Highschool Popularity Hiarchy

[LadyObvious23]

:/ Aww...Arte I just wanna hug you. *hugs*

[Artemisia]

Awww....Thank you. Needless to say, High School doesn't hold the best memories for me. Of course, what I've always found kind of weird is that most girls I knew growing up treated me rather like a fellow girl. Our school did something odd for Valentine's and St. Patrick's Days. On Valentine's Day, the girls all had hearts and had to stay silent all day. If they talked to any boys, they had to give up their heart to that boy. The opposite was done on St. Patrick's Day.

I remember that the girls tended to forget and talk to me. It was weird.

[LadyObvious23]

You're welcome. And that sounds like an odd tradition. Sorta fun but odd.

[Artemisia]

It was odd, but not bad. I still have one of the hearts that I got that day. I had something of a crush on Robyn, and she reacted automatically to my voice and said hello. Looking back, I wish I had said no, though.

[LadyObvious23]

Just out of curiosity...why? Was she awful to you or something?

[Artemisia]

No, she was very nice to me, but I still feel that I took advantage of the situation and tricked her into giving me that heart.

[Valerie]

High school was fine. I went to high school, for the most part, in a pretty poor town. Everyone had a screwy family and the "rich" kids were middle class. So everyone got along pretty well (unless there was the normal petty high school drama, like "she stole my boyfriend" or whatever).

Elementary and middle school were much harder for me. I went to a small Catholic school for that one. The most kids that I ever had in my grade was 20 when we were in kindergarten. It thinned out over the years, since people came and went, as people are wont to do. So by 8th grade, there were 16 of us.

Growing up with a tight-knit group of people would have been great... if not for the very obvious differences in social standing. I never stop whining about it, so y'all already know I was poverty-born-'n'-raised. On the playground is where I spent most of my days. So I had nothing in common with these kids who had Playstations and DVD players and lots of clothes, whereas I had used N64 games we found at thrift shops and a VCR and like two uniforms that I cycled through and often went to school in damp because my mom couldn't be bothered to do the laundry at normal times.

You can guess how that went. It didn't help that, as hinted in the last paragraph, I was neglected/abused (though not physically), so I always felt too unworthy to talk to the other kids in the first place, especially since they had nicer houses than mine and were always clean and spoke without a hick accent. (I eventually lost the accent. Catholic schools are big on proper speech.) Their parents had all these cool occupations and were so cultured. My dad was a pest control guy and my mom was unemployed for most of it. My stepdad, who I lived with (my biological parents split when I was 2, I think), was an alcoholic who couldn't hold down a job, and part of that was because my mom is an emotional, jealous wreck that constantly called to make sure he was at work.

And my brother being mentally retarded. I didn't know he was retarded back then. I just said he was autistic, only it always came out as "artistic" when I was a kid. I don't remember the kids at school ever making fun of him (he didn't go to our school, so I can't even say for certain that any of them ever met him, since Mom wouldn't let anyone visit and she also wouldn't let me visit them on the occasion that I was invited to birthday parties and whatnot). I think I was just embarrassed by him. I was embarrassed by everything. It was... pretty bad. My whole childhood was pretty bad.

Anyway, the point is, I think they did try to include me, in the beginning, but eventually we all figured out how different we were and they switched to picking on me or ignoring me.

Good times.

[sgtrock]

High school was fine. I went to high school, for the most part, in a pretty poor town. Everyone had a screwy family and the "rich" kids were middle class. So everyone got along pretty well (unless there was the normal petty high school drama, like "she stole my boyfriend" or whatever).

Wow. I just realized that you grew up almost directly east of Gretchen Wilson.

[Artemisia]

This was my High School: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Hi ... Florida%29

I grew up in Tampa, FL.

I don't know if this is just sad, but one of the few things I really remember from HS was that one of the students who was severely bullied killed himself on the side steps of the school back in 1989.

[Trefle]

High school was fine. I went to high school, for the most part, in a pretty poor town. Everyone had a screwy family and the "rich" kids were middle class. So everyone got along pretty well (unless there was the normal petty high school drama, like "she stole my boyfriend" or whatever).

Elementary and middle school were much harder for me. I went to a small Catholic school for that one. The most kids that I ever had in my grade was 20 when we were in kindergarten. It thinned out over the years, since people came and went, as people are wont to do. So by 8th grade, there were 16 of us.

Growing up with a tight-knit group of people would have been great... if not for the very obvious differences in social standing. I never stop whining about it, so y'all already know I was poverty-born-'n'-raised. On the playground is where I spent most of my days. So I had nothing in common with these kids who had Playstations and DVD players and lots of clothes, whereas I had used N64 games we found at thrift shops and a VCR and like two uniforms that I cycled through and often went to school in damp because my mom couldn't be bothered to do the laundry at normal times.

