High School Cliches

My high school is like this. Probably much different then what you remember depending on your age.

I don't like them to be so cliche but if done uniquely and written well why not?

the Big Party--everyone's drunk and having a good time, and then Something Bad Happens.

Cliques do exist. The jocks hang out with each other because they have more in common, same to the other cliques.

And Lol, what shady said.

X popular boy falls in love with X unpopular girl for no reason and vice-versa. Also the old one where the ex-girlfriend/ex-boyfriend wants revenge because his/her ex is now dating somone else.

I second that "popular guy in love with unpopular girl" thing. Seriously, when does that happen? and how does he fall in love with her if he doesn't KNOW her?

vroth said:

I second that "popular guy in love with unpopular girl" thing. Seriously, when does that happen? and how does he fall in love with her if he doesn't KNOW her?

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he falls in love with her INNER BEAUTY. it EMANATES FROM HER NERDY SHELL.

Mmmmm nerdy shell..

What about highschool isn't cliche?

I think my favorite thing in highschool was the people that hated "conforming". It was like they hated anything preppy (which I could understand, but hating it because it conformed and not because of the way it looked...), yet they conformed to another sterotype, usually a more strict sterotype.

Mine was not and its probably why I have such a hard time relating to books like that. For the record we were the only class not to have specific "groups" of people. Almost every knew everyone. There were 156 kids in my grade. Sure we had the weirdo geeks, and the preppy kids, and the basketball players, the cheerleaders, stoners, etc., but everyone was friends with everyone. If you were popular, you didn't get shit for talking to a band geek, ya know.

ha, yeah, my graduating class had 38 people. makes it a hell of a lot less impressive that I was homecoming queen, prom queen, and valedictorian.

My high school was definitely like this in terms of people types. In my opinion, high schoolers group themselves into these stereotypical groups because they haven't developed their own personalities fully yet. I'm in college now, and these groups still exist, but they're less stringent.

In my high school though, you weren't going to get blacklisted because you talked to someone in another group. Everybody talks to each other; they just don't hang out. I think the "shun the outsider" thing comes more from books and movies.

Okay, I'm not sure if these are necessarily "clichés" because my high-school experience has been...limited, to say the least. However, I would say that these are the ones that make me shudder:

- The treatment of the social hierarchy as something you can actually "climb", by schmoozing, integrating yourself, etc. I don't know how that one would work. In my school, there is no definitive hierarchy. Sure, we have popular kids and unpopular kids, but a lot of people just float in the middle. You can gravitate from "middle" group to "middle" group, but you can't take the leap from "middle" to "popular."
- Almost a "part B" to the first one: popular people who are painfully aware of their social standing. "Nineteen Minutes" by Jodi Picoult (although not YA) is a prime example of this. All the kids in that treated their school like it was some kind of red carpet/tightrope. Now, I don't know if this is just me, but in my school, most popular kids just...are. I agree with ThePenDragon on this, basically. I hate that social self-awareness.
- The sense that "OMG IF I DON'T CONFORM TO EXACTLY WHAT MY FRIENDS WANT, I'LL BE OSTRACIZED." Okay, I've seen people get the cold shoulder. But, to me, the school social hierarchy isn't a slide. You don't get pushed into an unending abyss of darkness and ugly if you do/don't do one little thing.

oh, and the "unpopular kids" can be just as bitchy and unaccepting as the popular kids. it's not like if you get booted of the cheerleading squad for wearing the wrong lipstick, you're going to get welcomed into the island of misfit toys.

I find it interesting that you have the popular witch but not the person you find everywhere--the popular girl who is popular because she is an absolute sweetheart to everybody and their mother (which is not to say that she can't be annoying/shallow). In my experience, there are both, but the popular sweetheart is the most popular.

My high school is nothing like this!
I am SO happy to say this, and I swear I'm not lying.

My school has a Personalized, Self-Directed Learning program (PSDL) which is uncommon, and very different from the normal classroom structure. It tends to attract both intense nerds and intense slackers, and those who don't like traditional gym class or traditional anything. Basically, we attract those who just don't fit in or do well at normal schools. We ARE the island of misfit toys.
Also, we are located right in the middle of the city, so you get kids from many, many different Jr. Highs.

Okay, so, there are still bitches. Assholes. People who think they're so much better than everyone else. The thing is, they think they're stranger, cleverer, more special than everyone else instead of prettier, more athletic, more charming.
It's a very different dynamic.

Socialization is VERY mingled. My circle of friends contains one extreme jock, one just-scraping-by slacker, several honours-classes kids, Wiccans, Protestants, girls, boys, prudes, promiscuous people, nerds, possibly stoners, peppy school-spirit types, slightly emo kids, and at least one dedicated writer. We all sit together at lunch every day.

I'm comfortable using these labels when people choose them for themselves, y'know?

There're still cliches. Ten-minute relationships, HUGE ANGSTY DRAMA OMG, I-hate-my-parents, etc. But you will never see a gaggle of teenagers walking down the hallway in my school who all look and sound identical. I think this is the case in most high schools, but you have to look below the surface to see that individuality. At my school it's what ties us all together - we're pretty much all freaks and happy with it.

If I had heard a Catholic school described this way before seeing it, I would not have believed it. Really, the Edmonton Catholic School Board screws up in a lot of areas but this school really does the true meaning of Christianity justice. I'm an atheist but even I feel good about the Catholic faith when inside that building, compared to the reeking hypocrisy and falseness of it in previous Catholic schools.

