Cliques at MS447

Part 1

A phenomenon prominent in many teens’ lives, and one never looked over. I am, of course, talking about popularity and cliques. I took it upon myself to do a case study in our school to figure out two things; Is our school like those in those 80’s movies we’ve all seen, and, if the so-called popular kids, actually are what they seem. Hint: There is a lot more behind this than I realized. I chose to do my interview in our school courtyard, where all the 8th graders have lunch with their groups. This is the perfect place to talk about cliques since this is where they are most apparent. I started with a couple of questions that just scratched the surface. I asked if there were cliques in our school, if they were in one, and how they define cliques. I also asked what cliques they thought they were in. Here are the answers I received:

How would you define cliques? 

“A group of people who share the same interests”

“Excluding people in a friend group and talking about stuff; who you like, etc.”

“Small, toxic groups that are a safe space but it really depends on the people in the clique”

“How cool you are, who you hang out with.”

“I don’t know.”

Everyone I interviewed mustered up a powerful “YES!” responding that there were, in fact, cliques in our school. The results were a bit more controversial with the last question, whether they themselves were in a clique. Some said yes, others said maybe, and some even said no. So already we can see that while MS447 8th graders are confident that the phenomenon exists, they are a bit more self-conscious when it comes to them personally. 

If we now talk about the kinds of cliques that students are in, the results are unclear. Students might think of themselves as one thing that is very different then what others think of them. For example, one clique might consider themselves; 

“The cool, sexy, hot group. Also the 2nd coolest,” (That’s them talking about themselves) while another group would consider them; “Judgy and mean, but also nice.” Now it’s time to talk about popularity. The same groups were again asked a couple of questions, but this time specifically about the “Popular group” and popularity in general. Define popular: 

“A lot of people know who they are, and are basically the head of the students.”

“Everyone knows you, good-looking, confident.”

“Usually comes up in conversation, everyone knows them”

“Most kids, everyone knows who you are”

So people seem to know what they are talking about, right? That’s not exactly the case. Looking at the responses for when I pointed at the “Popular group” and asked them what they were, the first time around, students recognized them as popular 100% of the time. The funny thing is, they did not always know why.

“I don’t know”

“They are pretty, social and some have abs. Don’t ask me how I know that”

“Huge Group, even high schoolers, ‘Take up whole lunchroom'" (just to be clear that is an exaggeration.)

The most interesting answer though was from the “popular kids” themselves. When I asked them to define themselves they said that they were, “Friends, wore each other clothes” I also asked what they thought other kids thought they were, 

“Annoying” Why? 

According to someone who would like to stay anonymous, (Someone in the group,) “Sometimes people in the group can be a bit b****y and act like crap. We are the kind people who people think are mean before they even meet us.” When I asked them if they were surprised that a lot of people consider them the popular kids, they said, altogether, 

“NO!!!!” (As in they were not surprised.) And the most interesting of all, when I asked them why they thought others thought that, they had no idea. We will explore why this happens, compare our school to those we always see in movies, and talk about what kinds of cliques are apparent in our school in the next update!