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Your Place On The Social Ladder of High School?

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Foust is SO authentic

22:53 / 26.02.03

The street fighting thread got me thinking about days of yore. Back in elementary & high school, I was the bottom rung most of the time, and so got stepped on an awful lot. I never knew quite how to handle it; I wasn't much physically, and I'm a naturally quiet person.

I said I was the bottom rung most of the time because there was one other guy competing with me. And it was quite sad, as the two of us were constantly trying to bring the other down, so we wouldn't have to be the one on the bottom.

What of you? Where on the social ladder were you? Ever do anything you're not proud of?

It's years later now, and thank God the interpersonal conflicts of 20-somethings are much more subtle and less degrading. Er...

Tryphena Absent

23:05 / 26.02.03

Erm, I was never bullied, I was pretty much in the middle to bottom social rung I guess. Always the last to be picked for sports, used to sit in my form room reading so I could avoid the people showing off at the front, I was quite weird. I liked science fiction so I was untouchable but was quite nice to everyone, including the teachers unfortunately, if I was the same person now I'd probably be quite successful at the whole argument/get sent outside thing. I'd be one of the bad kids! Used to play football with the guys on the field in summer, had a big group of friends who didn't really care how they were seen, the thing was I never rolled my skirt up. That was just a popularity killer at school. I was the girl with the long skirt.

My brother was immensely popular in his year and I think I got the better deal. I have far more real friends from school and I actually like some of them.

Brigade du jour

00:22 / 27.02.03

Minor bullying experiences, but I don't think I was really on a social ladder at all at school. I had friends at primary school. Thus, I'm still in touch with people I met when I was six, but not people I met when I was eleven. Because I went to a school full of bastards. At least that's the way I see it.

01:19 / 27.02.03

nothing binds like a common enemy...

i feel the same way about the better friends.

i was a Wierd Kid, but not all by choice. skiving 'games' to play guitar, giving teachers shit that can only really result in trouble, and not giving a rat's ass if some twat thought i was gay. blow em kisses i say, i was always a big bastard anyway.
that and looking funny at people without meaning it.

and yeah, never did any work unless absolutely necessary. well, except in lunch, when i worked on the ladies. (well, yeah, miserably, but you'll never know that)

05:42 / 27.02.03

Definitely on the receiving end of some of my fellows students' love of aggressive behaviour. The bullying didn't really stop for a while, but lost all credibility when I discovered their logic for attacking me was Doesn’t Play Sports + Talks to Girls + Reads Books = Gay. Therefore, since Gay = Bad, a sound kicking is fully justified.

ONLY NICE THINGS

07:14 / 27.02.03

I've parked outside their houses, I've watched them through the window, and they have pathetic lives. Pathetic, I tell you. Who's got their own BBC chat show now, eh? So who wins? I'll tell you who. I win.

07:41 / 27.02.03

I really enjoyed school - I don't think I had any official place I just sort of knew everyone. I wouldn't say I reached the very top or elite but I knew them all, sometimes I'd get drunk with the psychos or get high with the stoners, hang with the nerds or get in trouble with the cool kids - I think that's what made everything ok, I didn't really have a type so nobody knew what to bully me about, oh apart from the baldness but then that made me even more unusual...

Yeah I loved High school!

08:19 / 27.02.03

Oh, how similar a tale I tell.

At High School: um, not so much on the Social Ladder, more trying to climb the brickwork with my bare hands. I had a close group of friends who I am still in contact with; there was a vast majority of the year group I really could have cared less about. This made them think I was anti-social, but hey, I just didn't want to socialise with them.

I did manage to socialise through various circles but not to the extent I did with my friends; to be honest, I really don't mind. My life is happening now, and it's all rather good. Most of the year are surprised by the ways I've changed... but at the same time, whenever I'm in their presence in the old haunts, the social ladder of the school (and not the present) comes back into play, and I feel insignificant again. Oh well.

Also, as Tez points out, rumours circulating that you're gay: mainly, in my case, because I didn't really socialise with the girls in my year very much. This was because I didn't really like any of them, and the few I did talk to were the ones I genuinely got on with. Never mind. Oh, and yes, put me in the "picked-last-for-sports" camp. I managed to find sports I could do and enjoyed, and then stopped being picked last for the ones I was shite at and hated.

