What’s your high school stereotype?
You scored as Goth.
| Goth | 56% | |
| Ghetto gangsta | 50% | |
| Loner | 50% | |
| Stoner | 44% | |
| Drama nerd | 31% | |
| Prep/Jock/Cheerleader | 25% | |
| Punk/Rebel | 25% | |
| Geek | 0% |
What’s your high school stereotype?
created with QuizFarm.com.
The nutty thing about this survey is that I never hung out with the Goths in high school. I hung out with skaters and punks and stoners and drama nerds. (And sometimes cheerleaders and preppies and jocks… it was a small school, and I didn’t really limit myself to one group.)
I was the nonconformist type. I’m not talking about the nonconformists who look like every other nonconformist; that never made any sense to me. I mean really nonconformist. I didn’t want to look like any other student. So I started to wear ties and carry a briefcase. Hey, nobody else was doing it.
Not even the teachers, who were worried about it for a while. See, they recognize the other categories. Those are known quantities, and they figure they can deal with them. But when you get someone who doesn’t do anything they way that other students do, it freaks ’em out a little.
I take pride in the fact that I was so nonconformist, my parents once had to attend a teacher conference about it. “He totally ignores peer pressure,” they were told. “That’s a bad thing?” they responded. Well… yeah, it can be. We teachers often use peer pressure in order to get kids to do things. When kids don’t respond to that, it means extra work for the teachers. They’d have to spend extra time trying to figure me out. (Which was part of the point. I don’t always like being a known quantity.)
But I never did put on the face paint and the black clothing. About the only thing close to Goth that I ever did was listen to the Cure and Nine Inch Nails. But I still liked U2 more.
Update, 11/17/2024: Mia Goth. (Sorry. Couldn’t resist the pun.)
It’s also interesting to look at these high school stereotypes from the perspective of a teacher. There are so many of them that match my own high school experience.
There’s the mouthy kids who want to contribute their limited experience to each lesson. There’s the kids who never take off their cowboy hats. (At my school, it was the kid who never took off his fedora. He even wore it to graduation.) There’s the kids who’d rather hang out with the teacher than “those children” in their class. There’s the art geeks, the band geeks, the sports geeks (they can’t play, but they get to do stats and operate the control board), the video geeks, the secretly-smart girls who play stupid because they think it attracts boys (and it does, but it attracts stupid ones)—and many other categories too numerous to name.
Fun to observe. Fascinating because I now know how to manipulate the system. (That talent would have come in handy when I was in high school, but it’s a good thing I didn’t then have it—I might have used my powers for evil.)