Seriously, on all the TV shows/films I watch that are set in American high school/college it makes it look so fun, and I get quite envious I'm not studying there! Is it actually as fun as they make it look? Parties all the time and stuff.

It also looks rather cliquey, is that true?

Still looks more fun than British schools

For me, school is not fun. I'm in high school and to me, it is the worst thing ever. The partying thing isn't really a big thing for my friends, I guess. Most people I know don't throw huge parties - they just throw small ones with close friends. But I can't say that for everyone. Guess it depends on who you are and what you like. As someone that enjoys spending time alone, I rarely go to parties and dances.
As for the cliques... that depends. I have a variety of friends, but most of them are from band. In my school, a lot of the band geeks stick together. But other than that, I haven't really seen a ton of cliques.
But that's just my school. It probably varies.

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High school was a blast but, I went to a small one. We had a few seasonal dances. Parties were mostly an extension of the sports (Cross Country team getting together for instance), but rather rare. And supervised by parents and often Coach would attend. So no, no getting drunk, no truth or dare. Just hanging out, watching movies, and depending on the host, a swim in the pool.

Cliques… there are some groups that hung out with each other. Goof balls, band geeks, etc. But nothing at all like on TV. That's drama taking control.

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Highschool was hella fun, I was a white guy surrounded by Mexicans and Black people.
I was huge and nobody messed with me, and the people who did didn't like being in my class anymore.

I could usually outwit the common student and the teachers liked me.

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You have to realize though too, shows are usually going to omit all the boring stuff and show all the fun stuff because it's more entertaining to watch. Would you really rather a plot about students studying, listening to lectures, and studying, or would you rather see a plot unfold when it's presented in a more fun way?

That being said, I enjoyed high school and college a great deal. Not because it was parties all the time and such, but because I got to hang out with my friends and such when the boring stuff wasn't going on, and even in college, some of the professors were pretty fun. And things are going to be cliquey wherever you go. Funnily enough, my high school class wasn't really like that. Sure there was the occasional oddball, but everyone pretty much got along. It helped that we broke status quo, we would have the top football players and cheerleaders taking advanced math and science classes and being best friends with the nerds. I loved it.

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My high school was pretty big, we had a lot of cliques, lot of school spirit, I heard LOTS of gossip from popular cliques about getting hammered and stuff. I recall a funny story where this one girl woke up in the middle of a rock on the beach surrounded by water. Oh California, so spoiled. I don't really know about college hijinks though, it sounds like, from Facebook at least, that a lot of my friends are in Frats and Sororities and they do crazy stuff (at least Frats do). I go to Community College, and I can say for certain it is NOTHING like the NBC TV show.

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My high school doesn't really have any cliques... I mean I guess the only division between students would be "those who take all of the honors/AP classes" and "those who don't."

That said, over 80% of the students in my school are Asian including me. I guess that doesn't make it so much like a normal American high school at all.

And yet I still don't fit in. :I

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Ha! I'd put it down to our British weather being typically gloomy and miserable as to why our schools never seem particularly fun.
Though when I consider media that portrays schools....it does seem that America gets portrayed as significantly more fun for kids. Contrast for example.....Saved by the Bell with a British teenage show like Byker Grove...which got pretty gritty and tackled issues like drugs homosexuality teen pregnancy and stuff. Haha when I think about it all the media for kids on CBBC showing childhood was pretty gritty back when I was a kid, Tracy Beaker had serious issues about troublesome childhoods and being in an orphanage and the actual secondary school show Grange Hill had severe topics like rape and stuff and a serious anti-drug message

Good old smily Britain.


Edit: According to Good Ol' Wikipedia Saved by the bell tackled serious issues as well so maybe Britain isn't exclusively bad but I don't have much experience with American High school series to judge how in dark they get.

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The answer may depend on where you go to high school. I got out of my junior year at a public high school in a town of 13,000 and a school of about 1,200 students. It's worlds different between the expectation of what my school is like based on our city and what actually goes on. We're smack dab in the Bible Belt and yet we have the big school environment because, well, we are a big school. There are 5 conferences for our interscholastic competitions based on enrollment numbers and we are one conference below the biggest schools in the state.