08:54 / 27.02.03

I was at Boarding School between year five of Primary School and 4th Form of High School (these are Uk equivalents as I am from Oz) and I hovered somewhere just above pond scum but never really seemed to make it up to full human status. Bullied quite a lot, but also the person people came to when they needed to talk about personal problems. So some kind of weird pilloried but useful agony aunt. Mind you at this time I was acting out lots of stuff, mainly for early childhood issues I had blocked from my memory. (I didn't really start to understand why I was so weird until my early 20s and I started getting counselling)

At the state school I moved to in 5th Form I kinda found some freaks and weirdos to hang out with, but due to the above childhood issues I was unaware existed, I had a lot of problems interacting with people as I created drama after drama to protect myself (although it just ended up hurting me more - go figure!) During this time I had a lot of problems with being sexually harassed by boys in the school and by the end of 6th form was very close to going to the police and officially charging a group of boys.

Hmmmm - School, the best years of your life??? I don't bloody think so! Well, not for me anyway.

11:23 / 27.02.03

I thankfully had safety in numbers at my high school. There was a group of goths/punks/cool geeks, and we all hung out together...grade 9s to grade 13s. Occasional beatings from the jocky Italians, but usually only trouble from the VP or teachers.

11:26 / 27.02.03

I was sort of off to the side of the social ladder. I wasn't popular or unpopular, or anything of the sort. I was just there. Nobody reall bullied me. Of course, on the other hand, nobody tried to befriend me. The only time most people talked to me was when they wanted help with their homework. The bastards! They took advantage of my good nature. Of course, I'll show them! Oh yes...at the ten year reunion, I'll go back, and I'll be all successful and they'll be stuck in some dead-end job pumping gas and popping out babies.

Foust is SO authentic

12:17 / 27.02.03

Ah yes, ye olde accusations of homosexuality. I didn't socialize with the ladies much either; they didn't like me anymore than the guys did. And being from a small northern mining town, it's not like I had a lot of choices.

gotham island fae

12:54 / 27.02.03

I stood straddling two ladders, one with a foot precariously placed three-fifths up the "everyone knows your face/what do you mean she's homecoming queen?" set, the other holding onto nearly the top of the "artsy even if we are the hick/redneck suburb of the city" clique.
Though I enjoyed my time well enough when I look back, I looked at a senior picture recently and realized that I could have cut much more of a dash in the inter-school social scene if I had just possessed the wherewithal to take advantage of my boyish good looks and outgoing predilections (a lesson I am still learning to this day, over a decade later). I guess that's what emotional abuse at home and school, during junior high, will do to you.

14:05 / 27.02.03

i was a Wierd Kid, but not all by choice. skiving 'games' to play guitar, giving teachers shit that can only really result in trouble, and not giving a rat's ass if some twat thought i was gay. blow em kisses i say, i was always a big bastard anyway.

I was gonna say that, but then I realised it would be a complete lie.

18:31 / 27.02.03

if you want, you can blow me kisses and i'll call you gay...? only if you're really into it, mind.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

19:13 / 27.02.03

Didn't really do the whole school thing. Did night courses and then spent two perfectly foul years at technical colledge instead. Definately not top of the ladder. Or even on the ladder. Walking underneath the ladder, possibly.

Every time we get onto discussing people's school experiences, I become more and more convinced that school, especially high-school, is just a really fucking bad idea?

Foust is SO authentic

19:46 / 27.02.03

Agreed entirely, Mordant.

I didn't learn anything in high school - academically or socially. All my math and science classes were a total wash. What I did learn in my history classes was typically inaccurate. My English courses didn't teach me to appreciate literature the way my university courses do.

I used to mock my home-schooled aquaintences, but nowadays I think they got the better deal.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

19:51 / 27.02.03

Aside from the giant plastic hamster-ball, I'm inclined to agree.

The Return Of Rothkoid

21:41 / 27.02.03

School for me, in stages:

"He's smart, isn't he?" (infants and primary school)
"He's gay, isn't he?" (until last two years of school)
"I really liked you but I don't know why we never got together" (after the last two years of school, goddamnit.)

