Rules Of The Game #12: Jocks And Burnouts

[koganbot]

My latest column, where I try to justify my nonstandard use of the word "class."

The Rules Of The Game #12: Jocks and Burnouts

I'm curious if you think the social map that Eckert provides and the social dynamic that I identify (the basic form being "jocks vs. burnouts" [w/ different category names in different times and places], but there being an unsettled effect when a third group, the "freaks," appears in strength) have anything to do with the situation at the high school you went to. If not, what was the social map? Also what sort of map(s) would you apply to situations you've been in after high school?

Oh yeah, and here's another chance for you to help me figure out what the hell it is I'm trying to say about Elvis.

EDIT: Here are links to all but three of my other Rules Of The Game columns (LVW's search results for "Rules of the Game"). Links for the other three (which for some reason didn't get "Rules Of The Game" in their titles), are here: #4, #5, and #8.

UPDATE: I've got all the links here now:

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/179531.html

Comments

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I find it difficult to recognise the map from school or university (but then I went to a fee-paying private school) - I recognise it more from ILX I guess!

How did the freaks alter the participates-in-school activities / doesnt-participate-in-school-activities schema? By providing alternative school activities or seeing to bring the outside activities into the school?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

seeing = seeming, I think.

Also, how if at all was the jock/burnout map modified by any kind of age based hierarchy? If you were a jock, could you hang out in school with people a year or two above you? Did things change if you were a burnout - did their lack of interest in school activities extend to school hierarchies?

[koganbot]

Well, in my school the jock-burnout map didn't hold as much, since the freaks were so strong, but one thing I noticed, and a few studies I've read say that this holds in general, is that the categories get less strong* - play less of a role in whom you choose as friends - in the later years of high school (which'd be around ages 16 to 18 in the U.S.). But interestingly, in my school right away the freaks broke the age boundary. Freaks were hanging around with other freaks no matter what the age group, whereas my impression was that among the others, the friendships tended to be with people in your own grade; though school activities would be one way that people in different grades mixed. But as for the burnouts - called "greasers" in my day - I don't know.

Also, for what it's worth, I was pretty much too intimidated by the freaks my own age to be friends with them, but I was friends with some of the younger freaks, whom I found less threatening. But the freaks I was friends with were in something of a different group from the freaks I was intimidated by (my friend Tina, who identified with the latter, and obviously is an exception to my generalization, disparagingly called my freak friends "teenyboppers," in comparison to her freak friends - even though she was younger than 'most any of the people she was talking about), and in fact a couple of them were my age.

*From what I've read - not a lot, and I haven't done much reading on this subject recently - is that kids from about age 12 on gradually expand away from only being friends with people in their specific clique of friends, but paradoxically their awareness of the broader social groups and tendency to follow those patterns will also increase up through about age 16. So I had more and more varied friends as the years went on but actually drifted away from friendships with people who were too far into the freaks or too straight arrow.

[koganbot]

I'd say they were like the burnouts in tending to shun school activities, but they might show up in the drama club (less likely after 1970 because a change in who was advising the drama club made it more mainstream) and they'd show up in political activities somewhat - not student council, but antiwar and other forms of activism. I think more to the point is that to some extent they didn't avoid classroom participation as much (some would discuss/argue with the teacher rather than simply cut class or stay silent or be disruptive) and that they were likely to take a certain amount of intellectualism and artsy-fartsiness into their off-campus lives.

What was your school social map like (Sinker actually wrote up his for Why Music Sucks)? And were there refusal groups; that is, not just people who tended to shy away from school activities - misfits and loners and grinds will do that - but who had active social lives with each other but took those activities either off campus or at least underground, away from adult eyes. Sort of an anti-school-spirit contingent. (Malcolm McClaren and his gang in if.... might be an example; also Stalky and Co. in Kipling's Stalky and Co., though they had a relatively benign relationship with authority.)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I can't promise to write it up today, but I will try and write up my school social map before the next column comes out (i.e. before I go on holiday) - I guess the crucial factor is that there is no sustained 'off-campus' at a boarding school.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

malcolm mclaren's appearance in if.... is fleeting at best!

[koganbot]

Ha! Well, all them macs look the same to me! (I wonder what Lindsay Anderson would have made of McLaren; or did make of him, come to think of it, since Anderson surely would have been aware of the Sex Pistols, if not of the dance version of Madame Butterfly.)

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about doing this too -- it would be interesting to see if we came up with the same map. I remember for example that NME-reading indie-ish tastes linked one in to a network of like-minded individuals which included both jocks and burnouts. Physical manifestation of this = trekking across campus to borrow cassettes rather than taping stuff of the guy in the study space next to you. But that some bands crossed rapidly out of this class, and that there were a lot of tribal house tastes. e.g. lots of hip-hop in one house, but not in another.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

This has reminded me of the "social map of a greek island in tourist season" thing I wrote last holiday and then totally forgot about and never posted! Must dig up that notebook

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I don't recognise this map at all from my own experience but I kept having to remind myself of that because I recognise it from so many US high school movies! (MEAN GIRLS.) There was a social map at my school - I couldn't delineate it very clearly because I've forgotten an alarming amount of the lines and cliques involved; it wasn't a very usual map b/c of the school's specialist music school status.

A lot of the time, these maps exist more in people's psyches than in reality; eg I'd always thought of certain people as located in certain places on it, but talking to them years later they hadn't had that impression at all. Essentially everyone thought they were less popular than they were, and that everyone else was more popular than they were.

[koganbot]

Well one thing Eckert says in her book is that almost all the students would state adamently that they were against categorizing people, but then it would be the students themselves who brought up time and again the jock vs. burnout split (which apparently was quite visible to anyone who looked at lunchtime, since the jocks always sat in the school cafeteria and the burnouts always hung out in the courtyard, even in cold weather). What I think is that the students are recognizing that the categories are real enough to have power in the school environment, but that no one necessarily "fits" a category completely (i.e., no one is devoid of characteristics beyond and potentially at odds with their social category).

cis made an interesting point in one of the Department Of Dilettante Research threads, which is that the roles themselves are somewhat expected (maybe owing to their appearance in movies and TV shows, though my experience is that the movies/shows don't match up very well with actual school life; but this doesn't mean they can't influence actual school life).