We have the goth kids, we have the jocks, we have the preps, we have the nerds, but at the same time, we all intermingle in different organizations at our school. We have the whole spectrum within choir, band, speech and debate, yearbook, newspaper, theater, musical and one-act play cast. Those who stick to one clique or organization (particularly those who only hang in their football crowd) quickly find themselves confused when their friends associate with those outside of the group. Advanced classes are where it's at in my school.

As to whether I think it's the same at my school as television and the silver screen make it out to be, the answer is no. High school as you watch it is not the same as I personally experience it. Even if football is glorified simply because we're in Texas, football (American football) is pretty much only glorified in the fall. Once that's over and done with, we move on to everyone competing in the winter and spring.

A lot of sponsors of programs that are not football are close friends from what I hear from my newspaper adviser. Basketball, journalism, track, cross country, power lifting, band, choir, speech and debate and, again, anyone else who isn't football. There are friendly students on the football team and I don't make such comments around them. One in particular. It's not as much that they're doing anything fundamentally wrong as it is that they claim victory too soon.

The hardcore football crowd seems introverted and, even though we all go to their games in the fall, once that's over with, no one cares unless they're involved in other organizations and activities. They can't use their limelight beyond the day their season ends. The furthest our football team has advanced is the state semifinals. Once. They rarely get past the first round otherwise. Especially this past year's team because they were so cocky. They noted all of their opponents' weaknesses and one plotted out the course of their journey to the State tournament. Their "mistake-prone" opponents trounced them in the first round 45-14.

As for that aspect, it is close to how "Friday Night Lights" depicts it. Once the season's over, no one cares. Texas high schools put football on a high pedestal, but that is taken down once they're done. One thing I like about choir is, until we sing at graduation, we're never done. Not to just gain the spotlight, but because we always have something not terribly far away to work for. The football team has to wait months until they put their work to use. We have four concerts, a themed music showcase and contest every year spread out over the course of 9 months. It's better that way so we don't have seniors lazing about through the rest of the year.

Everyone outside of the United States who has the question of whether high school is as it seems on TV, I'll tell you now that answer is absolutely not. Your boob tube might not even get the setting right wherever in the States Tinseltown High is.

And that concludes my daily rant of Badd-mouthing. *ba-dum tish*

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Others can speak for themselves, but, for me, high school was absolute hell. People were obnoxious, rude, and constantly hurled insults at me nonstop.

High school was the most stressful period of my life, and I had to take anti-anxiety medications to keep myself going every day. I routinely called in sick, just because there were days when I just couldn't do it.

College, however, is a slightly different story. People are much more professional, mature, and have gotten past their petty differences. There are still people who haven't matured and still wish they were in high school picking on people who don't conform to their idea of normalcy, but college was much better for me, and I met some really nice people and instructors there.

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I go to a Canadian high school, if that counts? It doesn't really seem like how the films and sitcoms make it out to be at all. Stuff like that needs to be exciting, I guess. Although some of the seniors at my school actually DO throw huge crazy parties. And there was alcohol. At my school's athletic banquet, the athletes apparently have a tradition where they bring alcohol in their water bottles...Which sounds extremely pointless, but I dunno, I don't play sports. This year the teachers caught on and three guys in my class got suspended for a few days because they were caught.

I guess my high school experience isn't exactly typical. I go to a regular school, but I'm enrolled in this specialized program for math and science. So the guy that everyone thinks is cool and awesome is this tall Chinese dude with glasses who's a huge math whiz. His math abilities and hyper competence kind of transformed him into somebody attractive. A bit of a change from the handsome jock from TV shows As for cliques, well, the people from my program (there are ~60 of us in each grade) usually stick together, but I have a few friends from the regular program too. Apparently there's a "popular" group in the regular program, kind of reminiscent of my middle school haha. Within the math program I'm in, there are just little groups of friends...not really cliques. Although I still feel a strange sort of vibe, some kind of invisible separation. Like, even though we're all technically nerds, there's still the fashionable girls and athletic guys that I always kinda feel ill at ease around, like I still feel like they're the "popular" kids.. A concept I've never really understood. But pretty much I guess we're all just one huge clique that's further didvided into several sub-cliques, with a few people who have the freedom and social capabilities to drift between these sub-cliques. Yeah.

