High School Cliches You're Sick Of!

What cliches in high school settings are you sick of?

Also, would you mind telling me how your school experience differs with what the media projects as to what high school is like?

Your responses are going to help me a more realistic high school drama script I'm planning! ^_^

The clique cliche.

Yes, cliques exist. But if you're going to have a school with more than a thousand kids, be prepared to not make them so omnipresent. I know a school with 500 kids, that is indeed very tight knitted and does judge you by what you wear. I know a school with much more people, and the jocks rule, there are desks with a semen film on them, and during football games, jocks wear their jerseys in class.

Mine? Never met a cheerleader who was mean. Girls Soccer is biggish here, and usually takes places. Our football players wear suits on game days. We have a whole sub-community of Goth-weaboos. It is big enough that an AP kid will never meet the kids who slack off.

The jocks, in my experience, are usually the nicest too!

And...is bullying extinct? I rarely see it happen....

Oh, another thing; how large is your school, thread?

edited 8th Jun '11 9:03:34 AM by cutewithoutthe

second from the back, window seat.

arghhhhhhhhh

edited 8th Jun '11 9:04:54 AM by Chubert

2k kids.

Bullying exists, but is usually passive aggressive, emotional, or in passing (hey look at weird kid who I never saw before!)

Bullying? Extinct?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA— -chocks-

Even my school had some bullying incidents. A whole campaign on verbal bullying was launched by the school.

One thousand here.

edited 8th Jun '11 9:06:48 AM by chihuahua0

ALSO; what are fights like in your school? Do they elevate to group beatings like my old school did?

In my school, a guard had to use a tazer on a student. XD

My school isn't really a good reflection of other schools, since it's better than most schools.

But physical fights aren't really common. Tasers seem to be completely absent too.

Well, it isn't true for every school but these cliches do get annoying after while. I know my school experience wasn't like that all aven if there were some elements present. Maybe the trope codifier had bad experience and the shows that existed afterward are jsut following the leader. I am only geenralizing of course.

Yes, but what patterns in this setting are you sick of? We're not discussing the actual cliches, we're discussing what you're sick of.

Extending a bit on what MR AHR said: clique relationships are not set in stone. I was a geek, by all definitions, the sort who played Magic The Gathering in lunch. Never met a jock I didn't like. Where I suffered through high school, we were all united against the spoiled Che Guevara wannabes. A friend of my went to a Northside school — all the athletes there were overachieving scholars, trying to get into a good college and avoiding getting shot. (North Minneapolis is fucked up.) Still another went to school in the 'burbs, where jocks really were Always Chaotic Evil. I've even heard stories of schools ruled by budding fundamentalists. It varies wildly according to what the school's demographics, and what it chooses to push as most important in its student body.

edited 8th Jun '11 9:39:26 AM by KillerClowns

The Libby: Yeah, I know, teens can be very nasty, but by this point it seems like a cheap way to create an antagonist and conflict: It is one of those things that happen in Real Life, but in fiction now seem too old and cliché.

The Jerk Jock stereotype: This really f*cking annoys me because, as the great majority of all tropers, I was in the nerd category, and I can tell you that nerds can be (and often are) more prejuiced that any other clique: I happened to like sports, and they often saw me as if I were "less of a nerd" just because I actually watched the match last night and I knew who Scotty Pippen was...

Adults Are Useless: I know, I know, we are all tired of this thing.

Music Video Syndrome: OK, TVTropes ruined my life, I didn't even notice this until I saw the trope page...now I see it everywhere

edited 8th Jun '11 9:52:22 AM by Anthony_H

The politics of high schools in fiction rarely resemble the kind I saw in real life. For example, the Absurdly Powerful Student Council. Our student council was a joke. They had less influence on staff decisions than the football team. Also, there was never this culture of glamourising cheerleaders and whatnot. There was a cheerleading squad at one point, don't know whether they stuck around, but I certainly don't remember them getting any kind of preferential treatment or being considered particularly desirable or fashionable.

Also, preps. Nobody at my school even used the word. There were some people who were a bit posh, and would get teased for that, but they didn't form cliques, they just hung out with whoever they hung out with. All the really rich kids went to public (that is, private) schools, anyway.

Bullying is extremely common, but is generally depicted very inaccurately. The most pervasive kind of bullying is the indirect, ostracising, sneering kind, not the "beat you up and take your lunch money" kind. I never saw anyone beat anybody up for lunch money, and in any case, the worst bullies were not the pathetic creatures that you see in fiction, they were people with some level of popularity and influence - not the most popular people, but people with friends and who were generally accepted.

Also, the tendency to portray nerds as victims. Nerds can be bullies. Nerds can also be elitists; I've seen more nerds saying horrible things about jocks than the reverse.

On the flipside of that, why are "popular kids" always assholes in fiction? Assholes are rarely popular. The most popular kids tended to be pretty nice to everybody.

In my experience, cliques like 'jocks', 'geeks', 'goths', don't exist. Most of the schools I've attended had relatively defined groups of friends, but that's just who you'd hang around with most of the time, not the only people you talk to or are friends with, and they aren't defined by your interests or styles or whatever.

