stormlyht:

theproblemwithstardust:

stormlyht:

theproblemwithstardust:

I never did get an explanation, so thank you for answering my late-night shouting into the void 😀 

But this mentality happens in real life? Outside of movies and TV and fic? It’s really that dichotomous? Does it have to do with how in some school districts people go to different middle/elementary schools so by the time high school rolls around they’ve figured out their place in the social hierarchy and are thrown in with people they don’t know?

sorry i shouldn’t have all these questions, just my school was small enough we knew each other from birth. like you were friends with the same people from preschool/kindergarten and maybe some of you ended up being good at sports or school or art or drama but like you weren’t in cliques based off that because those distinctions came later? if that makes sense? 

i was on a couple sports teams, but i’d always end up eating lunch and hanging out with my group – half were ‘band geeks,’ then there was the two-sport varsity athlete who ended up valedictorian, a couple other sporty types who did artsy stuff, and a choir kid. but then again, a small school meant that nobody was just one thing? there’d be no band if choir/sports/artsy/smart kids weren’t in it too? so there were smart jocks and athletic nerds?

and don’t even get me started on college, i didn’t know anyone in my class’ names let alone whether they were intelligent or physically inclined. but maybe there was a distinction? social queues aren’t my strong suit lol.

Short answer is, yes this crap happens in real life.  I think a lot of it is related to the massive amount of students crammed into one classroom honestly, plus the ever present need for funds.

See, schools get more money if their communities are willing to give it to them.  So they have to find a way to make the communities take an interest.  Since sports are so highly in demand, they get a lot of attention, and as such, the sport programs get a lot of money, ESPECIALLY if they do well.  In my HS, which was a private Lutheran school, our sports teams were doing super well so they made a lot of money for the school, which benefits everyone to a degree but really benefitted the sports teams.  They replaced the entire weight system twice in 5 years, once before I was there as a Freshman and once while I was there, Junior or Senior year I can’t remember.  The gymnasium got lots of attention, the bleachers were fixed, they got all the new equipment, new uniforms, etc. etc.

Whereas the arts programs struggled constantly.  Music was starting to get a good reputation because we had an awesome music teacher that took the choir and band to competitions and actually started *winning* them.  Then they did programs that brought in the families, Christmas events that brought more money, and that made the music program something the school began to take note of.  Since they started doing well, the music program got more funding, and could do more things.

The drama program didn’t get much funding, neither did the drawing parts of the arts.  They didn’t win competitions, they barely brought in much money, so the teachers in those programs paid for a lot of things out of their own pocket.  I got to see a couple of plays in town through the drama club, but still had to pay for everything on my own, because there was nothing extra to help students out, where the sports people got to go to leadership classes at a drastically discounted rates, for instance.

And this isn’t even taking any kind of academically inclined programs into consideration.  I know they were there, but I didn’t personally know anything about them.  I was a drama/music girl but boy did I know EVERYTHING the sports kids were doing, because we heard about it again and again.  While we were fixing up costumes by hand, the jocks were getting brand new uniforms, second year in a row.  Envy happens.

Now, take all the students, and put them in those programs, and watch the chips fall.  Kids who might be smart but are also in sports aren’t likely to say they’re smart when the smart kids are bitching about their beloved sports.  Kids who are part of the chess club, but are using the chess set from their home because it’s one of the only sets with all the pieces in it, but are also good at basketball aren’t necessarily going to try out for basketball because chess is more important.

You find your friends, and sometimes that determines what things “you’re allowed” to be a part of.  If you find yourself in a group of kids who are great at math, the minute one of the baseball players laughs at you you aren’t going to feel comfortable joining the baseball team.  And oh, if you dare join the team anyway, those math students are going to look at you like you’re crazy, because you just betrayed them by doing something athletic, and the baseball team is going to make you work harder than anyone else because they don’t want a nerd on the team.

There were some crossovers here and there.  For instance, you could be part of track and be part of something academic or artsy because for some reason track wasn’t “jock” enough in my school.  If you were a football player though, oh boy, you didn’t show those A’s off if you didn’t want to get teased by all the other football players.  If you were a cheerleader, that was your main concern, not your classes.

This is even more supremely stupid when you realize that you have to get certain grades in order to be a part of a team.  I wasn’t able to work on a play at one point until I got a grade up to a C I think?  So they have to at least make a C average in order to participate, but then again, this is where the tutor thing comes into play in a lot of stories.  The idea that the “dumb” jock has to have someone smarter than them tutor them so they can go back to playing the sport they love.  That probably has it’s roots in some real life things but it wasn’t seen much in my HS.

This envy gets even worse when the teachers have feuds, which was a thing I actually saw happen in my HS.  Our male gym teacher (we had both a guy and girl teacher in our HS) would show off his trophies to the music teacher, who then started getting his own trophies and would show them off to the gym teacher.  So if you were in your choir class and suddenly this teacher shows up and says to your music teacher, “Hey, look what we brought home from State.” and shows off this trophy, the music teacher has to respond to that.  It could be done in a friendly competitive way, but given that I didn’t realize competition could be friendly until I was in my early 30′s you can imagine what it was instead.

