Poll: On senior seniority (High School)

[Jamash]

I'm not really too clear about the American definitions of High School, Senior and Freshman, so what ages are we talking about here?

What is the age range of High School and how are the age groups/years divided?

What age are Seniors?

What age are Freshmen?

When I went to school in the UK, Secondary School lasted from ages 11-15 (then College for 16-18), so I can't really envisage much of a hierarchy between 4 years of adolescents (even the most senior students were relatively young and immature), but I guess it's different enough in the US for this to be a thing.

Not by much, well, actually a little.

In the US Secondary School (We call it High School) is grades 9-12 which results in about 13-14 years olds in freshmen and 17-20 year olds in senior.

Thanks for the clarification.

So if I'm understanding this correctly, for the general purposes of this topic, the Seniors that bully (or "creeps that date") Freshmen are, at the extremes of the age groups, 20 year olds bullying (or dating) 13 year olds?

Yeah, that's pretty fucked up compared to my own school experiences.

While I acknowledge that school is a microcosm of society, that learning about hierarchies and pecking orders are part of growing up, that it prepares you for the real world and is somewhat of a necessarily evil, the flipside of Freshmen learning to respect their elders and those with natural seniority is that by the age someone is a Senior, they should be mature and developed enough not to pick on someone 7 years their junior, especially when you consider the obvious growth difference between a 13 year old and 20 year old.

In the UK, where the age of majority is 18, that kind of Senior-Freshman bullying (or dating) would probably get the 20 year old adult banged up in jail for child abuse (all definitions).

It almost beggars belief in my mind that in US schools there is a need for "Anti-Senior bullying measures" in the first place, that 17-20 year olds targeting 13-14 year olds is something that occurs with enough regularity to require measures to curb it.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Posts like this make me thank the gods I wasn't born in-

All I can think of when reading the OP is "glad I didn't go to high school in the US". Frankly, the whole 'this group of students is better than this one' or 'deserves to be bullied by this one' mentality scares me. Sounds more like an army base than a school.

Whoops, ninja'd.

 

[punkrocker27]

Nope

 

[Palademon]

It wouldn't need a be a trial by fire if the older genderation DIDN'T KEEP DOING IT.

It's just a crap excuse to be a dick. Although your school doesn't sound too bad with it.

My school, and I believe all schools in my country don't have this. The closest would be older guys cutting in the lunch line and stealing our last food, just because they were bigger and thought they mattered more. There isn't a "seniority" culture, just a normal one of being an older asshole.
What really annoyed me about this is our lunch break starts and therfore ends earlier, meaning we were waiting in line for about 15 minutes when they just come in and take all the food. And that that was OUR period's food. More gets made for them after we're done.

 

[BlackStar42]

Nope, in my school we didn't have a problem with the eldest bullying the little ones. The usual offenders were the Year 9s (13-14 years old) because they'd just started puberty and hit growth spurts, so they were suddenly able to lord it over the Year 7s and consequently became huge arrogant cockbags. This usually lasted until Year 10, then everyone is all "holyshitshit exams" and actually does some bloody work.

 

[TheTim]

When i was a freshman i was never subject to any of the "bullying" but i was subject the the seniors first thing, which wasn't a big deal probably because that's how we'd been told it was going to happen for 3 or 4 years before that point. And in turn, when i was a senior i was able to be on the other end of that. I do think that there are many other issues that should take precedence over that as it really is not much of an issue at all. I'ts part of the high school experience.

 

[Xixikal]

I've only seen this kind of stuff in movies, in my opinion, it's pretty childish.
Not only that, but I've heard that kind of behaviour carries on until university/college and is encouraged by parents.

I'm questioning how this could contribute to society in any positive way, as such, I would say its an unnecessary and infantile practice
that is only made worse by today's social media sites. It needs to stop.

 

[hooblabla6262]

I am from east coast of Canada and this is something I never experienced, in high school there was no real distinction between grades (in some cases you might even take a class with different grades). I imagine that the general mood to anyone who tried to hassle someone because of grade would have been "grow the fuck up".

(I went to a public school with no dorms or anything)

I too am from the East Coast of Canada (high five!), and the only "prank" people in grade 12 would pull was to vote for the worst school president for the following year.
Not that it ever made much of a difference cause, well, it's a highschool president.

 

[snappydog]

I wish I knew what any of those words meant, having lived my whole life in the UK. From what I can tell though, we don't get anything like that over here.

