Re: What the Fark 3: The Strange and Unusual
Perhaps my high school was different. I know one of those popular girls is now a heart surgeon, one of the popular guys attended the Air Force Academy, and a number of others received some serious academic scholarships. Of course we had the blockheads, which made up the majority of the "in crowd," but we certainly had some overlapping circles in a Venn diagram.
I went to a large high school (grad class around 800), so there tended to be no overlap. The groups were, roughly, the rich kids, the popular kids, the jocks, the proto-goths, the music kids, the Crazy Christians, the theater kids, and the white kids who took shop and would be in jail in ten years. There was no group of smart kids -- they (OK, we) were atomized.
On top of that we had a division into even thirds of white, black and brown kids, where the working class white kids would get beat up by the black kids and everybody was terrified of the brown kids because they had weapons. Everybody was racist as hell with every race hating every other race to the point that you would never go behind the school with a group of less than 6.
The smart kids all blew town and went to the Ivies, the rich kids went to Bucknell or Colgate (a couple with the grades went to Dartmouth), the black kids all joined the army and everybody was too scared of the brown kids to keep up with them. The popular kids went to state u and then came home to run dad's finance / law / realty / boat building firm, intermarried and produced the next generation of popular kids.
The big difference with John Hughes High was the groups didn't dislike each other, they simply didn't interact. There was no concept of the school as a unity. Even the kids who ran say yearbook were just the popular kids who presumed to speak for everybody but nobody disliked them, they just were ignored. I ran our school paper as a way to have access to a locked office which is
extremely useful to a high school senior. If kids intergroup dated nobody cared, and the only kids with serious relationships were the poor kids who got pregnant and dropped out anyway. "Popularity" wasn't about numbers -- there were no "popular" kids in the sense that they had more friends. Their mutual popularity was just the thing they had in common -- but to the rest of the school they were invisible.
I think this happens in a big school, while in small schools kids double up on cliques and niches. Dr. Mrs.' school sounds like it was very different, and her grad class was about 200. There they actually had groups with animosity like in Breakfast Club. But in our school -- well, after 3 years together I probably had never met 500 of my classmates on graduation day.
