Changing High School Stereotypes: For Better or Worse?

                We’ve all seen the stereotypes of high school students portrayed in popular movies such as Mean Girls or High School Musical where the kid wearing glasses with his nose tucked away in a book is classified as a “nerd”, or the preppy girl talking animatedly with her large group of friends at lunch is known as the “cheerleader”. All high schools have these cliché groups, whether they be in movies or real life, and Lassiter is no exception. Walking through the halls and into lunch, cliques can be clearly spotted; nerds, outcasts, jocks, cheerleaders, mean girls. We’ve got them all. And not only do these groups dress the part of their associated roles, but many of them act it as well. So you can see why it comes as a shocking surprise when the quarter back of our football team scored higher on his SAT’s than the supposed “know-it-all nerd”.

                As children of the 21^st century, we are taught from an early age to never judge a book by their cover. So, maybe classifying our fellow peers into categories as degrading as these isn’t showing our understanding of this saying, but it happens almost without any thought. People are seen by what they wear, how they act and who they hang out with. It’s not to say that football players aren’t smart, because most of them are, and saying that everyone with glasses knows everything is most definitely not true. But when people see each other through these stereotypes for so long, things like this seem to cause havoc in the “social food chain” that is high school. Because students of all kinds have such an image to uphold, disturbances such as these raise questions, many of which have no answers. Did our quarterback go as far as cheating on his SAT to prove a point that jocks could be just as smart, if not smarter than the nerds? Are our stereotypes changing from what was considered the norm? Will this strange event cause more high school uprisings?

                One can only assume that the worst is to come of this. “We have a social balance to keep at Lassiter,” says one of the cheerleaders. “If people begin to break away from their assigned groups that they migrated towards at the beginning of our high school years, who knows what kind of crazy things will happen.” This concern is shown throughout all of Lassiter as other students begin to break away from the status quo. In other words, nerds are not the only ones being bullied into doing others homework, jocks aren’t the favored picks for sports in physical education classes anymore, and mean girls aren’t being feared as much by lower classmen. Teachers are noticing a change in student’s behavior as well with this current SAT scandal leading the suspicions of the changes in what we thought we knew about high school stereotypes. So what will become of this? Will people continue to break out of their cliché shells, embracing individualism and no longer holding concern for what used to be normal? “Everyone changes at some point in their life,” states a senior, “but this might be too quick of a change.”