Captcha: What's that?
Bugger me, captcha, you really are a clever bastard.

 

[Angie7F]

I have never really experienced this myself, and I still believe it is a movie fiction thing, but I dont know what crazy stuff goes on in the U.S...
I know that there are some crazy seniority related bullying in the athletic world in Japan.

I dont support bullying, but it is only natural for someone to get targeted in one way or another when there is a group of three or more.
I dont think it is correct when it turns into bullying, but I also think seniority and certain hierarchy is necessary.
For example, you would not go against your boss in work. If they harrased you, you should speak out against it, but as long as it is reasonable you will have to put up with a certain amount of crap from them.
I am well aware that this is a slippery slope, and the question is just how much is too much?

My argument here is that people will try to bully you in one way or another, and this will keep happening in real life even after high school.
You just have to learn how to stay under the radar, be smart about it when you become the victim, and dont advocate it when you are the one is a position of seniority.
The most harmful mentality is "i went through it, so now it is my turn to bully people beneath me"

 

[Nokturos]

I don't live in America, but the "high school" (called a gymnasium over her)I went to had that sort of vibe going. On the first day, we were expected to jump through hoops for the people starting their second year. I wasn't all too cooperative, though, which led to me kneeing some asshat in the stomach after he tried physically forcing me to jump around like a frog.

 

[soren7550]

When I was in high school, the whole 'senior seniority' didn't really exist. Most just treated everyone else the same. The closest to open animosity the seniors (my graduating class anyway) had to the lower grades was that we were the only ones who had spent all our years there without any kind of school trip, while all the lower grades got loads of trips.

Really hated the 7th & 8th graders though (my school went grades 7-12). Boy, were they a bunch of loudmouthed idiots. I had to chaperon a trip for them, and boy were they dumb. The first class I had to chaperon evidently had a death wish since they kept running out into traffic, so I had to run after them, cursing at them about how dumb they were (the other chaperons found this hilarious). The second class were full of themselves, and just complained the whole time. Either way, the tykes seemed to like me, so whenever they saw me they tended to smile and wave.

Oh, and this was a school in New York, right outside of Manhattan.

 

[Mau95]

I don't even know how those grades work. I think my school doesn't have older students bullying younger ones (or the other way around). We do get our own classroom and get to organise some events in our 6th year.

 

[Jolly Co-operator]

That's not really a problem in my school, at least not that I've seen. My school district is pretty damn small, so there's a certain sense of camaraderie throughout all age groups. There's the occasional joke; For example, when a freshman puts in a point during a conversation, an upperclassman might jokingly say "shut up, freshman". It's usually said with a smile, though, and the people involved just have a quick laugh before inviting the freshman to join the conversation. That's not to say that everyone in my school gets along, not even close, but any discrepancies people have with each other aren't based on age.

 

[Scolar Visari]

When I was a senior in high school (scary how that time seems to get farther and farther away every time I utter those words) there was very little to no bullying/harassing that came from our ranks.

We might have been young, but most of us had come to realize that most of what happens in high school means fuck all in the real world and our time was better spent trying to avoid any unnecessary bullshit.

 

[Mocmocman]

Mostly it comes into play as that prank I mentioned above, and when I say "Blow through the freshmen" I mean it in the way of we're big, they're small; how the fuck have they not figured out that we only have three minutes to jog from one side of the school to the other in the 5 months they've been here?

3 minutes??? Where I go to we have seven minutes and it's still annoying when people go too damn slow. With 3 minutes I'd imagine that anyone who dared slow down should go flying with those passing periods. Though the majority of people who do it aren't freshmen but annoying couples.

 

[Vault101]

snip.

bullshit

bullying is not ok and should not be tolerated

 

[littlewisp]

Depends entirely on the school.

The worst that ever happened in mine that I recall was a few of the seniors zipstripped the freshman hallway lockers. There was no getting into them without the janitor cutting them free.

Overall I think it inconvenienced the janitors and teachers more than the freshmen.

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

Never had this when I was in High School. The freshman/senior thing. Huh.

 

[Astoria]

We definitely had the 'seniors rule the school' thing but they never harassed younger students or anything like that, it was more like in a traffic jam they go first and they get dibs at the best spots in the yard, that sort of thing. I don't think it's something that can really be stopped until you get a whole year of seniors who are willing to let what happened to them go and that's not gonna happen.