Reading 2

Unit 8- Reading 2

Page 122

High School Society: Who Belongs Where?

At lunch time, Look around the sprawling Chaparral High School campus in Scottsdale, Arizona, in the southwestern United States. the social geography of the 1,850 students is clearly instituted. The football players and their friends have the center table outdoors. In back of them, other popular students chat cheerfully-an attractive gathering of cheerleaders, lesser jocks, and members of the student government. If you qualify for membership under some unwritten clause in the group’s unwritten rulebook-even if no one has ever met you before-you’ve got it made. Lauren, a sophomore cheerleader, notes that “unqualified” students would never dare sit where she’s sitting. “But once you’re in with the girls, everyone is really friendly to you. When I made cheerleader, it was like I was just set.”

OTHER GROUPS

Inside, in the cafeteria, a converse society exists. There are more braces and glasses and hair that doesn’t quite have a shape. These are the skateboarders, the so-called nerds, those who say they are just regular, the freshmen who have not yet found their place. They may have lower social status than the sunny groups outside, but they generally feel they have, or eventually will have, a social place they can live with. There are many other lunchtime domains as well. A group of art students eat in the studios, and some band members gather by the music building. Dozens of drama students eat in the theater building, where they are joined by some students whose looks or manners deviate from the norm but who find the theater group more tolerant than most.

TAKING EVERYOHE

Ssecondary schools worldwide are shaped by the natural tendency of teenagers to form exclusive social groups known as cliques. Despite all the choices at Chapparal, a few students still have no clique. They eat upstairs or alone outside the library, or they just passively wander, their heads low as they pass groups of noisy schoolmates. They are reminders that a public high school has to admit all kinds of students, but it cannot guarantee them all a place in high-school society.

Chaparral is a large, well-regarded high school in an affluent suburb. It is a pleasant place, where parents, teachers, and students take justifiable pride in their facilities, their community, and their achievements. Compared with big-city schools, these schools do not look very diverse. The majority of the students are white, middle class, and dressed in the same few of brand names. But the reality is far more complex. Those who run such good suburban schools are well aware that some of the most horrifying school violence has happened at this kind of place, not at tough inner-city high schools.

They speculate about the reasons for this. The dropout rate has declined sharply since the 1960s, especially in suburban schools. Poor urban schools still lose many of their problem students to the streets. Suburban schools still have them. “It used to be that the kids who were really having trouble, the misfits would leave,” said John Kriekard, the principal at Chaparral. But now, “we serve all kinds of kids and we have to try to be all things to all people.”

He and others also emphasize the central role schools play in suburban life. “In big cities, there are lots of places where kids make connections, where they have pieces of their lives,” he said. “But in a place like this, we’re pretty much it.” This maximizes the influence that school society has on a student’s overall life. Adolescence has always been a time of identity formation, with inclusion and exclusion, trying out new ideas, styles, and friends. And these are not primarily girl issues. No matter what your gender, good looks, cool friends, academic achievement, and money have always defined the social terrain.

TROUBLED TEENS

A few troubled students would continually disrupt the whole school unless someone-if not the principal, then the law-intervened. These students are likely to be rootless and poorly directed, and their chances of finding effective control at home are slim. Economic factors are less important than family factors and previous social experience. Such behaviors is a call for help, not for material goods. To a teenager who has little experience with acceptance and security, these advantages seem to given arbitrarily to some people and not to others, certainly not to them.

Carol Miller Lieber, a former principal, says many students entering high school already see themselves as losers. Not surprisingly, this affects their perception of the entire school. Studies show that students who see themselves inevitably as outside the winners’s circle have far more negative views of a school than either the teachers or the most successful students. “In these big high-powered suburban high schools, there’s a very dominant winner culture, including the jocks, the advanced-placement kids, the student government and, depending on the school, the drama kids or the service clubs,” she said. “The winners are a smaller group than we’d like to think, and high school life is very different for those who experience it as the losers. They become part of the invisible middle and suffer in silence, alienated and without any real connection to any adult.” Interviews with Chaparral students confirm the research: the popular students who lunch outside were far more likely than the ones sitting inside to say that they love the school and feel connected to at least one teacher.