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]

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.