Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[misko27]

Err, yes and no. There are certain groups that people tend to fall into, but certainly nothing quite as extreme.


But I'm anti-social, so it's hard to tell on the outside looking in, and I go to a nerd school, so not the norm.


Also, I thought it was clique.

[FearfulJesuit]

Prep school kid checking in here. We had about 500 students, most of them from pretty ritzy-doo families, or at least moderately well-off ones. Me, my family are upper-middle/graduate-educated class, so we're well-off enough, but I'd never have gone if it weren't for the fact that my father was head of the history department, so a tasty ~50% (plus aid) discount on my tuition.

Thing about the cliques was, all the kids, or at least the ones that created the overall atmosphere of the place, were trying to be the same sort of student, or at least that's how their parents wanted them: perfect Ivy League (or at least Villanova/Miami/etc.) material with lots of extracurriculars and a good dose of athleticism. You know the type. I think the closest thing to real cliques we had were the little hivemind trios that the freshman and some sophomore girls had going on. Those were kind of scary, frankly.

I was part of the Library Group, which was sort of a catch-all for anyone too geeky or eccentric to be in the rat race. Mostly we just played the copy of Halo that someone had put on a remote corner of the school servers, or had cuddle piles. Once most of them graduated my sophomore year, it was just me and my friend [redacted] and a few other wash-ups, and then my senior year there wasn't much of a community at all. I expect when I come back for my fifth-year reunion it won't exist anymore. Sic transit gloria.

[Flying Dice]

Not particularly. I mean, there were groups with common interests, but no hard-and-fast delineations. People drifted around fairly freely. The only ones who did form a distinct in-group were the rich suburban preps who bussed in from outside the city, and more than anything else that was because they were bloody annoying and nobody else wanted to talk to them.

[UltraValican]

I'm actually in high-school, "cliques" are really blown out of proportion, hell they aren't really as bad as American media distorts them.
People who play the same sports are more likely to hang with people who play the same sports, no ones really ostracized.  Most of my friends are in the band, I haven't touched an instrument in my life, I can't even read sheet music. The closest I can think of an "exclusive" clique is the "Jew Crew", for obvious reasons. And before someone says why would that matter, they're some of the most popular kids at the school.

[Owlbread]

Ours were actually quite cosmopolitan. No particular group was so closely-knit that they wouldn't socialise with the rest, so even though people of a similar mindset/interest would form groups of friends (e.g. farming types, guys from a particular village, guys that were into a particular kind of music etc) that didn't mean that the next day you'd see 3 from one group and 4 from another just sitting around chatting.

We didn't have any religious cliques or racial groups or whatever, mostly because everyone was white and protestant/atheist. Literally everyone. No black people, East Asians, South Asians or anything - we were completely homogenous. I suppose that means we weren't cosmopolitan in the traditional sense, but you get my meaning. If we did have someone from a different racial background they'd just translate into one of the groups, as would happen on the off-chance we did meet a black guy or an indian guy or whoever.

[Scoops Novel]

"You're the first person I've seen to spell it as 'click'."

Well I've never seen anyone pronounce it clique.

I originally thought you were talking about some standard unit of measurement, 'Did your school have 20 clicks?'

"When I was your age I had to ride 20 clicks through the vacuum of space to get to school!"

Young man, we used to walk 20 kilometres through the vacuum of space, while fending off cliques of so-called "bleeding-edge linguists". We could not understand a word they said.

Well done that man.

[Scoops Novel]

I actually came in wondering if we were going to be talking about a Film Club-type thing.  (Blame my interest in Discworld for that misunderstanding.)  However, it looks like I thought I'd say something anyway...

...and now back to your regularly scheduled programme.


(Also, Neo, When people use "Decimate" to mean "Annihilate" or something close to "destroy all but 10% of something" I cry inside...)

I read that as fight club before i got the reference. Wonder if there are any of those around schools.

[Scoops Novel]

Cliques? Barely, here. I, personally, am in the band clique, acquainted with the theatre clique, and I a good part of the geek and stoner cliques.

I also feel like I may be a target of envy for the prep clique (4.0 GPA etc), based on the general reactions when I told them my SAT score.

Friend groups are large and nebulous around here. Certain groups have very little overlap, but I'm in most of the ones that don't, hehe. I've noticed that the majority of my friends are friends with each other, but this is a pretty big surprise since I have a damn lot of friends.

Can you give me a bit more information on the prep clique and the stoner clique? I have some friends who do that but I'd default to playful (with hard undertones) condescension over envy (assuming you partook or had no problem with doing so, primarily because of the wasted money and less because of where  it goes, hinging on the local cottage industry status) and I'm your age i think.

Edit: to clarify that, if you had no reason for the drugs besides them them being cool and were on weed and the like, which is admittedly relatively unlikely. Not that i wouldn't be somewhat condescending in that regard (depending on the circumstances), but I'd assume you had problems which had caused you to adopt drugs and would be more understanding about it.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Kind of. My school had significant cross-contamination between the clique groups, and there wasn't really any hostility between most of them. The only groups that were solid groups were the the future gang members and the inexplicable population of Vietnamese students, who could all speak English but rarely did so.