Overall, not very exciting or dramatic. Except for the whole getting-drunk-thing. Which was treated like this huge scandal. XD Stick to the calculus textbooks and avoid the booze, my friends. (Incidentally, those seniors who throw big crazy parties are the ones who choose to go into social sciences/business university programs rather than, say, engineering or medicine-related stuff. The biggest math/science nerds are probably at home studying for AP Physics.)

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It not only depends on where you are, but also what type of school you go to. I can say there is a big difference in private and public schools, but TV does get some of it right (or it sets these trends).

I was in private school for Junior high, and I will say those were the worst years of my life. Everyone was the same: Bible bumping, conservative, "all American" redneck snobs. And if you didn't conform to that, you were outcasted. Naturally, that was me, the lone nerd who liked computers, videogames, and anime. Frankly I'm glad I was pulled out of there for high school, because if I had to endure one more year of their taunting and pranks, I don't know if I would have made it.

High School I was in public school. It was more diverse, and I wasn't picked on, but I did see the partying. Though I never attended one, I would hear people talk about how drunk they were and what crazy antics they got themselves into. I mostly kept to myself in high school, but their stories were somewhat amusing (although they did make me worry for humanity...).

College on the other hand is different. Right now I'm just attending a junior college; I haven't transferred to university yet, but the people and the atmosphere are so different. People actually seem to care about the work they do, there's more diversity, less stupidity, no more hearing "when are we going to use this?" in math class. I still hear about some parties, but not quite as frequently as I did in High School.

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Granted, I probably wouldn't have qualified as a "normal" American youth, but I generally experienced high school as alternately infuriating and depressing. Imagine fighting a multiple front war all alone and watching the apple of your eye blithely jump off a cliff, laughing off any warnings you may offer about the danger ahead, and you'll have my HS experience in a nutshell. College was a little more bearable than that, but not by a wide enough margin to make it worth the expense. I suppose parties might well have been fairly common where I went to school but to the extent that I was exposed to them, they never did me much good. There's nothing quite like being surrounded by familiar faces and still feeling alone.

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I'm not American, I'm Austrian. Thus, our school systems are much different from the American ones. We don't have a rather big school with a lot of students like in the USA. I went to the same school for 9 years, until I decided to get a job and got into vacational school. But more about it later.

As I said, I always was in the same school for nine years. From the beginning on in kindergarten till high school. We don't have any activities (like band, baseball, basketball or something like that) and it's not like that our school is boring - it's just a normal Austrian school where the kids can learn something for their later life.

Now to vacational school. Yeah, I know something like that simply doesn't exist in America, but I still want to let you know what exactly a vacational school is. It's pretty much the last stage of school. When you drop out of high school, you have 2 optinions. Either you go and search a job or you hang around on your lazy butt and continue to go to a higher school for the next 2 or 3 years. When you pick the first one, you have to accept that you still have to go to school. And this is the vacational school. It's not as big as my old high school, but it's great. Actually, it's also pretty chilly, you don't have to study that hard like you did back then. For high school, good grades are important. As for the vacational school, even better grades are important. Because.. if you have bad grades, and I mean rather bad ones, then you might lose your job.

Yeah, that pretty much suits it.

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FUN!?
What I see from American High Schools on TV is a bunch of bitches called Cheerleaders who get revered as slut-goddesses, stupid jerks who get mislabelled as Jocks and are also gods because they know how to play sports but fail at every other subject, teasing and down-right bullying of Nerds..... and dances. What's the point of dances? Actually, what's the point of buying a new dress for every single dance, for every high school year?
Seriously....

I went to german school and we had no dances. Thank god. The system was very different from american schools...

C-A

It's a little difficult for me to say how accurate they are because I was generally pretty oblivious to stuff that was going on that I wasn't particularly interested in. I, for one, spent a lot of high school chilling in my friend's basement and watching anime. A lot of my close friends really hated high school because they found everyone around them to be judgmental and rude. I was totally fine, had a small group of close friends and got on well enough with everyone else that I had to deal with. The only party I ever went to was prom, which I found to be remarkably boring.