I wasn't really bullied as such until I moved to New Zealand when I was 12. The only Australian kid in an all-boys' school; I can trace my shocking self-esteem to the utter fucking floggings and continual bitchery I got almost every day until I was accepted 'cos I wasn't fucking going anywhere. Which, strangely, occurred in the six months before I left. Anyway. I think my lack of belief in self comes from there - enough people tell you you're shit and you believe them, especially at that age - as well as my kinda unco manner around women. (Moved from a mixed school at 12, when you start to socialise differently, then to an all-boys' school where the only female interaction was on the bus - and who's gonna talk to some kid getting teased? Nobody. Probably didn't help that the area I moved to was populated by lots of families of European descent, whose daughters were fairly fully-developed at a time where Aussie girls (the only ones I'd known until now) were still androgynous... it's a terrifying shift to have to deal with actual women instead of someone who looks kinda like you in pigtails.)

I dunno. I hated my school life in NZ for a long, long time. It made me feel uncertain about everything, and I fucking hate that. I recognise that there's no point in using it as an excuse, but it's taken a long time for me to get to the point where I can admit that anything I do is good or worthwhile, and it's still very rare that I do so. You know, having things like thirty or so guys follow you home after you get off the bus is pretty fucked up to have to deal with when you're a kid. I wondered, for the longest time, why it happened - and I guess the real answer is that there really was no why. It could've been anyone else, I guess.

Gah. So I was kinda weird, mostly picked on, and very, very self-loathing. Nice to know that some things hang on for a while...

Brigade du jour

21:43 / 27.02.03

Picking up on angel's references to school being the best years of your life. I agree with angel - for me at least, university was the best years of my life. So far, anyway. Maybe I'd grown up a bit by then and was in a better emotional position to handle it.

Goodness Gracious Meme

14:01 / 28.02.03

I was a huge bully. The worst.

When I wasn't cheerleading, or heading the debate team, that is.

14:09 / 28.02.03

They told me I was smart, and put me in the good classes. I did well in them, because I *was* smart. However, children are still evil, even in the good classes. Like Foust, I competed with another kid for who was the lowest homo in the game. Only, I spent much of my time otherwise plotting the bloody rampaging murder of my oppressive classmates. Foruntately, I was not cool enough to get my hands on any actual firearms, or I'm sure I would have used them. Though I didn't startwearing trenchcoats until after I got out of school and was well on my way to a more well adjusted social life. It was all denim jackets and metallica patches for me. Ow yea, don't I show my age, eh? My teachers hated me, too. Something about looking like a complete burnout punk who carved shit into desks and didn't get along with anyone but still aceing their classes really pissed them off, I think.

Though as hellish as it all was, it did make me into the Neitcheian Superman I am today.

Foust is SO authentic

03:34 / 02.03.03

Interesting ideas here: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

The usual excerpts:

Why Nerds Are Unpopular

I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular....

Why? To someone in school now, that may seem an odd question to ask. The mere fact is so overwhelming that it may seem strange to imagine that it could be any other way. But it could. Being smart doesn't make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor does it harm you in the real world. Nor, as far as I can tell, is the problem so bad in most other countries. But in a typical American secondary school, being smart is likely to make your life difficult. Why? ...

In the schools I went to, being smart just didn't matter much. Kids didn't admire it or despise it. All other things being equal, they would have preferred to be on smart side of average rather than the dumb side, but intelligence counted far less than, say, physical appearance, charisma, or athletic ability.

So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don't really want to be popular....

There was something else I wanted more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in school, though that counted for something, but to design marvellous rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to make great things, which seems a more accurate definition of smart than the passive one implicit in IQ tests....

The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about. Their attention is drawn to books, or the natural world, not fashions and parties. They're like someone trying to play soccer while balancing a glass of water on his head. Other players who can focus their whole attention on the game beat them effortlessly, and wonder why they seem so incapable....

He also talks at length about the screwed up nature of the American high school, ideas I agree with.