We had somewhere between 100-125 students per grade level when I graduated, somewhere close to 500 students total in the HS.  I don’t really know if that’s a lot or not, but some quick googling shows that the average around that time was over 700 students in HS on average in OH.  So we had a smaller amount of students than other schools, likely because it was a private HS.  All those students, most of them not knowing each other before they get to the school, and they fell into these patterns of who was picked on and who was being picked on even though it made no sense.

I attribute a certain amount of that to the cut throat nature of middle school/jr. high.  Things were much worse for me there than HS.  I got lucky in HS, no one knew me where I went, I got to be completely unknown.  I saw all the crap that went on, but mostly I did okay.  I could see the lines, but didn’t really fall into any of them.  Middle School was torture for me though.  There were hard lines and you had to be careful or you were spending time in lockers.  That was no joke.  Sit at a table at lunch time and cross your fingers that you don’t get the wrong people sitting next to you or you didn’t know what would end up on your plate.  I think some of that mentality holds on so when kids go to HS, they still think along those lines.

Honestly though, I don’t get it much in college stories because I feel like there’s more of a divide than in HS.  I never went, but my wife did and she didn’t really notice the same kind of issues that HS had.  She was the same as you, mostly stuck with her classes and her peers and didn’t notice the sports stuff.

Hope that helps explain it a bit more.  Feel free to ask if I’ve brought up more questions. 🙂

When you put the rivalries in terms of funding… that just makes so much sense. I remember everyone hated the football program. Not so much the other sports but yeah definitely football. They got fancy air conditioned rental buses while the track team piled in three to a seat on the normal buses. (going to meets was not so bad. coming home after meets. well. you can imagine). And I forgot about the grade thing! Pretty sure we had to maintain a certain GPA to even participate in extracurriculars.

But also what kind of activities does HS have for ‘nerds’? I understand jock/band or art or theatre or drama because they all want funding. But that doesnt explain the jock/nerd divide? Unless its more like nerds can be condescending as hell (I’m in academia. It only gets worse. ugh) and jocks can be stronger and more intimidating?

And yikes, I’m so sorry your school experience was that rough. The only time i knew about someone getting shut in a locker when i was in middle school was because the guy wanted to see if he could fit.

To be fair, all that stuff might’ve been going on? i mean I spent most of middle school/ jr high devising ways to read or write in class without getting caught and didn’t interact with people outside of my friends and my teammates. There was bullying. Hell, I got my fair share (shy

weird

adhd kid) but it was all subtle, behind your back. Rumors, gossip, that kind of stuff.

my favorite rumor that was ever started about me was that i moved to my school from the UK and at graduation the dude sitting next to me asked how long i had lived in the US and i was like ‘bro. we sat next to each other in first grade. you puked on my desk.’ 

I don’t think, as kids, there’s any real understanding of why the rivalries exist, and why types of people dislike other types of people.  Mostly, I suspect there’s a feeling of superiority the jocks/football players have so they act that way and other people react to it in whatever way they do naturally.  Oddly enough I was part of the “nerd” group.  I think because I was pretty good at math and was generally a teacher’s pet.  In school it was often easier to talk to the teachers than to the other students for me.

Mostly for true academic types, I feel like there’s spelling bee’s and something for math students, but I was completely unaware of any of that.  I have no idea what sort of after school activities any of them have, but like I said, I was considered a nerd.  So was my wife and she never did any of that, was also in drama, and even intentionally got bad grades to try to get out of the nerd category but that didn’t work.  I think that most of the concept of nerds gets down to, you aren’t a jock, so you must be a nerd.

I see a lot of solid divide in shows, but there wasn’t that kind of divide in school for me.  Not that the groups didn’t exist per say, just that they weren’t so solidly divided except for the jocks.  Like, all the sports people were part of a group, and then everyone else kinda milled around and mixed with each other, except for my specific group who mostly hung out with each other, and sometimes talked to others.  So I have to assume that there is a specific group of “nerds” but I also think that any number of student type got classified as a nerd whether or not they were actually smart.

Jocks can be stronger and more intimidating, and I do know that there were some who used to bully other kids into doing homework for them, but there were also some who would pay for such work.  My wife made some money doing typing projects for people at home using her word processor.  She didn’t do the work, she just typed it out once, printed it multiple times and got paid for each piece.  Never got caught.

Also, when I read the part about you trying to find ways to read/write in class, my wife just looked at me and said, “My class soulmate.”  That’s basically what she did during school.  I did the reading thing sometimes, but I also did a fair amount of doodling in the margins of my notebooks.

I freekin’ love the rumor though, that’s fantastic.  Nothing even remotely awesome like that ever was ever suggested about me.  I did have a weird middle name that got some attention when I got older. My middle name is Pepper and one of the girls who tried to make fun of me went on a long list of spices and I laughed so hard I fell out of my seat.  I had a love/hate relationship with my middle name until that point, but when she did that I fell in love with it and never hid it away anymore.

okay this is the last one, i promise

but it just hit me and i feel like an idiot but school is the thing for nerds. like learning and college prep and stuff. not necessarily an activity. but then money goes to sports and the kids that are there to actually learn get stuck with shitty desks and freaking chalkboards and computers that don’t work. 

i mightve had a reputation for being smart but i obviously wasnt a nerd because i forgot the point of going to school was to go to school. jesh

also hi five your wife for me, i wish i could say i’ve grown out of it but i definitely outlined and wrote a lot of my reverse bang fic in class these past few weeks