Clique Poll
Wow, I’m on a roll today. The entry I wrote about high school made me wonder what cliques or perceived social groups people I know were in during high school. Report them here! 😀
I’d also like to know what group your significant other was in, just to see how things have ended up in the real world.
Use the cliques found here and here.
Me: Advanced placement, church people/youth grouper, individualist, nerd, friend of orchestra geeks, Korean/Asian, tomboy, possibly student government (but not actually *in* student government), new wave.
Hmm, I need another list.
huh. AP and Nerd are the only ones of that list that really apply. I never really fit in in high school, but I wasn’t really a loner either – I had my crowd of nerds, and we somehow managed to get along with other folks. Heck, I even managed to win a Student Government position (okay, it was treasurer) one year.
Interestingly, I went out to dinner with a friend from high school this evening, somebody I’d seen maybe twice in the past fifteen years. It got me thinking about those days with a touch of nostalgia. Except not really. College was so so so much better for me than high school.
I guess I would have to say I was an Individualist, but mainly because (while voted most friendly in my senior class) I didn’t fit into an one clique and floated very easily between most of them. Of course, there are some cliques that are just not as easy to be in contact with if you are not one of them but what do you do.
I guess, I could have been Church People but I didn’t really get into that in high school and didn’t really have time for those kids in any deep way.
Interesting topic to think back on.
My list of cliques is full of contradictions. I’d say I was a part of the following although I’m very proud of some of them:
AP, Blonde, Band Geeks, Cheerleaders, In Crowd, Student Government, and sadly “Queen Bee”
I’ll let Chad post his own but I know that it is very different fomr mine excpet for band geeks.
– Advanced Placement (mostly just science)
– Alternative
– A/V Club (only as it pertained to some band functions)
– Band Geeks
– Gamers
– Hackers (I co-wrote horse race program and ran the bets)
– and I was friends with a lot of the Theater People
Alhtough I think I was percieved mainly as a Joe Smoe and maybe Band Geek. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, my regular group of friends consisted entirely of people who weren’t from the area. We all either moved around a lot or moved in from out of state. As a group we didn’t fit into a particular clique and I think most people probably weren’t sure what to make of us.
Advanced Placement students
Alternative
Artsy
Debaters
This was High School. I would add nerd/geek before that. I stopped hanging out with that crowd in high school. Those guys went of to “Heavy metal subculture”. Actually, we called them “burnouts.” They hung around convenience stores smoking and skipping school.
This discussion triggered a memory that I still have my “nerd jacket” from my high school honors award somewhere. I hope it didn’t get thrown out! I’ll nerd out like it’s 1994.
I still sometimes wear the same black flight jacket I wore in high school. It is real air force issue, not a cheap knock-off, and is almost indestructible.
College was so so so much better for me than high school.
I find that that’s how a lot of people feel, mostly because that’s when they end up finding what I found in high school.
However, I never found a real niche that I felt happy in at MIT, and it’s the first place I had really experienced institutionalized sexism (so institutionalized that people didn’t seem to notice it), because before that, I was smoking my peers to the degree that they never challenged the fact that I was a girl, whereas there was a constant question of quota-filling (which MIT emphatically does NOT do, but it doesn’t change that most people don’t seem to know it when they are there, including myself) brought up by others and, eventually, me of myself.
For me, going from a high school where learning and teaching were passionate things, to a primarily research-focussed institution was a big shocker. It’s a great school for many, many people, but in retrospect, it was not the right fit for me. I used to blame the school entirely, but I think I’ve largely come to realize that it was a matter of compatibility.
I sound like I am doing a post-portum on a relationship. 😀
I floated from group to group depending on what drama happened to be unfolding at the time. At any one point, I was probably a member of at least three different groups.
– Advanced placement students: we didn’t have AP courses, but we had Honors courses which didn’t do anything for your college applications, I should point out.
– Alternative/Grunge: This was especially true my junior year. One of my friends from the “popular” clique slept with my boyfriend and when things got ugly, I quit being friends with the lot of them. One of my friends from elementary school and junior high was firmly entrenched in the alternative group and she took me in and told everyone to be nice. I loved the freedom of wearing jeans, white t-shirts, flannels, and combat boots.
– In Crowd: see above how well that went for me
– Blonde
– Cheerleader (dance team)
– Band geek: my dance team was integrated with the band. We performed at halftime, walked in parades with them, and I also did flags. But you had to be on the dance team to do flags. We competed separately from the band, but spend A LOT of time with them.
I should clarify that when I say MIT, that should generally be translated as TEP. I’m not sure I got much, if anything, out of the MIT part of my MIT experience, except possibly the confidence to believe I could handle most any academic problem. But finding TEP changed my life. As is probably obvious from the fact that I still hang out with the same people fifteen years later. Ah, pathos.
I had planned to write a high school retrospective post myself this evening because you got me thinking about those days, but then I was lame.
AP, Geek, Theater… But there was nothing to define the way my group behaved. We sometimes hung out with the popular kids, sometimes with the really nerdy kids, sometimes with the jocks. We didn’t really care.
The SO, well, AP and the Racially-identified group (Japanese). She’s from Torrance, CA, so that’s a *really* large group 🙂
After reading this post, I’ve been mulling what my place was in high school. At the time, I just enjoyed having a small group of smart, hilarious friends with a wider group of people I was friends with. Since then, friends from high school have told me I was a Queen Bee (I didn’t know that then). My main group was the Math Hos (yes, that’s HO, like short for whore). We had a group of girls that kicked ass at math and got a kick out of kicking the ass of anyone who thought we couldn’t. asssss. I’m sure this made me a Nerd, but I don’t think I felt it in a negative sense at the time. I was into animal rights and environmentalism and tangential to the skater/druggie/grundge crew at our school. I was pretty anti-In Crowd (which is ironic cause how is someone In if everyone hates them?) but as with most groups, there was usually an individual or two that I really liked.
Looking back at the things about my life and self that I enjoyed then, I’m reminded of some stuff I’d like to bring back -like fun jewelry and spirited arguments and ideals and maybe even math.
AP, Alternative, Artsy, Nerd/geek, Jock, Tomboy. Many of my friends were in the band, so I was a bit of a band groupie, and I hung out with a bunch of theatre geeks and skate punks.
Oh, and I did every academic team/competition available (NERD!). The jock affiliation really helped me be able to float through and connect with a variety of groups, so I wasn’t compartmentalized. I knew every one of the ~250 people in my class by name, since my county lumped us all together since 7th grade.
d. none of the above. :/
And since I don’t have a s.o.:
My first high school ex was: AP, Debater/ (lawyer) Geek, Individualist, Student Government. Last I heard, she was studying law at Harvard.
My second ex was: Alternative, Animal Lover, Blonde, Church People, Reject. Last I heard, she was still stuck in Palmdale (though hopefully still not working at McDonald’s).