<p>What Really Happened to the Cool Kids in Your High School</p>
<p><a href=“http://m.policymic.com/articles/91199/what-really-happened-to-the-cool-kids-in-your-high-school”>http://m.policymic.com/articles/91199/what-really-happened-to-the-cool-kids-in-your-high-school</a></p>
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<p>I noticed that the cool kids stopped coming to my HS reunion after the 10th one. How did they turn out at your school?</p>
<p>Well one worked on the east coast for years as an environmental reporter for ABC, now he is back on the west coast doing the same thing.</p>
<p>I have only gone to my 35th reunion and it was a smattering of different groups, but most people I knew.</p>
<p>In my school, my recollection was that the " cool kids" were the extroverts & introverts who were socially adept.
That carried over into adulthood.
I still see a couple and I can’t get over their memory and interest in extraneous details of acquaintances.
In a nice, making you feel warm inside way.</p>
<p>There also were students who were popular because of their sports expertise, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into skills needed to make a career.</p>
<p>Just under a year out from graduation, Cool Kid #1 met Cool Kid #2 in jail when she was brought in for assaulting a police officer and public intoxication. Cool Kid #1 was in jail for a drug charge. </p>
<p>Great job, guys. Great job. =D> </p>
<p>The “hot” girl who flashed us in biology before the teacher walked into the class, actually did become a pole-dancer and junkie.</p>
<p>From my high school, they are doing just fine. I believe there was some book that followed a group of high school kids to some years after college. A “what Happened to the Class of XXXX?” Popular kids did absolutely fine, very well, the best. From my college, they are doing well and the schools I’m following, the same. </p>
<p>I don’t know how this will turn out lately with drug and alcohol use a huge issue with the popular kids. That was not so much the case if my experience whereas in the past 10 years or so, there has been a direct co-relation between use of contraband and the cool kids, popular kids. The heavy duty “druggies” from my college years have not fared well at all. A lot of years lost, jail, dry out stays, and some deaths. These are among doctors, attorneys, and other such professionals, some who got pretty far before crashing. One of our close friends was in the “druggy” group and though he has fared well, he has told us that he is the exception. </p>
<p>I don’t know because I never went to any high school reunion. But maybe I will when I retire but they will all be dead anyway.</p>
<p>My high school was so big that I literally have no idea who the “cool kids” were… or anyone else for that matter.
Kinda hard to have cliques with over 6,000 students and 4 buildings to walk around to. </p>
<p>My graduating class was about 90 people (from a parochial high school). I went to my 40th last September. We got along well 40 years ago and we got along well this past year. We actually invited kids who went to grade school with us and went to the public high. Had a great time. </p>
<p>How did the come up with who was “cool” and who wasn’t? </p>
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<p>My experience was the same. There was no body that everybody knew. </p>
<p>Ditto. My HS graduating class was larger than my college graduating class. Have been to 2 reunions and connected on facebook. Most are doing very well. Only surprise was the # of classmates who weren’t in the top classes, that I recall, that ultimately became MDs. Have to think about that one…</p>
<p>Many of the “cool” kids seem to have pretty low wage jobs and not much college behind them, after all these years. The ones I consider very successful were those who were fairly quiet in school, not necessarily overachievers, just pretty quiet.</p>
<p>No idea who the cool kids were. (except they were not me.).</p>
<p>From a different article on the study:
"Allen and his colleague looked at a cluster of “pseudomature” behaviors — trying to act older than you are — among 184 seventh and eighth-graders. Those behaviors included more romance and “making out,” minor deviance like shoplifting or destroying property, and picking the best-looking classmates as friends.</p>
<p>In middle school, it paid off — kids who engaged in those behaviors were rated as more popular by their peers. But by age 15 or so, they weren’t anymore. And by 22 or 23, they had real problems."</p>
<p>This is the key. The way they defined the “cool kids” was based on deviant behavior. No surprise that children who display deviant behavior often grow up to become adults who do as well.</p>
<p>“No idea who the cool kids were. (except they were not me.).”</p>
<p>I wonder if people have different impressions of whom the cool kids were, and I wonder if those that people considered cool, actually realized that people considered them so.</p>
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Ding! Ding! Ding! </p>
<p>The “cool” kids were the ones who threw the parties, who had the drugs and alcohol, who had the coveted parking lot spaces, who didn’t have a single stock part on their car, who told the teacher “what was up”, who were the most featured in the yearbook, I could go on and on. </p>
<p>Did people really regard them as “cool”? I’d say some may have had some choice words for these group of people, but I wouldn’t consider the “cool” kids to be the equivalent to the “popular” kids. </p>
<p>And Ferris Bueller WAS cool (yes, I know he is fictitious). He was nice to people. Yes, he pulled a few fasts ones but he was genuinely nice.</p>
<p>Actually, the people I considered as the cool kids were also nice. Some of them were even friendly to me, I don’t remember many of them as being jerks. Except…one of them who was a real jerk ended up being a teacher at my kid’s middle school. Ugh. Thankfully, they never had him as a teacher.</p>
<p>In my early-1970s high school, you could be a cool kid if one of more of these applied: your parents were well-off; you were an athlete on the football, basketball, or baseball teams; you were attractive and dressed according to code. Drinking didn’t necessarily confer cool status, because it cut across all social lines. And the drinking age was 18, so a good percentage of each year’s seniors could drink legally. Smoking was allowed in smoking lounges at school, the legal age was 16, and so many kids (and teachers and parents) smoked that it didn’t seem especially daring or cool, either. If you did drugs you were a hood, which took a while to become cool. I had graduated by the time that happened.</p>
<p>I never have and never will attend a high school reunion, so I’ll never know how people in different groups turned out. We’re all more or less headed in the same direction at this point, I think.</p>
<p>The person who was probably the coolest kid in my high school class (smart, good-looking, social athlete) went to Yale then UVa Law. He became a partner in a West Coast law firm, then helped one of his senior partners get elected to Congress and went to Washington as a legislative aide. He went through a kind of mid-life crisis when his wife left him; he spent a year and a half working as an Outward Bound group leader and crewing a sailboat across the Pacific to Tahiti. He went to work as a policy expert for a national environmental group. After a decade, and pursuing a life-long dream, he resigned his position, sold his house, bought a 33-foot boat, and took off with his second wife and two young children to sail around the world, with lots of long stops along the way. He spent almost 7 years doing that, and when he got back he took a job teaching at a private school for girls, where he is now in charge of the 9th grade curriculum.</p>
<p>In case you didn’t notice, he never, ever stopped being cool.</p>
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<p>Well, that’ll teach THEM!</p>