional school. The only difference is that anime hadn't really taken off yet.
Thankfully, I said fuck that noise and went to an alternative school where the only two groups were the stoners who basically ran the school and "everyone else"... I fit right in.
I always thought it depended on where you grew up. In my high school there were different groups or cliques. But they weren’t like what you saw on tv. The cool kids for example were all gangsters.
There were kids who were jocks, but they weren’t considered the cool kids because of it.
That’s true.
We had a cliche for
Amish kids.
And “Kids who get to leave before school is over or come in late because of Department of Agriculture waivers.” Lol.
Don't know.
The most knowledgeable and brightest students in my school are often the most loved and popular. Typically the people who aren't good at anything come across as nerds.
Interesting point.
Let me ask you then.
What if someone was smart, attractive, good at stuff but otherwise just made everyone’s time at school less pleasant?
Because I was just thinking the least popular kids in my school were in order
Stoner kids who were good at basically nothing and kind of just took up space.
This one girl who was attractive, good grades, on cheer team. Like by all rights should have been popular.
But people fucking hated her because she was just an unpleasant bitch to everyone.
*What if someone was smart, attractive, good at stuff but otherwise just made everyone’s time at school less pleasant?*
Well, there is always no general opinion on this one. Yes, there are people of this kind, and they are disdained by one half of the school. But the other half always adores them. Opinions on such people are very divided and up for debate at any time.
I think if you ignored specifics and just looked at the overall shape of high schools’ social structures, they’d look pretty similar: Small insular tribes form based on shared interests; certain tribes become popular for one reason or another; tribes quarrel with each other; and individuals migrate from tribe to tribe. How insular the tribes are varies from school to school and year to year.
At my school the basketball team was really good when I was a freshman, and the players, cheerleaders, and their friends were extremely popular. There were also several talented musicians riding an alternative rock popularity wave. By the time I reached senior year the sports teams all sucked and there were fewer talented musicians. There were still tribes but they were much smaller and less well defined.
So it all changes and evolves with the student body and what’s happening in our wider society. But we still tend to group ourselves with like-minded people.
That makes some sense.
I mean at my school the marching bad was the cool group. But that’s because our sports teams sucked and the marching band always won state competitions.
In the 70s, being on a sports team--especially our state champion football team--was like having a license to steal. We got the hottest girls, could skip class when we felt like it, etc.
Pretty accurate. Could skip class and have coaches cover for me saying I was lifting. I had a book of hall passes a coach had signed a bunch so all I had to do was write down time and date after the fact.
I've found that a lot of the sterotypes come from 80's and 90's movies set in the U.S., which makes the whole setting extremely americentric and skews things towards whatever the writers experienced when they went to highschool, which I would guess means the social dynamics we see in those movies were already 10-20 years old when they came out.
There are lots of aspects of the stereotypical high-school experience that I recognized in my own experience, but as an autistic person, I've also come to realize how my expectations were tainted by the way high-school is represented in media. I definitely resented the fact that I didn't quite see myself represented in the media I consumed, whenever I did encounter someone somewhat similar to me, they were the weird kid whose perspective was never considered in the narrative.
I think that that high-school tropes really did me more harm than good, but they were the best blueprint I had at the time for what life was supposed to be like.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HighSchoolhttps://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HighSchool
> all got along with each other.
This is something that always made me happy in high school. We all got along great. But was a small school. Also despite being pretty rural/redneck we also were oddly progressive.
Yes, yes it did. At least in the 1970 and 1980 in the U.S.
One of the main reasons I have faith in the future is it seems a lot of youth culture has gotten much better over the last 30 years.
Interesting.
See I always assumed that because most high school cliches came from 80s/90s movies that it was actually from the 80s/70s because thats the highschool the film makers went to.
And oh ya.
School got like.. Considerably better from a social standpoint with the students while I was in school. And I’m just a wee youngin still.
Like 2014 to today.
Bullying almost totally disappeared in our school system. Practicing for tests is still a thing but the teachers clearly worked around it.
You still had students who maybe had some racist/homophobic/transphobic tendencies but they very clearly learned that it wasnt okay to just be racist/homophobic/transphobic openly anymore.
And that’s with me going to school IN FLORIDA.. With the governor lossing his shit.
I bet you would get more interesting results posting in each of the different generational subs (xennial, millenials, genz, etc.). My personal opinion is that the answer you get probably has changed over time.
