2/24/00
HIGH SCHOOL GROUPINGS
5 PAGES

I started thinking about this today, cuz you know, you gotta think about something. Cliques. In highschool specifically. I don't know how it was at other schools, but I know that at Mt. View, nothing was as clear cut as every single major media wants to make it out to be. In every single TV show and movie, they make it seem as though there are very definite lines drawn between cliques at school. SAVED BY THE BELL, CLUELESS, FREAKS AND GEEKS, and others I can't necessarily think of off the top of my head. Even THE BREAKFAST CLUB whose overriding message was that even though we are all in different groups, we're still all the same, still made it out like the lines were very concrete. they all make it out to be like there are your basic groups from the top of the food chain on down:

Jocks: Typically your popular kids. The football team. The basketball team. The cheerleaders. These are the kids who are looked up to, get voted prom queen, and are basically the envy of the entire school.

Socs: For lack of a better term. These are the kids who are the "in-crowd." The social directors of the school. Usually working hand in hand with the jocks at the top of the pyramid. They are the editors of the yearbook, student council president, pep squad people. They are perfect, beautiful people. They are always at the height of fashion, spend their free time at the mall, are always up on what's in and what's out. They were onto the Backstreet Boys the second they became popular. And the minute they become yesterday's news, they act like they never liked them in the first place.

Artists: These are the theater people, the musicians (not to be confused with band geeks), the painters, the writers, the poets. The kids who play guitar and make up songs about lost love and suicide. They aren't part of the "popular" crowd because according to their respective shows, they are above labels like that. They are typically the seemingly most mature kids in the school because they are in touch with their soul. They tend to VOLUNTARILY avoid the "in-crowd" thinking they are all a bunch of immature snobs.

The Rebels: Kids from this group are most likely to take an automatic weapon through the halls of the school. They tend not to belong to any group. They don't play sports or get involved in activities. They hate school and think it's cool that they get bad grades. They are the heavy drug and alchohol users who spend a lot of their free time fixing up their cars. The girls in these groups are usually easy and skanky. The guys are usually portrayed as one of two things: Big fat galutes, or James Dean.

Geeks: These are of course, all the smart kids who take college level courses and are members of the physics club and the band and don't play any sports. There are of course characterized as being gangly, uncoordinated, with no social skills, often wearing glasses, braces, and really unhip clothes. They are picked on and teased and are the lowest of the social ladder but unlike the artists, they yearn to be popular.

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Now, I don't know how it was at other highschools, but at Mt. View, the groups were not that well defined. Sure, in these shows there would always be the very special episode where the popular girl realizes that she should be nice the the nerdy kid in her class, but even so, there were still very defined lines between groups with very little bleedover.

At Mt. View, there was bleedover all over the place. With a few exceptions, I am hard pressed to put anybody into only one particular group. But even with a lot of group mixing, there were three BASIC groups that I saw defined at Mt. View. I am assigning names to them here just to make it easier to reference later on, but really after having discussed it with a few alumni, WE, the students never really named these groups. It was never said, "James is part of the Voc Kids crowd." It was more like, "James hangs out with Mike and those guys." We all knew what the groups were and where the blurry lines extended, but we never referred to any group by a specific name. So these names that I give now, are merely to make it easier to talk about.

The Popular Crowd: For lack of a better term. Really we referred to them all as the jocks even though at Mt. View, this was really the Jocks and Socs of the above descriptions all rolled into one. At our school which was too poor for football, the three popular sports, (i.e. the ones that drew a crowd and determined social fate) were Soccer, Basketball and Track. But, you weren't strictly a basketball player or writer for the newspaper. The head cheeleader was also class president. The captain of the soccer team also was yearbook editor. Like anywhere else, these were the most visible people at the school. The popular crowd. Even though Mt. View not being a particularly trendy place, they were still fairly conservatively dressed, boat shoes or sneakers the norm. Pop and rock was the music of choice.