Andrew C*** passing himself of as Haus

08:44 / 02.03.03

I was peewee out of Porkys.

09:57 / 02.03.03

HS.. well everything about being that age and actually NOT being at the school was good, my friends, our parties (watchin' movies listening to They Might be Giants and this new music called "ska"), not payin' rent or bills, buyin' a bunch of records, goin' to local shows, yeah that was cool...

at the school itself? spat on, books pushed outta my arms, called fag more times than i can even think of now, being forgotten by my most of class (at graduation "you're in our class?"), being called a girl by my gym teacher, called a nerd by everyone's favorite english teacher, ect...

i was near the bottom of the social latter i think, i didn't so much keep up w/ that, i knew who "the clique" (1) was (main source of frustration for me), i knew the kids that that gave "the clique" thier name (2) (the ones that had something to prove picked on me, the rest thought "he doesn't talk and when he does he's nice, so i'll return kindness), the group under them (3) that dinna like me as they thought i was in that group so i was thier duty to pick on me thinkin' i was one rung higher, the burn outs (4) that told me "yr pretty cool for a smart guy" (let it be known i was a B/C student) and they'd have my back if i needed it, then the kids that acted/dressed weird to be wierd and chalange athourity and the social ideas of the student body (5), and finally me and 3 friends (6) happy to be at the bottom and be ourselves... i was the dumb one in my group not that the other two were way smart, better than average, 2 of us were poor and didn't know it until our junior year, but all of us didn't let the pain of HS get to us, and i think that was our REAL bond, we got on well w/ the rung ubove us and most of our grade school friends were in the 2nd rung but what ever, so yeah i was bullied, but spit wipes right off, books can be picked up, and i stopped caring the names they hurled at me beign called gay only gets to you for like the first week of school before it's all "i've heard that all before"

okay i've had my say... but i still don't remeber these days as painful as some people i know that were on the first few rungs, they say things to me like "fuck i don't know how i'd deal w/ all that? i woulda went crazy!"

12:17 / 02.03.03

Physically:

I was weak and bullied in some contexts.

However, I was strong and a bully in others.

Psychologically:

I was once accused of driving a man to a nervous breakdown. (This was by he himself, when we met up via Friends Reunited, and we are still friends, at least now. At school, I used to call him "cripple" because he had some health problems.) The irony there is that he was not the one I was nastiest to. I was an evil little bitch, I admit it.

However, I only did it because being the son of a teacher was fucking me up right royally, both socially and mentally.

16:49 / 04.05.03

My second barbelith post, so it might serve as a nice introduction to me:

Despite being very brainy and doing the minimum possible amount of socialisation, I was never really picked on, except when I was the New Kid. I think this had something to do with the fact that I did Greek and the other Greek students were all Uber-Cool Kids, so it kind of rubbed off on me. This meant I sauntered through school rather unexceptionally.
My only regret is that I never got an even vaguely fashionable haircut until I'd left school.

17:20 / 04.05.03

Made some bloody good friends at secondary school, many of whom I still know today, Fraelyboy amongst them.

Also had the strange experience of being particularly popular at my girlfriend's school.

22:15 / 04.05.03

I wasn't bullied regularly, just on one off occasions which were usually settled by my friends dealing with the problem for me.

For some reason I was pretty well known at school despite never really doing anything apart from being smart and ah, being really morbid.

I often wonder though, if i was put into the school system again (my current mind in my old body maybe) would anything actually be different?

22:41 / 04.05.03

*shrugs*

I guess I'm liked more then I notice, most of the time, but I'm still not asked out anywhere. Hum-de, and all that.

I've always had a problem with younger people tho. In primary school, the worst bullying I got was from kids two years younger then me- what the fuck's up with that?? Now year 10's tel me I've been branded "The Ugly One" and ask me why and I totally don't react fast enough to turn around and tell them it's cos all the boys fancy me and it makes the girls jealous before blowing them kisses.

I've also never been called gay, which actually makes me feel cheated. I don't think anyone was derrided as gay in my primary school, actually. Weird.