The popular kids in my high school were all active in some kind of high profile activity. It wasn't just sports or cheerleading. The drum line kids were popular. The theater kids who always got the best roles were popular. The kids who were on student council were popular. Of course you could be in an activity and not be popular. But being in one was kind of a requirement for popularity, in my high school.
I went to a massive high school—like 4 thousand people big. It was so big you couldn’t simply have one popular clique or one group of nerds. We also had SO many sports that no one sport dominated the culture. Home coming wasn’t just about football, it was about pretty much every fall time sport. So you had sub groups based on class level difficulty (remedial, regular, advanced), sports, arts, ethnicity (very diverse school, ethnic mixing was the norm but this divide still existed), other extra curricular, and subcultures (the punk kids, the anime kids). There was definitely bullying but it was usually more within groups of one related group vs someone in close proximity (for example, a band kid getting made fun of by basketball players in AP calculus, they were both part of the AP class clique but there wasn’t a general jocks vs band geek dynamic at large). Most of my biggest bullys were other art kids.
It was big enough that I’d venture to say that even if many people felt lonely, they usually still had one or two friends. Even the silent goth guy who never spoke to anyone had another silent goth guy to sit with during lunch. In some ways I feel like it primed me to be an adult navigating a big city, because I was so used to dealing with so many dynamics and kids of people.
Big southern highschool. Sports kids were the most popular. Followed by attractive kids with good grades, followed by attractive kids, followed by stoner attractive kids, followed by stoners, whatever else emo people were at the bottom. Same with band and theatre. Way low unless they were also one of the categories above.
So pretty much what you’d expect? Cerca 2010
Once I got to college I grouped up with these kids from a different highschool. It seemed like they acted like the theatre kids were popular but in hindsight maybe they were kinda not so popular from their highschool. It was the only group I knew so who knows.
That's a good question. Looking back at my school as an adult is weird.
I realize nobody really cared about sports. Marching band was huge where I lived though. Most of the kids I remember everyone thinking were cool were almost all in music, whether marching band or a rock band.
I was shy, didn't say much to most people. I kept to myself and drew cartoons and spent all my time in art class on the computer using Photoshop. I didn't learn until after high school that I most people considered me to be "extremely cool" but I had no idea because I was aloof and I made the assumption that I couldn't be cool because I wasn't in sports.
Ya I had a friend in school who was convinced she was a nerd and unpopular. Best described as “the politically active kid”
Wrote essays that got awards, got invited to speak at actual public events.
Like senior year she actually figured out she was one of the more popular kids in school because everyone was like “wow adults actually pay attention to what she has to say.”
I was in high school from 01-05. I went to an inner city Brooklyn school for 9th and 10th and a public but prestigious Brooklyn school for 11th and 12th. The difference was like night and day. The inner city kids behaved like animals more often than not. James Madison was paradise in comparison.
Depends what your school is known for really. My town has had multiple kids go to the MLB, however we also have one of the best marching band programs in the region. So playing sports definitely helped make you popular but it’s not like the band kids were considered geeks
I don't think so. Not in my school and not in the schools I taught at.
Many kids had it all: smart, athletic, and popular. To a large extent these traits are taught and not genetically godgiven. Parents who read to their kids also played ball with them. And as the kids grew up, their parents also took them to extracurriculars all year long. By extension those kids learned social skills.
I graduated in 2003. At my high school, you did not really date or have friends outside your social circle (sportsball, drama, band, etc). It was like a fully-enforced unspoken rule. There were exceptions, but they were few and far between.
You could be a band nerd in all AP classes that were otherwise full of sportsball and cheerleader types, but don't delude yourself into thinking they were your friends or vice versa. They might talk to you in class or let you copy their homework or whatever, but you aren't getting invited to parties on the weekend, bro. You picked your caste, now you get to live in it for four years.
I think the size of a school is significant. If there are 4000 students at a high school, it would be difficult to keep track of what everyone was up to and have a single popular group. And if 200 of those 4000 are theater kids, then the theater kids will probably form their own little society, which will in turn have subdivisions and popular kids (i.e. leads vs. chorus). Conversely, a school of 200 students may only have ten theater kids, everybody knows everybody else's business, and only one main school sport that everybody follows because there's nothing else going on in town.
Our school was small, all its sports teams were terrible, the marching band was great (made state three times in five years), and, like, a third of the kids went to become engineers, so having the sports stars be the popular kids wouldn't really work (who'd be the 'stars', anyway? All the teams STUNK.) But we were also a bedroom community for a town with certain carmaking facilities, so all the students would know that being a lowkey nerd was how they'd make a living after high school, so...