Voc Kids: The closest other group I can put them near is the Rebel group described above. The kids who weren't much for academics, so they took classes at the vocational center to learn how to fix up cars and such. They bought cars and fixed them up. The girls typically were the more trashy, loose, worst behavior of men types. Wore boots and greasy jeans to school. At least the guys did. Country typically the music of choice.

Granolas: That's what we called them anyways. These were the arty, earthy types who smoked a lot of pot, listened to Phish, played guitar, sang in the chorus, and were the actors in the fall musical. Typically they wore thrift store clothing, bought by the pound and Keds-type sneakers with duct tape wrapped around to seal up the holes. Folky bluesy rock was the music of choice.

Like I said. These were the 3 BASIC groups. And at the core of each group there was no doubt some mocking and making fun of the other groups. The popular jock and activity types would make fun of the loser voc kids and vice versa. But nothing was that simple. Even as I think about attemping to break this down, I scratch my head, because there really is no way to define anything like this. Plus you have to add in that in addition to all the crossing over and overlapping, there were also kids who really didn't belong to any group. They weren't rebels. They just had their own little group of friends that AS A GROUP never did anything that really made them stand out as a group. But even with this, there was crossover.

Certain things about Mt. View were like anywhere else. There was definitely the popular crowd comprised mostly of the jock crowd. These were the most visible people at the school. They were the ones who everybody knew. With very few exceptions, if you were beautiful, you were in this crowd. Whether the two were directly related, I'm not so sure. It could be that these people were the most in shape because they were the athletes and so they were invariable part of that crowd. In fact I remember thinking about a few very beautiful girls who were not part of this popular crowd: "Why?" It was the rare exception for a really genuinely good-looking person, somebody who puberty didn't play cruel tricks on, to not be in the popular crowd. Not that only beautiful people were in this crowd. For that matter, being out of shape didn't necessitate not being on a sports team. Several of our cheerleaders did not have an athletic muscle in their body. But the point here being that even with blurred lines between groups, there was still a section that was definitely the "popular" crowd. The elite. The envied. Definitely the cliquiest group among the school, yet still allowing for lots of crossover and overlapping.

One of the things that I've been thinking about since the last paragraph and can't seem to get through accurately, even in my own head is how exactly the crossover worked at Mt. View. Because nobody seemed completely exclusive to one group. There was a lot of overlapping. Even the really deep rooted people in the jock popular crowd were good friends with many of the arty granola people. Even looking at that last sentence just doesn't look right because that is to imply that there was a definitely line between these two groups when there really wasn't. It was a blurred line at best. And any person who I can think of who might have fit into any of the stereotypes of their group inevitable had friends who weren't part of what deemed their circle. The prom queen / cheerleader / captain of the girl's soccer team had friends among all the other circles. A kid who wasn't on the basketball or soccer team, who was kinda chubby, and not really what would be considered one of "the most popular guys in school," got voted prom king. Yet not every crossover was considered kosher amongst the group that you were a part of. Somebody in the popular crowd could get looked down on or at least given a couple raised eyebrows at first for dating somebody too far rooted in the voc circle. I remember that specifically happening to me on one occasion. Most of my friends were in that popular crowd even though I was really more of an overlap. And I started going out with this girl who had no ties to anybody in my circle. As I said earlier, a lot of the voc girls were seen as trashy, so that's the impression my friends had. It wasn't like my reputation got damaged per se, but I did get some raised eyebrows and questions like, "Are you sure this is what you want?"

Maybe that last part of that last paragraph is the beginning of the answer to how crossover worked at Mt. View. Having ties to others in multiple circles. It's all about association. How many degrees of separation there are between you and the people of a certain group. Mt. View was the only high school in SAD #3 which encompassed something like 16 towns over a fairly large geographic area. 500 kids came to Mt. View from I think 7 different elementary schools across the county. From Kindegarten through 6th grade, these kids had to make friends amongst the kids in their elementary school. Usually at that age you don't hang out with kids more than 1 grade above or below you. So with classes of about 20-25 people, you're talking about trying to create a network of friends among only 75 people. By the time we all made the trip to Mt. View Jr. High, we each had a unit of about 10-20 people in our core of friendship. Those of us who had played youth basketball maybe had a slight advantage going into Jr. High and High School because we had been playing ball with kids from these other elementary schools and so had a bit of a headstart on what the social circles were going to be by the time we got there.

