High School Kids Are the Worst... Or Are They?

High school is a really tough time for kids. The hormones, the endless friendship dilemmas, the stress of making life decisions about what to do post-school armed with limited life experience. All round, it’s tough.

One way teens deal with these difficulties is to form tribes (the musos, the jocks, the nerds, the bookworms and, of course, the ‘cool’ kids - generally named for their icy cold demeanor). We know these groups, they exist in almost every high-school. These tribes are fine... until they’re not. The dark side of high school is the bullying; the shaming; the need, or maybe it's the demand, to fit into a pecking order. 

Is this dark side a byproduct of that tribal culture?

Before I attempt to answer that question, I want to out myself as the reason for my own children's shortcomings. I used to tell my first year communication studies students: "if you’re awake you're communicating."

What you wear.
How you eat.
Where you read

All these things say something about you - even if you don't mean them to. So, my unconscious actions create habits and an environment, good and bad, that have transferred to my children.

Back to high school. I’ve been in high schools, virtually, every week this lockdown year. Something I’ve observed and heard repeatedly when it comes to high school teachers is they are exactly the same as the teens they teach. The English department hang together (the bookworms); the IT department hang out together (the nerds); the PE teachers hang out together (the jocks); and the maths department hang out together (the ‘cool’ kids - I say this, because I am a maths nerd myself). The same tribal culture of the playground exists in the staff room.

This behaviour may or may not be related to the way high-school kids behave (maybe the causality is the other way around, and the students are influencing the staff). Not only classrooms are placed by department, further entrenching those differences, but communal staffrooms in many new schools are replaced with subject bases.

Let’s be clear, though: the lack of integration in most high schools is detrimental to the school culture in general and students’ learning in particular.

To ensure that students get authentic learning experiences the maths teachers need to see the value (and math) in PE or art or Music. The English teachers need to see the value (and literature) in IT, coding or History. In the average workplace, everything is mashed together and solutions are rarely contained inside a single ‘subject’. And we see some of the strongest most memorable learning moments are interdisciplinary ones.

So for the sake of the students, break out of your high school clique and introduce yourself to the cool kids (in the staff room). You never know what learning you could create together.