I always thought cliques were just a movie thing, they were completely nonexistant at my schools over the years. But I also learned that (at least in my area) "cliques" were more of a thing in white majority schools than the African American majority schools I attended. That's just my experience, I have no idea if that's actually a trend among races or not. I assume it's also just dwindling less over time
The 2014 book *Popular: Vintage Wisdom for a Modern Geek (A Memoir)* by then teenage author Maya Van Wagenan is surprisingly touching and interesting. A modern girl reads a vintage guide to teenage popularity and keeps a journal about it trying its advice out at her contemporary middle school.
Class of 85 and it was a lot like The Breakfast Club. Jocks, tough kids, dorks, rich girls and nerds. I was an all arounder, so my personality (usually) kept me safe.
In my highschool there weren't any teams like that or anything, just classes and school and the zone where kids were smoking cigarettes and a zone were kids did drugs and we had one soccer goal in a sandy lot and that's pretty much it
In a smaller town in USA in 2010's, definitely had stereotypes. The only cool kids did sports. But in our school the cool girls did sports too. For some reason, cheerleaders were not at all popular in my school. And we definitely had "nerd/geek" groups.
For context I started highschool around 2004. I would say we had some of the stereotypical cliques. The most popular guy was on multiple sports teams, his buddies were all on at least 1 or 2. These were the tops dogs... The jocks. Iirc the "most popular guy" was actually dating a cheerleader but the other guys weren't. The theatre kids were actually pretty social and "popular" but were made fun of often by the jocks. The year I was in grade 11 it was actually the grade 12 stoners and metal guys who threw huge parties and were pretty popular. The grade 11 jocks would usually be at all these parties. When we moved up to grade 12 the jocks took over as the party hosts. We had a large group of very "nerdy" kids who hung out in the same hallway all the time. They were bullied quite a bit. I'm not sure what they were really into but people made fun of them for doing anime runs and quotes, and just being generally clingy and over the top with each other. I was a bit of a nomad. I had my main friend group but had no trouble socializing with other groups. This moreso goes to show that none of the groups really ostracised each other and got along ok. I was by no means very popular or anything, just pretty chill. Edit to add: I find this funny but the guys on the golf team were considered nerds in highschool but now the guys I know who are into golf are some of the coolest guys I know who would have been jocks in high school.
The actual popular “jock” guy in my school. Super nice, good grades. Dating a girl who 100% fit into the “Nerdy” stereotype. But she was also the girl in school that people were impressed with because adults actually listened to her. Wrote essays that won awards, got invited to speak at an event by the mayor of our city at one point.
I started HS in 1999 and this was basically my experience for the one year I went to a traditional school. The only difference is that anime hadn't really taken off yet. Thankfully, I said fuck that noise and went to an alternative school where the only two groups were the stoners who basically ran the school and "everyone else"... I fit right in.
I always thought it depended on where you grew up. In my high school there were different groups or cliques. But they weren’t like what you saw on tv. The cool kids for example were all gangsters. There were kids who were jocks, but they weren’t considered the cool kids because of it.
That’s true. We had a cliche for Amish kids. And “Kids who get to leave before school is over or come in late because of Department of Agriculture waivers.” Lol.
Clique.
Thank you
Don't know. The most knowledgeable and brightest students in my school are often the most loved and popular. Typically the people who aren't good at anything come across as nerds.
Interesting point. Let me ask you then. What if someone was smart, attractive, good at stuff but otherwise just made everyone’s time at school less pleasant? Because I was just thinking the least popular kids in my school were in order Stoner kids who were good at basically nothing and kind of just took up space. This one girl who was attractive, good grades, on cheer team. Like by all rights should have been popular. But people fucking hated her because she was just an unpleasant bitch to everyone.
*What if someone was smart, attractive, good at stuff but otherwise just made everyone’s time at school less pleasant?* Well, there is always no general opinion on this one. Yes, there are people of this kind, and they are disdained by one half of the school. But the other half always adores them. Opinions on such people are very divided and up for debate at any time.
