Typical school people

Okay, I go to a high school that has some taunting, some jokers, and some classes with homework that requires that you pour out your heart and soul. End of article on the elements of school.

Okay, I'd better elaborate, which will be hard to do considering that I'm writing this out of sheer boredom due to the inability to fall asleep and the end of Bush's State of the Union. I should start off by saying that I don't belong a secondary school that fits the description of 'school daze', although that rhetoric will be present throughout the day. I go to a school run by the county that had a hard tme of selecting laureates in my graduating year. This school is so much a mesh of people that have the same general interest that physical bullying almost never exists in the school. However, the school itself does have its classes of personalities, and so do other schools in the region. Tonight we'll discuss the types of people that you'll find in the American secondary school.

First are the computer geeks with clean report cards. To dispel the myth, many geeks are not dressed in dress clothes bearing pens in their breast pockets. Many of these 'geeks' actually do not exist, but are rather a deformed stereotype in America. Geeks will be confined to the computer, yes, but they do not have glasses most of the time and they usually do not have high-pitched voices or crooked teeth as the Urkel stereotype suggests. More importantly, they're far from outcasts; they even have their own cliques or will assimilate into other groups.

Second are the girly girls. 'Picture stalkers' drool over pictures of Dream Street and actually take advice from and adhere to magazines such as YM or J14 — both of which advertise for both genders when spoken but in the visual department show their true colours as magazines oriented toward girls and pushing the 'chic', 'glam', and 'sexy' girl image, but due to the fact that they, unlike the tabloids Star, National Enquirer, or Globe (not that they're entirely trustworthy), do not give any information as to obtain those images, these images drive many girls to anorexia. Some older ones will flout the dress code, wearing revealing clothing on the campus. Some will gawk at boys like me (there are currently three in a pack that gawk at me when I'm working) and then giggle amongst themselves. Some will horse about in the cafeteria, pushing and chivvying boys and often feigning physical offence. And some are on the path to contracting chlamydia, AIDS, or herpes. Contrary to the advertisements, there are NO girls who will buy the Bartz dolls. Not one girl I know has one of them.

Third are 'hagglers' that resort to looking at other profiles and chatting on MySpace using 'txtspk'. These come from all genders but are unified in the fact that what they communicate about boils down to a monotonous 'glum, glum, glum'. They carry over from picture stalkers and will also use the service to arrange dates with people they go to school with or have just met over the service itself (resulting in the abductions I talked about).

Fourth are isolated people. (Thanks to José's muttering in history class for this!) Some of these people don't fit into any category or are exiled or rejected by the other groups. Others are rather successful in their lives and don't feel the need to assimilate into any of these groups. They, alongside the geeks, tend to do the best in academics compared to picture stalkers or hagglers. However, some don't do as well due to low self-esteem. The isolated people keep schools from being true melting pots — which, for one, I think they should be.

It's amazing how distinct these groups are in every American school. Whether they're reinforced by the media (I'm glaring at James' comment on the MySpace article), by emotional, physical, or social contrasts, or by forced separation by the staff, they exist and have had a formidable effect on the politics of school. And they'd better enjoy this position, too; the only other place than college after you leave secondary school where these classes will form again is in prison.

Sorry, guys, but that's how I feel about you.