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Welcome to my blog. I am Liz Kleinfeld, mother to Lily, wife to T, and Assistant Professor of English and Writing Center Director at Metropolitan State College of Denver. Here are 100 things about me.
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    persistence of high school cliques

    « H E parenting :: email
    posted Saturday, 2 June 2007
    The mother of one of Lily’s friends and I were talking the other day about the cliquishness in high schools. We both have our kids at a public Montessori school that is not clique-free, but the cliques are not as dominant and brutal and controlling as what we both know high school cliques are. We both felt that in our high schools, cliques were not only tolerated by most of the teachers and administrators but sometimes even encouraged. She asked me if I had any insights, given that I teach some gen. ed. courses that future high school teachers take.

    I hadn’t thought about this before, but once she asked me that question, I had to admit that many of the education majors in my composition classes are “popular.” If you’ve seen Mean Girls or read the book it was inspired by, Queen Bees and Wannabes, you’ll know what I mean by “popular”—the kids who are social if not physical bullies, who thrive on putting other kids down. I’m not saying that all the education majors are like that, but I believe that more of the “popular” kids who turn up in my classes intend to be teachers than go into any other career.

    I can see why kids who were Queen Bees and whatever the male equivalent is in high school would want to become high school teachers. By staying in the high school milieu, they can relive their “glory days” through their careers. And if they maintain the same immature values as adults that they held as high school students, then of course they won’t try very hard to discourage cliquishness in their own classes (or schools if they become administrators).

    I know kids will form groups based on interests and personalities. That happens everywhere and makes sense. What I am against is the meanness of it, the emotional and social cruelty of it. When one group’s identity is based on the shared interest of making others feel bad about themselves, then I have a problem. I don’t mind the brainy kids hanging out together, the athletes hanging out together, whatever. But if the brainy kids go out of their way to make the others feel stupid, that’s a problem (not that I’ve ever seen the brainy clique do anything like that except in self defense, but perhaps that’s my prejudice showing).

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    And? (2)

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    1. Parts-n-Pieces left...
    Saturday, 2 June 2007 5:36 pm :: http://partsnpieces.blog-city.com

    What you say about education majors has a struck a chord, and it saddens me greatly. You would think that students choosing to TEACH would be a little more open to difference in others, but I guess not. Even more sad, though, is that the popular girls from high school and college, those "mean girls," grow up and they become mean women. (And I'm not kidding one bit.) I leave for Florida in about a week to read AP Language exams, and the place is filled with high school AP teachers. Some of them are very nice and open and collegial. There are some terrific people teaching the youth of America. Then there are the rest of them. And many of these women just plain mean.

    In the course of a week, I saw the equivalent of the three-way phone conversation (from the movie), gossip about other readers (their appearance, their weight, where they taught), claims about the stratification between high school teachers and college faculty (that college faculty just couldn't cut it in the high school AP world), horribly disparaging remarks about non-white students and their academic abilities . . . it was awful. All of this coming from high school AP teachers-- all of the snarky comments and backbiting? from women.

    I don't want to paint all high school teachers with the same "mean" brush because--like I noted--there are some very good teachers out there. But this particular grouping of teachers -- those who were mean girls in high school-- a lot of them fall into the category of mean adults and they are still in high school.


    2. Elizabeth Kleinfeld left...
    Sunday, 3 June 2007 10:10 am

    P-n-P, wow, your comments are terribly depressing, but they do support my observations. I heard somewhere--I wish I could remember--that while people used to go into high school teaching because, duh, they wanted to teach, nowadays, some people are going into it because high school teachers are known to have job security in a time when many careers are no longer considered secure. Pretty scary.