I can say that my school was a lot dirtier than any of the high schools on the Disney Channel, and a lot less likely to have murder plots than shows aimed at older audiences. High school was a lot less cliquey than Middle school. And everyone was not played by someone in their twenties.

The only thing I know about British high schools is Hogwarts, which is pretty awesome as high schools go.

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Well, I'm a freshman in college...I don't think college is exactly how most movies put it out to be. Well, I'm not sure. The amount that you party and get drunk all depends on the school that you go to.
All the cliche "I'm studying under a tree to pass the time" that actually can be true sometimes.
For my school, the classes aren't gigantic unless you're taking a 100 level class where everyone in the school is required to take it. Yeah I don't know...

As for high school, I had a French exchange student come over and stay with me and she and all her friends said that our high school looked like High School Musical and that it looked like that we might all start singing any second...

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Hehe well British TV indicates normal schools as pretty grim places as much as I recall with shows like Byker Grove and Grange Hill which weren't all full of sun an smiles.

Though magic british schools are all in castles s'far as I can remember it's the same in "The Worst Witch".

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The community college I go to is nothing like what you'd see in Hollywood. Drugs and Alcohol are banned, unsurprisingly, and the Campus Police do a thorough job of making sure it stays that way. This place has no dormitories, so there are no late-night parties either. The most exciting thing that happened in the three years I've been taking classes here was this one time where a brawl broke out, someone drew a knife, a few people landed in the hospital for a little bit, and someone got arrested (probably the knife guy). And the best/worst part of it was that the whole thing started over a game of Yu Gi Oh.

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I guess you can say this kind of shit only happens...



In America.

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Nothing but headaches and misery. Although it has been good a few times.

For me at first, highschool wasn't like as it is potrayed in the tv shows, movies, etc, which wasn't such a bad thing now that I look back.

But, in my current highschool, "popular" people exist and it's annoying because they act like arrogant imbeciles. And, there are barely any nerds I can talk to here. v_v

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As everyone above has mentioned, TV shows about American schools tend to crank up the drama so it's more interesting to watch.

I thought I should mention that almost all the TV shows I see here in the US about American schools is that they're /all/ indoors. Except Zoey 101 but that was some weird fantasy rich school and I don't even know. I'm a SoCal kid, so my high school was all outside (and so were my elementary school and middle school). Since it's sunshine most of the year, it's quite nice to go out and walk around for about 5 minutes before the next class. We also don't have a cafeteria (since the school's outside, we just find some outdoor tables scattered around campus or sit on the grass).

I hung around with the same group of people I met in middle school, though others joined in later. Overall we were basically the "top 2%" brainiacs of the school. We were in AP and honors classes, and most people there were really nice.
There were some jocks and cheerleaders in the classes (obviously, being an athlete doesn't mean you can't be smart too) but some of them... eh. Props for taking the AP classes and everything, but some of them treated school like one big social event. I wouldn't normally mention this because hey, to each their own, I don't really care, but some teachers preferred the more loudmouthed, obnoxious people in class (who tended to be jocks).
(I'll stop here since I'll just get into this rant about my Gov teacher... if a more "nerdy" kid raised his/her hand to answer, she'd usually be a little shaky about their answer and claim it's incomplete. If a "jock" kid answered with a clearly incomplete/vague answer, she would be like, "Yes, that's correct!!" It annoyed the hell out of me.)

ANYWAYS, yeah, I would occasionally hear about drama happening, but that was usually from the kids in non-honors classes or clubs (one of the reasons I quit band after my second year of high school despite my love for being in a Symphony Band was the stupid drama and weird hierarchy that placed a couple teacher's pets at the top... *sigh*).

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I heard the highschool in Zoey 101 is real.

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WHAT.

... Well, whaddaya know. It's apparently Pepperdine University.
Well, I guess that explains why the high school looked so open and free... because it was SECRETLY A COLLEGE. I KNOW YOUR SECRETS, ZOEY ONE-OH-ONE.

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oh God you guys made me laugh ridiculously hard. Thanks for making my day.

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I wish I could've went to a highschool like that as a kid. :(

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This!

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