You could count my position as having been a clique of it's own, albeit a one-man clique. I was definitely "that guy". I didn't eat lunch with anybody for four years and I rarely spoke (originally because I didn't want to, eventually because I found it made people listen to me when I did speak). I occasionally heard crazy rumors about myself that I don't think anybody who I had classes with took seriously, and once had an "outside observer" try to get the school to put me in counseling for not sitting with anybody during lunch (I never showed up to the meeting they requested and I never heard anything about it again). The weird thing is that my loner status blossomed into a bizarre form of popularity during my senior year. Everybody suddenly seemed to be interested in my opinion and outlook.

[misko27]

Kind of. My school had significant cross-contamination between the clique groups, and there wasn't really any hostility between most of them. The only groups that were solid groups were the the future gang members and the inexplicable population of Vietnamese students, who could all speak English but rarely did so.

You could count my position as having been a clique of it's own, albeit a one-man clique. I was definitely "that guy". I didn't eat lunch with anybody for four years and I rarely spoke (originally because I didn't want to, eventually because I found it made people listen to me when I did speak). I occasionally heard crazy rumors about myself that I don't think anybody who I had classes with took seriously, and once had an "outside observer" try to get the school to put me in counseling for not sitting with anybody during lunch (I never showed up to the meeting they requested and I never heard anything about it again). The weird thing is that my loner status blossomed into a bizarre form of popularity during my senior year. Everybody suddenly seemed to be interested in my opinion and outlook.

This, describes me to a terrifyingly accurate extent. Except the Vietnamese part.

[DJ]

Our cliques were organised by musical preferences. And they were proper mean cliques, fighting each other with butterfly knives in an elaborate choreography set to their preferred music. For some reason the metalheads always won.

[Zrk2]

Our cliques were organised by musical preferences. And they were proper mean cliques, fighting each other with butterfly knives in an elaborate choreography set to their preferred music. For some reason the metalheads always won.

Probably had more metal on them.

[Graknorke]

In my high-school, there's not really any cliques. People tend to just sort of be bros with everyone else. Social circles of interaction do form, but only really when there's so many people that everyone being in one big conversation would be impossible. There's one "freak" group, but TBH they're not as weird or edgy as at least one of them wants to be. It's mostly girls, one MtF; and then there's a couple of guys. Their caim to edginess is mostly either nerdiness or sexuality. But they're the closest to an isolated clique there is.
There's more division between year groups than withing them, by far.

[Tomcost]

Well, I finished secondary school past year, and I have to say that cliques don't really exist. While it's true that there were some groups of friends that always hanged out and the like, but there were not any group were you were not allowed to be. They existed because of affinities, just that. But I feel that I have to point out that male groups lasted years, while female ones didn't last long.

The people that formed the nearest things to a clique were a kind of "I'm better than the rest of the society" people, so they hanged out with few people just to feel that their group was more exclusive, while, in fact, their members weren't even close friends. In all this groups thing, I was the one who could hang out with any of them, but, at the same time, I wasn't very close with any, I just didn't have common interests with any, and the topics of conversation were boring in th elong term. Anyway I can recall a kind of group which I never hanged out with: the kind of people that just drink and try to appear that do cool stuff, I found them as the least interesting people.

But, I have to say that the effects of media caused a wannabe "popular" clique to appear within my classmates while we just started the secondary school. Nobody liked them, and nobody cared too much, but for some reason hat group was like the main one in the classroom. Maybe it was just because nobody else wanted to be the center of the attention.

I have found that media has a really important power to influence many aspects of a person and the way he relates to other ones, even affecting the way a person speaks (read below).

Additional information: I live in Argentina, we speak Spanish here, but we have a particular way of speaking: most of our verb conjuations differ in the stressing and sometimes the pronoun we use to speak. The media that influences us, if it doesn't come form the local community, usually has a classical Spanish accent. I have to say that it is really irritating to hear a child who speakis in an Spanish tone, because it means that he has been watching a lot of television, without human contact.
While I don't care about regional use of certain words (like can or tin in English), I find the Spanish accent in our country to be a way of loosing our own culture and letting the media to brainwash our population.

Diclaimer: it's all ok with Spain and it's inhabitants (really, I'm not a xenophobe by any means), I just don't like children here speaking like if they had been born there, not because of the culture, but because of the brainwashing.

[Max White]

The weird thing is that my loner status blossomed into a bizarre form of popularity during my senior year. Everybody suddenly seemed to be interested in my opinion and outlook.

Fun fact: Attraction is a form of curiosity. The less people think they know about you, the more interest you generate.
Although we have this great little technique of stereotyping people, thus assuming we know a lot about them when we really don't, so how much you actually know about somebody is irrelevant.