...is High School in America anything like it's portrayed in TV shows? Like with the football team and cheerleaders being the head of the social pyramid and all the bullying and locker pranks etc?
So, I've always wondered...
...is High School in America anything like it's portrayed in TV shows? Like with the football team and cheerleaders being the head of the social pyramid and all the bullying and locker pranks etc?
I think the kids look nothing like the actors on tv, except maybe for Michael Cera.
This twenty-year-old boy was distinguished from childhood by strange qualities, a dreamer and an eccentric. A girl fell in love with him, and he went and sold her to a brothel...
Yes, although IMO the worst bullying happens in middle school.
Mine was nothing like that.
...
I wondered about this the other day, when I watched The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Do they really shove you into a locker for completing your essay ahead of time? Really?
Furthermore, why are lockers that large in american high schools? The ones we had in high school and now in the uni library can barely fit a backpack. Were they designed to fit nerds?
This twenty-year-old boy was distinguished from childhood by strange qualities, a dreamer and an eccentric. A girl fell in love with him, and he went and sold her to a brothel...
Yes, and no. Well, it was kinda like that back in the 90's, but I have no idea how it is currently, so I have no say on the subject. As for the lockers, at my high school, they were big enough to fit jackets, books, and maybe a small kid. Though, I doubt they were specifically designed to have a nerd fit in them.Originally Posted by Aulayna
Apparently, I have been declared banished.
Yeah, I could climb inside my jr. high and high school lockers.
In my experience, TV high school was more like jr. high. Everyone was super cliquey then when everyone's hormones begin to fly around. Kids were bitches and cared way too much about passing notes in school and popularity. Things mellowed out a lot once we got to high school. (but that didn't keep me from hating it)
YES. Although I live in the South so yeah... hardly setting the American standard.
Because I'm one hell of a butler.
Agree with those who said that it was more like Junior High/Middle School than High School.
Well, the first high school I went to was in a very small town. We'd all been together since elementary, and people were so cruel. No matter what you did to change your image, once you were in a certain group, you were there. I got bullied up til my junior year. I can't say that the football players and cheerleaders were top of the social pyramid, though, although they usually were in the more popular cliques.
My second high school was awesome. I love that place so much even now. Which is weird to say. It was a really large school, but everyone intermingled with everyone. I guess there were cliques in the sense that certain people hung out with certain people with their same interests (drama kids, choir kids, sports kids, etc) but that doesn't mean it was exclusive. I had friends in all of the groups. And in that school, there was a lot of cross-over. There were so many football and cheerleader girls in choir, choir kids who did drama, drama kids who were in Science Olympiad, Science Olympiad kids who did sports...
Everyone was open, and so it made the last two years of my high school experience mostly pleasant.
Yes. A lot of the popular kids in my high school were impressionable especially by the media so they fufilled the jock cheerleader stereotype. Also a majority of the cheerleaders were pretty hot. I would say most the popular guys though were ugly, but they were football players so whatdya expect. Some of the other popular kids played soccer or were just rich. There was also some huge racism going on in our school.
The popular kids still hang around eachother to this day but none of them are really do anything interesting. I only bothered friending a few and even those people I can barely stomach. Nerds weren't shoved in to lockers though. A few of them were teased for being socially awkward, but they were placed in special classes so were hardly in the same ones as the jocks. And yes, I agree that the worse bullying occured during middle school.
Ouch. :/
I mostly asked this as it was a weird conversation we had at a bar the other night about if we'd grown up in America what would everyone have been like at school. Which got me thinking, the stuff in TV is very different to the stuff I experienced going to a comprehensive school in the East End of London. I can imagine as Shiny said a lot of it is very self-perpetuating due to the media.
After reading this though. Gee, no wonder people make anecdotes about highschool being hell. I can't even imagine what that would've been like to grow up in.
Keep in mind that America is a big place with a lot of different influences and cultural biases that shift based on the location. Growing up in the north east is not the same as the south nor the midwest nor the west coast, and even in those areas there's a certain amount of gradation between the local cultures. You also have to account for class sizes and socioeconomic make-up: poor rural schools are not the same as poor urban schools and neither are going to be the same as rich suburban schools. Even year over year the composition is different based on whatever is currently trendy.
Movies and TV heavily cherry pick some common stereotypes (bullying, hot chicks, jocks) to play out in a fabricated environment but the social dynamics between each school vary wildly. Some places there's more intense bullying than others, some have almost no bullying. Some have strong sense of cliques, some are wholly integrated. Some even value the education experience significantly more than others.
So the answer is yes and no. There's some common threads between the fictional representation and the reality of it, but it's more like writers are taking inspiration from their high school experiences rather than writing verbatim what they experienced. Which is good, because a direct account of high school would most likely be incredibly boring for a large proportion of people who went through it.
What was your experience in school in London, Aulayna?
Well to put in perspective we were in year groups - with about 3 seperate classes ranked based on achievement with about 20-30 in each class, for years 7-11. So that's roughly only 300 pupils. Our school was relatively small campus wise.
There was a bit of bullying around the year 8 (so 12'ish when everyone was getting hormonal) but the majority of it tended happen outside of school. London has a lot of schools and you often got bullied based on what school you went too (which because everyone wore school uniforms it was pretty easy to determine).
There were a few who got involved in drinking toward the end of year 11 but beyond that most people got a long, and you knew pretty much everyone in your year group - either as friends or just acquaintances.
We didn't really have a lot in the way of after school groups etc so whilst there was some cliqueyness and people who were more popular/known than others it never really resulted in any clashing - especially as due to the achievement ranking which meant you rarely crossed paths with people you might normally have butted heads with.
There were some fights which were usually the result of silly disagreements.
I guess I was kind of in the right place at the right time though as I moved there not long before the end of middle school and the high school I went too wasn't one of the better ones in the borough but the faculty were doing everything they could to improve it and our year group was one of the first for all the new changes to be applied too.
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