Yeah, I sound like the head of Public Relations or something. For the first time in my life, I actually love my school, the people in it, and I love going there every day. Every kid should be as lucky as me when it comes to education.

YAwriter72 said:

Mine was not and its probably why I have such a hard time relating to books like that. For the record we were the only class not to have specific "groups" of people. Almost every knew everyone. There were 156 kids in my grade. Sure we had the weirdo geeks, and the preppy kids, and the basketball players, the cheerleaders, stoners, etc., but everyone were friends with everyone. If you were popular, you didn't get shit for talking to a band geek, ya know.

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THANK YOU. My high school was a little bigger--230 graduated in my class, but it was still small (esp. when you take into account that it was people from several towns).

The cliches just did not apply. Or the little rigidly defined friendship circles. This is actually something my friends & I discussed on occasion during college, and none of my college friends had these cliched sort of high schools either.

I honestly couldn't tell you who was the most popular in my high school. There were people who were better known than others, but for all different reasons. Friends were friends, regardless of if they were cheerleaders, good students, athletes, etc etc.

I went to a couple of different high schools with very different flavors. One was a school with a great reputation for the arts, so people tended to admire the creative folks. There wasn't nearly as much in the way of closed groups and no one group or person I could identify as *teh popular* Most of us had friends with a variety of backgrounds and talents and interests. Image was important, but not some mall produced image. People dressed goth and 40's and prep and edgy and girly and jock and etc. and it was all good.

Another school I attended pretty much fit the mold. I always floated because I was a varsity athlete (popular), but also in the orchestra and choir (not so much). There were more heavily labeled unpopular groups - and this was a place where "nerd" was not cute. The most popular girls wore high heels with satin capris and halter tops and leaned against their lockers sucking lollipops. Srsly. I never thought they were bad people, just hyper-aware of their image. Parties, yes. Bullying, not too much.

ETA: One trope that I just don't buy is the popular mean girls picking on the random nerdy girl. I've never seen that. The nerdy girl is usually considered so far beneath the mean girls that they don't bother. Who do the mean girls really attack? The girls who are trying really, really hard to become popular or, most often, the girls who used to be popular but fell out of favor for whatever reason. Courtney Summers wrote about that in Some Girls Are - and it rang so true.

When I see those tropes in books, it makes me think of America. American books and movies introduced me to the concept.

My secondary school wasn't like that. My school had sports teams, but it wasn't such a big thing. There weren't any cheerleaders. People had friends and enemies, but it wasn't a rigidly defined thing based on pre-assigned cliques.

I think the problem with these cliches, even if there are elements of truth to them, is that they are written as cliches. Schools may have the gaggle of popular cheerleaders, that's fine. But some writers just shove the group in there and expect you to believe it and accept it without really justifying it for their novel.
"Why are these girls popular?"
"oh, you know, because the school needed a popular group."
"and why are they picking on the nerd?"
"because that's what popular girls do. and I needed a plot."

I didn't go to high school, and I know of all these tropes without having my own experiences with them. Yes, clique-y-ness, ostracizing, basic social dynamics happen with any large group of teens, but you have to make them real and make sense for whatever world you plop them into. Sometimes it seems writers just go with what seems to be "normal" and not with what's true.

Honors versus non-Honors was a bigger thing than popular versus non-popular in my class. If you were in honors classes, you knew all the other people who were, whether they were popular or not. I think the "smart" kids were more excluding and cliquish than the "popular" kids. Popular was a forgivable offense. Stupid was not.

I'm not a huge fan of these cliches, because they just don't ring true to me. The drama kids weren't all only drama kids--most of them also did newspaper, or track, or ski team, or yearbook.

I've known a mean cheerleaders and a depressed drama kid, and a brainless stoner, but the cheerleader was also the person who put the most effort into fund raising, the drama kid was the kid who baked cookies for everyone, and the stoner was the only person who cried when the teacher read really tragic poems to the class.

Cliches smack of bad characterization and lazy writing. In high school, in my experience, there is so much going on inside a person that they just don't have time to draw black and white lines around people to denote social groups. And at least up here, we went to elementary school with people who ended up in all sorts of cliques. And middle school, too. You knew the kids in your class, even the ones you hated.

It's hard to categorize and label people you know, and hard to maintain cliches and cliques that strongly when the people are real to you. In my experience, you can only be that way to people you don't know. And if you've gone to school with these people before, especially, there's no way you don't know people all over.

Ummm....

My high school wasn't cliche. We had jocks in choir, straight A students on the football team... our drama program was the most random group of people-- jocks, student body kids, weirdos, academic achievers, etc. We had some cliques but they weren't typical. I was lucky.

Epiphany said:

Ummm....

My high school wasn't cliche. We had jocks in choir, straight A students on the football team... our drama program was the most random group of people-- jocks, student body kids, weirdos, academic achievers, etc. We had some cliques but they weren't typical. I was lucky.

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Hm, yeah we had cliques, but they were...different.
No one really stayed with one group the whole time.
Except the really bitchy girls. They weren't popular, they were just bitchy.

Stunted said:

The gaggle of popular bitches. The group of stupid, gorgeous jocks. The totally normal-seeming MC who everyone thinks is weird for some reason.

Was your high school like this?

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You have successfully described my high school. Mostly. We do have cliques -- anyone that says we don't needs to take a look around the lunch room -- but the school is way too small for us not to associate with each other. I have friends and people I hate all across the board.