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Man, am I the only person left alive who went through the stereotypical jocks vs. nerds thing? I'm getting the feeling everyone is conspiring to convince me it was all a dream.
I'll give you that one. Even at the time, I remember thinking "you guys are cool, but howcome everyone here comes from a broken home, and seems to have a drug or alcohol problem?"
My experience with jocks (students who participated in the school's sports teams) is that they were perfectly nice, friendly people. Not as smart as me, but then again I wasn't as athletic as them.
Virtually all trouble (bullying, fighting, stealing, class disruption, etc.) was caused by underclass kids. And, yes, they were mostly black.
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My high school was in a military town. While we did have folks that might fit the definition of a jock, there was no dominant jock clique, and jocks were distributed pretty diffusely throughout many friend clusters. There was also a great deal of kids that had just arrived last year and would be leaving the next, and didn't have the time to develop strong cliqueish ties.
I witnessed one instance of physical bullying during all of high school, and as far as I know it didn't recur. The bully didn't get any positive or negative reinforcement, those of us around just kind of stared because this was strange and like something from a TV show.
I also can't recall any instances of serious nerd teasing, and being fairly nerdy, I think I would've been a target. My friends and I would tease each other about all kinds of things, but there wasn't anyone enforcing non-nerdy norms.
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More of my teasing was in elementary, where those groups hadn’t yet coalesced. Ironically, I was in track & field (100y dash + long jump) and T-ball at the time, so technically, I was jock as well as nerd.
In middle school, I had the distinct displeasure of being picked literally last every time we had captains picking teams in PE, so by that point, it was closer to true. But in high school, the jocks were in such a different social class, I barely even interacted with them.
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My school was small, in a deep red, rural area so probably different enough from the norm, but outside of a few very physically gifted kids, like the 300 lb guy who'd started on the offensive and defensive lines all his years, or the son of a former major league pitcher who wasn't too bright, the jocks were most of the advanced tracked kids, too.
Our math olympiad team included two very nerdy guys, one very nerdy girl (our schools only national merit finalist) the head cheerleader, a starter on the basketball team, and me who lettered in 2 sports.
I went to a relatively large suburban California high school, and noticed the same thing. Most of the popular kids were also jocks and most of the actually outstanding athletes were also honors students, and a fair number also acted in the school musicals. The fact they were likeable and good at everything and possessed the social confidence to effortlessly pass between groups was why they were popular.
The vast majority of the bullying I saw, experienced, and (shamefully) participated in was intra-clique. You were far more likely to be humiliated by the only-slightly-more-socially-adept-than-you nerd attempting to gain status within the small group of friends you played video games with than some chad in a letterman's jacket. They were too busy bullying the fat kid on the football team to pay attention to the nerds.
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At small rural schools, there's often not much else more interesting to do than athletics and AP classes, and classes are small enough for teachers to actually teach the material. Unless there's a "real" ambient culture of thinking learning is dumb and for poofters (seeing a black guy on TV occasionally doesn't count), so you don't see as much segregation of academic performance, athletics, and popularity.
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