The whole "sport usually considered a support for the football team" was a factor.. but even more than that similarity.. I don't remember the cheerleaders being nasty by high school.

our cheerleaders were actually pretty nice, a lot of them were always really kind to me even though i was the goth kid who everyone hated.

Middle school, sure.. but by high school, no.

They were mostly just plain nice.

strawberrysingh, I never would have thought of you as a cheerleader before. It makes sense, though. (In a good, way..)

it a local thing? An outdated stereotype? Why the "cheerleaders are evil" thing at all? Did it change at some particular point?

It's a really pervasive image. But I don't remember it being remotely accurate at any time after middle school.

They were.. like the band. Got most of their exposure through the football thing, but were a championship group in their own right.

I was a cheerleader, I'd like to think I was pretty nice.

Veenya, is the culture the same in terms of high school groups? Usually the north American teen culture seems to be separate from anything that would be equivalent in Europe?

(Or maybe I"m just stereotyping here? I recall somebody saying something about social groups that boiled down to Canada being America with healthcare, but the dynamics elsewhere being different?)

Side note: We went to block scheduling when I was in 10th grade. This resulted in a few non-music classes per year being comprised entirely of music students.

I mean, it's different because it's different activities. Like we were cheerleaders for the athletics team, we didn't have football.

But mostly the clicks were somewhat stereotypical, nerd and geeks, athletes, the popular and mean girls.

Halfway through my junior year, we apparently scared away our [Israeli] gym teacher. She just vanished. Less surprising than you'd thing.. most teachers have no clue what to do with a class of music kids.

erm, think, not thing..

I was a bit floaty though, I was a cheerleader, a gleek and computer geek.

Maybe it was all the Jars of Clay? Or the hiding in the opposite-sex locker room to get out of doing stuff..

So you were one of those people who everybody liked.

[in a good way]

nimil, they really were at my school.. just sweet. A few of them I have negative memories about, but not actually from high school, from earlier, before they were high school cheerleaders.

I can't really count myself as a real part of any group.. I was just somewhat similar to or accepted by some groups more than others.

There were the kind, accepting groups and the.. less so.

bizarrely, we had this awesome Christian group that was like the social group that didn't reject people. In today's climate that sounds insane.

And makes the current crap even crazier. I've seen sixteen-year-old children of missionaries manage to be accepting and kind and not asinine. Makes it ridiculous that adults can't not be assholes.

Goths were a group that I almost aspired to for a long time. Any group meant some belonging.

Veenya: erm.,. by football.. you mean American football? I'm not even sure of the culture in that context. I think of Sweden, I imagine Lisbeth Salander and Ikea. (And I'm from Plymouth Meeting.)

I don't even think of meatballs, because all sentient races have some form of Swedish meatballs, no matter what planet they come from.

Well that's I meant but we didn't have a soccer team either. Our school was all runners and jumpers and boxing. Some of the people from my year even made Olympics.

And I was far from liked by everyone but I was a pretty good chameleon and could go from group to group. The means girls hated me though, lol

Nah. None of the cheerleaders at my highschool were even human, let alone nice.

But then I was the creepy new wave goth kid in high school, so of course we weren't exactly on the same wavelenght.

I was not in a social circle that encountered cheerleaders so I couldn't address their relative niceness. My own experience was that the cheerleaders came from wealthier and more socially conscious backgrounds.

Within their circle they may have been lovely people, but they did not tend to acknowledge the existence of anyone not in their circle. Sports is tied to the upper end of the social strata in most schools.

And my experience was in a small town HS and a miniscule bizzarro Texas Baptist HS so ymmv!