Inevitably, once we got to junior high, about 25-75 percent of the friends in your circle from elementary school get dropped. Either you cut them off or they cut you off, or you just end up drifting apart. Junior High was without a doubt the cliquiest time of my life. There actually did seem to be more definitely lines drawn and more emphasis and who and what was acceptable to your group. Back then, the popular kids really were the popular kids with very little crossover. And you were either in or not. How cruel it was that this period in your life coincides exactly with puberty when your horomones bring your emotions to the breaking point and your physical beauty to it's worst possible form. How cruel to make this the time when your social stature is pretty much sealed for the next 6 years. But I digress.

So how does this explain crossover? When the tightly knit cliques are formed in junior high, there are inevitably, those who are not included in the circles. Natural selection, they didn't make the cut. But a lot of times, what happens, what happened to me anyway is that some of your friends from elementary school did make the cut, and if they havne't cut you off, you still have a chance. I was not at the center of the popular crowd in junior high. I was however on the outer edge of the circle because several of my friends from elementary and from basketball were in the circle. So through association with them, I was in. Just barely in, but in. I was sort of tangental to that circle. Then as my two years in Junior High progressed, I of course made new friends and became parts of multiple circles.

Then came highschool. Here is when crossover became possible. The lines softened. Upperclassmen, selected certain freshman to "adopt." Certain freshman were pulled from their circles into others. These ended up being the freshman who had active social lives because unlike the rest of us who were too young to drive, they had licensed drivers to take them places. Yet another form of selection that I'm not quite sure how it worked. Pretty girls were an almost gauranteed in. Senior guys swooped down on them like prey. Freshman guys had it a little diffently. For the most part, senior girls didn't claim or adopt freshman guys. Generally, the way a freshman guy was adopted by upperclassmen was if he was the brother of somebody in the network, or if he made varsity his freshman year. Also if they got cast as a freshman in the fall musical, made the cut for the Chamber singers, or anything that showed you were good enough to be there with people who had been at it for a few more years. Then the upperclassmen kind of adopted them. The same I guess also went for the girls as well. If they were the sister of somebody or made varsity, they were invariably adopted by the upperclassmen. These usually ended up being the first among us to start drinking and smoking pot, mostly because they were going to the parties where that was going on. DAZED AND CONFUSED really got it on the money in that respect. The freshman Mitch. He wouldn't have started drinking and doing pot that summer if he hadn't been adopted by the seniors who were out partying. The upperclassmen are the ones who introduce you to it.

So the popular by association principle that we just explored in junior high works amongst the upperclassmen circuit as well. Some kid's older brother is an upperclassmen, so the kid gets adopted. His close friends are inevitably going to be brought in as well because they will get invited along by the adopted freshman at some point. Gradually, as more and more people are invited into that circuit, the circle widens and widens, including more and more people as each accepted member in turn invites a friend.

Freshmen knew that being picked by the upperclassmen was a mark of social status. Even the freshmen who said they really didn't care and didn't want to hang out with a bunch of drunks and druggies anyway, deep down are still wishing that they would have been picked and at least had the choice.

Now I run into the chicken or egg problem. When freshmen are adopted by seniors, they are going into the social web that is already in existence where the 3 basic circles are already intermingling. By the time these freshmen are seniors and adopting freshmen of their own, they will have adopted the practices of those who came before them, intermingling with people of all groups and not thinking twice about it. And not only that, but their classmates who were not adopted and are only now arriving with drivers licences into the social scene will be arriving at a web that is already in place. Did this web with it's blurred lines form because it was already in place by the time people got to highschool? Or did it form on it's own? Would it form on it's own if freshmen weren't adopted by upperclassmen? If a few select freshmen hadn't seen how the social network was working, would they in turn form their own network with more rigid lines 3 years later when they are the seniors? If they had no model to work off of, what would they have formed on their own? Who decided and when was it decided that there would be this much intermingling of groups?