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

02:17 / 05.05.03

I was bullied pretty brutally until I was about 16 and had a combination of friends who would protect me, and grew to be about 6 feet tall. I was the kid who would use his mouth to get out of most beatings, but they still happened. My dad kept at me to fight back, forgetting that I wasn't the kind of kid who could fight three people at once.

I hated high school with a passion and didn't much care for college either. Just didn't seem to mix well in those environments.

07:12 / 05.05.03

I'm not sure where I fit in on the rungs in high school. I went to an all boys Catholic school, and, early on, was hanging out with a group of about twenty to thirty punk kids (who couldn't dress or look punk because everyone had to have normal hair, button down oxford white or blue shirts and ties), and we got picked on a lot by football players and white power kids (who, very often, were the same, and the white power kids actually outnumbered us by quite a bit), nothing physical ever really happened. I became pretty popular, sort of, when I got a belt buckle with my own name on it. Becoming some sort of a novelty can do wonders for that.

11:46 / 05.05.03

I'd say im somewhere around the middle- Not really thought of as scum by the top-of-the-ladder, but most certainly not with them. For a while i hung out with the top ones from another school (who i knew from gymnastics, where there is no real social ladder). But then i found out what dull lives the top ones lead, and that they're just warped in their own strange world. At the start, they make you insecure, but at the end, you realise that the whole ladder is.

I like the middle rungs- there are enough of us not to care whos above.

Our Lady of The Two Towers

08:13 / 06.05.03

I had a moderately rough time of things when I went up to secondary school, it was the only school in the area and fed from the primary schools of all the surrounding area so all the nasty brain dead cretins in a year tended to band together and start terrorising people until they got expelled. However, the good thing was that they tended to forget about you when they couldn't see you and when they started streaming us into classes by aptitude I saw less and less of them.

Two years later I got to grammar school where sadism and mild physical abuse is part of the system. I've always slightly resented my parents for signing me up for the school's Combined Cadet Force where sixth-formers could live out their power fantasies. In my 'if I could live my whole life over again' fantasy I join again just to try and tear the whole thing down from the inside. We had an armoury on school grounds for fucks sake! This was pre-Hungerford, pre-Trenchcoat Mafia, but we had a specific part of the school that had the soul prupose of indoctrinating kids into the mindset that it's okay to kill people! It's morally indefensible, and the only kid that gave me much by way of hassle in the remaining years at that school was a CCF kid, who made a point of wearing his army uniform on CCF days at school, because he was allowed to.

But otherwise, I was a lazy kid so never rated high on the radar. While there were the popular kids and the less so kids I wasn't ever aware of there being much of a 'in kids versus the out kids' thing, it's just the 'in kids' at our school tended to get it together very quickly with the 'in kids' from the girls school across town. We were mostly below their radar and fights tended to be more fratricidal. However, we were a grammar school, with a pretense of selecting kids by aptitude, so we probably screened out the more stupid thuggish element.

10:31 / 06.05.03

High school sucked, but I kind or ran the gamut on the social spectrum. I didn't start out too hot, and I did get picked on a bit in the Early Days, but I wised up and made lots of friends and though I was pretty much straight in the middle in terms of popularity, I had a few bottom-rung friends I hung with, as well as some upper-echelon people I hung with. That pretty much came about due to the social cache I received having by having lunch with a cute punk stoner every day. It's all politics, really.

I always had friends, but I particularly remember one day when maybe I was 18 or maybe I was 17 and three of my friends I were walking down the road and I realized we were all wearing identical outfits except for the color and patterns of our clothes. That made me feel pretty sad and trapped, which is probably a good description of the general mood most of the time. Not that there weren't bright spots because there were, but I don't want to go back.

University was much better. There I was Miss Popularity due to my general friendliness and the general ease in a giant school to find people who share your interests to hang out with. Oh I'll never forget a happy day when I wanted to go out so I looked at my phone list and I realized I had about six or seven people to call right off the bat that I'd like to spend time with, and knowing surely one or two of them would be available. Ah memories.

But I wonder if it's not so much smartness knocking one out of the popularity game. As I recall plenty of popular kids at my school were smart. But the popular ones tended to be also either preppy, or rich, or beautiful. I think social intelligience counts for a lot in this regard, btw.

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