You can guess how that went. It didn't help that, as hinted in the last paragraph, I was neglected/abused (though not physically), so I always felt too unworthy to talk to the other kids in the first place, especially since they had nicer houses than mine and were always clean and spoke without a hick accent. (I eventually lost the accent. Catholic schools are big on proper speech.) Their parents had all these cool occupations and were so cultured. My dad was a pest control guy and my mom was unemployed for most of it. My stepdad, who I lived with (my biological parents split when I was 2, I think), was an alcoholic who couldn't hold down a job, and part of that was because my mom is an emotional, jealous wreck that constantly called to make sure he was at work.

And my brother being mentally retarded. I didn't know he was retarded back then. I just said he was autistic, only it always came out as "artistic" when I was a kid. I don't remember the kids at school ever making fun of him (he didn't go to our school, so I can't even say for certain that any of them ever met him, since Mom wouldn't let anyone visit and she also wouldn't let me visit them on the occasion that I was invited to birthday parties and whatnot). I think I was just embarrassed by him. I was embarrassed by everything. It was... pretty bad. My whole childhood was pretty bad.

Anyway, the point is, I think they did try to include me, in the beginning, but eventually we all figured out how different we were and they switched to picking on me or ignoring me.

Good times.

*hugs Val* I'm sorry. That must've been painful.

[FlyingFish]

Honestly, I didn't have enough social awareness back in high school to tell you much about its social structure. Probably still don't.

Pretty much the same here. I wound up in the honors track clique and the drama club clique because I was involved in both activities, but I couldn't tell you (and did not care) what other groups were out there or how they ranked in relation to each other.

I never dated because I really don't understand heterosexual sex at all

Off-topic, but did you consider dating without sex? It's not a requirement, especially in high school, and a girl worth dating would have respected that you weren't comfortable taking things in that direction.

[Zanosuke Kurosaki]

FF, that's not off-topic in the least. Sexual politics are very much part of any high school's popularity hierarchy. The question of "who puts out" and "who's frigid" are (unfortunately) on way too many people's minds.

[Artemisia]

FF

Well, it didn't help that there were a lot of people who thought I was a gay male. . .plus I'm very socially awkward. I still haven't dated and I'm nearly 40.

[Valerie]

FF, that's not off-topic in the least. Sexual politics are very much part of any high school's popularity hierarchy. The question of "who puts out" and "who's frigid" are (unfortunately) on way too many people's minds.

tru dat. My friends were always trying to hook me up. It was obnoxious.

[Freemage]

My school was... well, it wasn't a very good high school. The local Marine recruitment used to call it "The Rockpile". If you were on the Honors track, you could get an adequate education out of it, but if not, you got a bunch of teachers who'd long ago given up hope of actually having any impact, and so were just going through the motions.

It was a poor suburban district, in the near-South suburbs of Chicago. Once upon a time, my school had been the "black" school in an otherwise white district; then they'd started forced busing, but because people are shit*, this led to whites abandoning the areas that would be bussed from. As a result, by the time I got there, we were already starting to bus black students to a black school from a (mostly white) neighborhood that was in walking distance to more racially diverse school. (If they still have those district lines now, that means black kids are getting bused to black schools instead of other black schools they live closer to. The technical name for it is "turning" a neighborhood. In one of the other threads, I've mentioned that I could literally count the non-black, non-white students that I actually knew the names of on one hand. Hell, I still remember them--Juan and Lisa were Hispanic, and France was Filipino.)

Now, since at the time, the white towns still had decent elementary/junior highs, this meant that the school had a very bizarre racial mix. The honors classes were mostly white (because those kids got the support to do well on the testing regimen that decided your track for the next four years); the regular and remedial classes were mostly black. And no one was ever JUST, say, an Honors English student--your track was your track, for the most part. Honors meant English, Economics, World/US History, the various Sciences and Math were all honors courses. And because of that, you generally had Phys Ed and other non-tracked classes (first and second year in any foreign language was 'regular'; after that, it was an Honors course automatically) at the same time as other honors students, though the sheer size of the school (around 2500 students) meant that you had some periodic interaction with non-honors kids, as well.

Now, one effect of this was that if you were Honors, that sort of was your clique. You might have a few friends from outside the honors classes, and no one gave a damn about crossing those lines (there wasn't much geek-hate, nor was there any honors snobbery as such), but generally, mere opportunity played a bigger role than deliberate social politics. The non-Honors tracks didn't have much to do with cliques, either... unless you want to count gangs, which there were a few of, but this was just before crack became an issue outside the inner cities, so being in a gang was basically an excuse to flash a funny hand sign and pick a fight with someone who used a different one.

This doesn't mean that bullying didn't happen, though--if you happened to fall into specific categories (visibly gender-different being at the top of the list), you would get targeted. It just wasn't as co-ordinated as it is in some schools. It was usually more a case of being largely invisible, than being actively picked on, though.