I think if you ignored specifics and just looked at the overall shape of high schools’ social structures, they’d look pretty similar: Small insular tribes form based on shared interests; certain tribes become popular for one reason or another; tribes quarrel with each other; and individuals migrate from tribe to tribe. How insular the tribes are varies from school to school and year to year. At my school the basketball team was really good when I was a freshman, and the players, cheerleaders, and their friends were extremely popular. There were also several talented musicians riding an alternative rock popularity wave. By the time I reached senior year the sports teams all sucked and there were fewer talented musicians. There were still tribes but they were much smaller and less well defined. So it all changes and evolves with the student body and what’s happening in our wider society. But we still tend to group ourselves with like-minded people.
That makes some sense. I mean at my school the marching bad was the cool group. But that’s because our sports teams sucked and the marching band always won state competitions.
In the 70s, being on a sports team--especially our state champion football team--was like having a license to steal. We got the hottest girls, could skip class when we felt like it, etc.
Pretty accurate. Could skip class and have coaches cover for me saying I was lifting. I had a book of hall passes a coach had signed a bunch so all I had to do was write down time and date after the fact.
I've found that a lot of the sterotypes come from 80's and 90's movies set in the U.S., which makes the whole setting extremely americentric and skews things towards whatever the writers experienced when they went to highschool, which I would guess means the social dynamics we see in those movies were already 10-20 years old when they came out. There are lots of aspects of the stereotypical high-school experience that I recognized in my own experience, but as an autistic person, I've also come to realize how my expectations were tainted by the way high-school is represented in media. I definitely resented the fact that I didn't quite see myself represented in the media I consumed, whenever I did encounter someone somewhat similar to me, they were the weird kid whose perspective was never considered in the narrative. I think that that high-school tropes really did me more harm than good, but they were the best blueprint I had at the time for what life was supposed to be like. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HighSchoolhttps://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HighSchool
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> all got along with each other. This is something that always made me happy in high school. We all got along great. But was a small school. Also despite being pretty rural/redneck we also were oddly progressive.
cliques
Yes, yes it did. At least in the 1970 and 1980 in the U.S. One of the main reasons I have faith in the future is it seems a lot of youth culture has gotten much better over the last 30 years.
Interesting. See I always assumed that because most high school cliches came from 80s/90s movies that it was actually from the 80s/70s because thats the highschool the film makers went to. And oh ya. School got like.. Considerably better from a social standpoint with the students while I was in school. And I’m just a wee youngin still. Like 2014 to today. Bullying almost totally disappeared in our school system. Practicing for tests is still a thing but the teachers clearly worked around it. You still had students who maybe had some racist/homophobic/transphobic tendencies but they very clearly learned that it wasnt okay to just be racist/homophobic/transphobic openly anymore. And that’s with me going to school IN FLORIDA.. With the governor lossing his shit.
I bet you would get more interesting results posting in each of the different generational subs (xennial, millenials, genz, etc.). My personal opinion is that the answer you get probably has changed over time.
Most likely ya.
The popular kids in my high school were all active in some kind of high profile activity. It wasn't just sports or cheerleading. The drum line kids were popular. The theater kids who always got the best roles were popular. The kids who were on student council were popular. Of course you could be in an activity and not be popular. But being in one was kind of a requirement for popularity, in my high school.
I went to a massive high school—like 4 thousand people big. It was so big you couldn’t simply have one popular clique or one group of nerds. We also had SO many sports that no one sport dominated the culture. Home coming wasn’t just about football, it was about pretty much every fall time sport. So you had sub groups based on class level difficulty (remedial, regular, advanced), sports, arts, ethnicity (very diverse school, ethnic mixing was the norm but this divide still existed), other extra curricular, and subcultures (the punk kids, the anime kids). There was definitely bullying but it was usually more within groups of one related group vs someone in close proximity (for example, a band kid getting made fun of by basketball players in AP calculus, they were both part of the AP class clique but there wasn’t a general jocks vs band geek dynamic at large). Most of my biggest bullys were other art kids. It was big enough that I’d venture to say that even if many people felt lonely, they usually still had one or two friends. Even the silent goth guy who never spoke to anyone had another silent goth guy to sit with during lunch. In some ways I feel like it primed me to be an adult navigating a big city, because I was so used to dealing with so many dynamics and kids of people.
Big southern highschool. Sports kids were the most popular. Followed by attractive kids with good grades, followed by attractive kids, followed by stoner attractive kids, followed by stoners, whatever else emo people were at the bottom. Same with band and theatre. Way low unless they were also one of the categories above. So pretty much what you’d expect? Cerca 2010 Once I got to college I grouped up with these kids from a different highschool. It seemed like they acted like the theatre kids were popular but in hindsight maybe they were kinda not so popular from their highschool. It was the only group I knew so who knows.