Same thing with the student council. We have one, whose job is to find out what minor changes the students would like to make to the school, meet with a couple of teachers once a month and be told that they're not actually going to change anything.

edited 8th Jun '11 10:14:36 AM by cityofmist

• Bullies, in my experience, will not jump at the nerds every time they happen to see them. Bullying is not their life, and they have other things to do. They're just as likely to just ignore you.
• The final exams are NOT Serious Business, unless we're talking about the FINAL final exams, the last ones.
• Related, the educational system does not suddenly work perfectly during the final exams (both the FINAL and the normal ones). Cheating exists, everywhere. Strict observation does not solve the problem.
• In my school no one really cares about the sports teams. I can't even remember one person that was part in one of them. They're not a big deal.
• There's no Absurdly Powerful Student Council. The reason most people want to get elected is so that they can have an excuse for being absent in classes. Though, admittedly, the council does have a tradition of putting some of the money in their members pockets. But still, nothing like this trope.
• As above, there are not "jocks" or "nerds" groups. Jocks hang with nerds, and generally people don't use these kind of distinctions. You hang around with your friends, that's all.

edited 8th Jun '11 10:16:22 AM by Dealan

Also; drug use and alcohol abuse is....surprisingly common here. Is that unique to Virginia, or did anyone else's schools do that?

And; Sex. Everyone does it, mostly.

We did have jocks and nerds at the grammar school I went to during my 6th form years, so that does happen. There was overlap, though; it wasn't a completely either/or thing.

There was no goth clique, because there weren't enough goths, and those that existed tended to hang with the nerds or the stoners (which again overlapped). Likewise, no emo clique. There was a kid in the year below who took to dressing like The Black Parade-era MCR at one point, but that's it.

And yes, sex, alcohol, drugs, etc. were nothing particularly unusual.

edited 8th Jun '11 10:23:51 AM by BobbyG

I've never known anyone from my high school doing drugs. Also, sex is uncommon.

As for alchohol, it depends on what you mean abuse. Some get drunk fairly often, but that's about it.

I'm in high school right now. I go to a small school in a tight-nit community. We have about 200 people per graduating class, so that averages out to 800 total. That's small enough for me to recognize almost every name in my class. Everyone has been going to school with each other since elementary school.

As far as I can see, we don't have all of the cliques and hierarchies and petty bullshit that you always see in YA fiction. Even our cheerleaders and footballers are nice, articulate individuals. The closest thing to popular kids that we have are real-life examples of The Ace- they take honors and even AP courses, they're members of the student council, they're in sports (usually more than one), they sing in the competitive chorale, and they lead their section in band, all while being chosen for the homecoming queen's court, if not the queen herself.

The only downside is that the band never gets any respect, even though it regularly outclasses all of the sports combined.

Yeah, aside from that, I love my school. A lot. I couldn't resist gushing about it a little. ^ w ^

Some of y'all are really lucky — I've yet to see a school that doesn't have at least some clique distinctions, though they vary from place to place and rarely match the pop-culture standard model exactly. It's not a myth, just something that isn't guaranteed to happen.

^ Truth.

I spent several years at a comprehensive school where instead of cliques we just had two camps, townies (calling them "chavs" was generally a very bad idea) and skaters. They supposedly hated one another and every now and again a fight would break out, but most people got along well enough the rest of the time.

Sports teams are important depending on how much money is put into them and how many awards they win. My school, for example, only cared about the marching and jazz bands and the girl's volleyball team. The football team only won a total of literally three games while I was attending.

One of my friends went to a school where the softball team won like every game, and did exceptionally well so they were all the cool athletic kids. Incidentally, every football team in the district sucked.

Also that thing where the UNPOPULAR kid sits down to eat with all the POPULAR kids and then they all get up and leave doesn't happen ever. Popular kids are usually popular because they're people that people enjoy being around, and usually are actually the first to see the awkward freshman in the corner and go "HEY WHAT'S YOUR NAME LET'S HANG OUT."

Also also! Cheerleaders are not horrible, vindictive people. You go to try-outs, you do good, you become one. At no point does that process inherently make you a complete bitch out to ruin everyone's life except your super-cool, buff jock boyfriend.

Also also also! That "fight fight fight fight" chant actually does happen. There's actually this thing where people just wander around campus and take recordings of fights that break out to sell them, at least where I went to school.

edited 8th Jun '11 10:33:37 AM by Lasty

People just lol'ed when a fight happened in my old school, or kept repeating OH SHIT YEEEEEEEE.

And food fights usually don't last long here...

edited 8th Jun '11 10:35:48 AM by cutewithoutthe

Oh right. We also don't have any kind of cheerleaders. And we don't have a place to eat, and also don't get fed by the school or something, so food fights or food snobs don't exist.

Funny thing: I used to live in Canada, and they do have that clique thing, maybe not just like the movies, but there are different well-defined groups.

Then I moved to Mexico and there was "the smart guys" and the rest: there was no some kind of system, and while there were "nerdy" students, "preppy" students and all that, it was without the antagonism, and with some rare exceptions, most of my class were usually cool to each other.

I don't know if it is some kind of "Anglo" thing: It seems more common in the Canadian and American schools (thanks for my own experience and for what my friends tell me) than in the Hispanic ones (Then again, the last time I was in high school was ten years ago, and it seems like now there IS some kind of antagonism between rockers, goths and emo kids in Mexico...musical tastes are Serious Business for our youth)

edited 8th Jun '11 10:44:34 AM by Anthony_H