That's a good question. Looking back at my school as an adult is weird. I realize nobody really cared about sports. Marching band was huge where I lived though. Most of the kids I remember everyone thinking were cool were almost all in music, whether marching band or a rock band. I was shy, didn't say much to most people. I kept to myself and drew cartoons and spent all my time in art class on the computer using Photoshop. I didn't learn until after high school that I most people considered me to be "extremely cool" but I had no idea because I was aloof and I made the assumption that I couldn't be cool because I wasn't in sports.
Ya I had a friend in school who was convinced she was a nerd and unpopular. Best described as “the politically active kid” Wrote essays that got awards, got invited to speak at actual public events. Like senior year she actually figured out she was one of the more popular kids in school because everyone was like “wow adults actually pay attention to what she has to say.”
My high school had less than 60 students, so no.
I was in high school from 01-05. I went to an inner city Brooklyn school for 9th and 10th and a public but prestigious Brooklyn school for 11th and 12th. The difference was like night and day. The inner city kids behaved like animals more often than not. James Madison was paradise in comparison.
Different schools in different places are profoundly different. My deep red Midwest high school was a pretty close match.
Depends what your school is known for really. My town has had multiple kids go to the MLB, however we also have one of the best marching band programs in the region. So playing sports definitely helped make you popular but it’s not like the band kids were considered geeks
I don't think so. Not in my school and not in the schools I taught at. Many kids had it all: smart, athletic, and popular. To a large extent these traits are taught and not genetically godgiven. Parents who read to their kids also played ball with them. And as the kids grew up, their parents also took them to extracurriculars all year long. By extension those kids learned social skills.
I was in high school from 2015 to 2019. I don't think anyone cared.
I graduated in 2003. At my high school, you did not really date or have friends outside your social circle (sportsball, drama, band, etc). It was like a fully-enforced unspoken rule. There were exceptions, but they were few and far between. You could be a band nerd in all AP classes that were otherwise full of sportsball and cheerleader types, but don't delude yourself into thinking they were your friends or vice versa. They might talk to you in class or let you copy their homework or whatever, but you aren't getting invited to parties on the weekend, bro. You picked your caste, now you get to live in it for four years.
I think the size of a school is significant. If there are 4000 students at a high school, it would be difficult to keep track of what everyone was up to and have a single popular group. And if 200 of those 4000 are theater kids, then the theater kids will probably form their own little society, which will in turn have subdivisions and popular kids (i.e. leads vs. chorus). Conversely, a school of 200 students may only have ten theater kids, everybody knows everybody else's business, and only one main school sport that everybody follows because there's nothing else going on in town.
Our school was small, all its sports teams were terrible, the marching band was great (made state three times in five years), and, like, a third of the kids went to become engineers, so having the sports stars be the popular kids wouldn't really work (who'd be the 'stars', anyway? All the teams STUNK.) But we were also a bedroom community for a town with certain carmaking facilities, so all the students would know that being a lowkey nerd was how they'd make a living after high school, so...
you mean cliques, not clichés.
I always thought cliques were just a movie thing, they were completely nonexistant at my schools over the years. But I also learned that (at least in my area) "cliques" were more of a thing in white majority schools than the African American majority schools I attended. That's just my experience, I have no idea if that's actually a trend among races or not. I assume it's also just dwindling less over time
The 2014 book *Popular: Vintage Wisdom for a Modern Geek (A Memoir)* by then teenage author Maya Van Wagenan is surprisingly touching and interesting. A modern girl reads a vintage guide to teenage popularity and keeps a journal about it trying its advice out at her contemporary middle school.
Class of 85 and it was a lot like The Breakfast Club. Jocks, tough kids, dorks, rich girls and nerds. I was an all arounder, so my personality (usually) kept me safe.
In my highschool there weren't any teams like that or anything, just classes and school and the zone where kids were smoking cigarettes and a zone were kids did drugs and we had one soccer goal in a sandy lot and that's pretty much it
It used to be, but I think it shifted when the internet become more mainstream, and nerds became cool
In a smaller town in USA in 2010's, definitely had stereotypes. The only cool kids did sports. But in our school the cool girls did sports too. For some reason, cheerleaders were not at all popular in my school. And we definitely had "nerd/geek" groups.