Breaking news! I got a DM from the artist of the game who explained the mystery card: "The creator of the game has been including depictions of past tournament winners in the games as 'champion cards,' so if someone takes the top trophy at one of the Epic Spell Wars tournaments, they get to be added to a future game. That guy was a sort of burly tattooed dude who was into weightlifting so I made him look like a Masters of the Universe character and his real name is Zach."
Just a note about American High School yearbooks. I can only speak for my experience at my schools, but yearbooks we're not free. They were actually quite pricey ($80-100+ USD), and if you couldnt come up with the cash, you missed out on what was made to be a "quintessential" school experience. ***Edit: spelling correction
@@juliesrail6886 only bad thing was who got to take it to which class to have people sign it - thankfully ours had extra signing pages so one of us got the book and the other got the extra pages
yeah I was a bit thrown off when JJ said yearbooks were free. That was never the case for me. I only had yearbooks for my freshman (9th) and senior (12th) years because my parents didnt want to spend the money on them.
I think “Zachaton” is a play on the word “Hackathon” which is a competition in which programmers are grouped together in teams to create a program in a limited time frame, ranging from about a whole weekend to a whole week or month. Game Jams are a subset of this in which people go together to make a video game under a certain theme such as a word or phrase. Although, this is more of a College activity than a high school activity The phrase on his chest is an infinite loop in the BASIC programming language in which it will print the phrase “KICK ASS” repeatedly. This is more speculation, but I did notice that there is an interesting subset of programmers who are strangely into weight lifting and self sufficiency such as Mental Outlaw and Luke Smith. It could also be that high school teachers also double as coaches for sports teams. It could be that the computer teacher might be a weight lifting teacher. Edit: Zachaton’s face and beard does slightly resemble Richard Stallman, an Open Source advocate and key developer/founder of the GNU/Linux project.
I think it’s really interesting that the stereotypical “American High School” is all based upon stereotypes from the 80’s. High school now-a-days in the States is quite different. We definitely still have the shells of those stereotypes, but I’ve never seen a TV show or movie about some of the newer cliques that high schoolers talk about.
What I would say is that nowadays lines between "cliques" are a lot more blurry so if you're trying to write a simple highschool story then it would be more difficult than just using these well defined and tried and true cliques. You'd need more depth than most highschool media wants to put in the effort to add
As an American who grew up in the Midwest, I can say that I've never seen the Canadian style pizza pockets before, but have had countless hot pockets. In fact, they are so ubiquitous that I and everyone I know use the brand name "Hot Pockets" as a generic, like Kleenex.
To be fair as a Winnipeger. We have known both "Pizza Pops" and Hot pockets. The Pizza pop used to be sold direct by the inventor (i think) then he sold the concept to Pillsbury. As a kid we had both available to us, but I would say I have eaten somewhere around 99/1 ratio of Pizza Pops to Hot pockets, not because they were not available, but because they were just better. I only found out in my mid thirties that Pizza pops were an invention in my hometown.
As a Malaysian, my first impression of American high school based on movies is that there is full of bullying and fighting, and friendship between girls are always so fake, as there is so much betrayal and talking behind your back. And there are also cliques. If you sit at the wrong seat in the canteen, you will be bullied. And there is a constant struggle to be popular. If you try to be popular but your efforts go awry, you will be shamed forever and your name in high school will forever be tarnished. Basically very bad impressions. But apparently American high school isn't all doom and gloom according to the comments in this video.
Bullying and fighting is real. At my school we had lots of gangs so that was the source of most of the fighting. But not 100% i knew someone that was threatened with a gun walking home, and someone else that had boiling water poured on her. There are a lot of fake people especially more popular people. Betrayal is a problem. Lots of friendships end terribly or one friend relentlessly bullies the other friend until they cant handle it anymore. But no it isn't all doom and gloom depends on the crowd you hang out with mostly
Depends on the high schools. Some are worst than others. My 2 highschools were very normal, believe it or not. So if you went there fearing expectation, than be relieve it wasn't the case
Idk my expereince is just hangout with freinds. Im sure all that heppened but i didnt notice. And cliques were not so enforced. You could say i was part of 3 different ones. No one really cared what else you did as long as you were freindly.
Fun fact: The College Board, trying to distance themselves from the SAT’s initial intent to determine aptitude/natural ability (bc it was based on eugenics and stuff), has made the SAT an empty acronym now. Technically the SAT doesn’t stand for scholastic aptitude test now, it stands for nothing 🤷♂️
@@TACTICALwaffle2 There was a belief that logic and intelligence was innate for people, thats in part where some of the really weird questions origin from.
My dad is a Chinese immigrant to America and his only exposure to American high schools was from 80's movies and one day he pulled me aside and very seriously said "Listen... if you are getting bullied by the jocks, you can tell me." and then I had to inform him that sort of bullying really only happened in teen movies.
I was the kid that would be bullied mercilessly by the jocks in a stereotypical American high school. In reality the other students stuck to their cliques and just ignored the solitary awkward types like me.
I had a similar experience. By the time senior year came around I barely had any friends. If there's a 10 year reunion, I don't know if I'll go because there's probably only 2 people I would talk to.
I would have gone through the same thing but I was more outgoing and had no problem sitting with other people like the jocks I was nervous around people but if I felt they was friendly enough I was outgoing
I was always told that I'd be beaten up in high school, but honestly only my locker suffered. Kids would jam the lock in the little pocket thingy or write homophobic slurs, but that's all. This was Canada in the early 2010s.
As someone who attended American public schools K-12 and graduated high school in 2018, I think the Zachaton card is a relatively new clique that was emerging when I graduated. In America, there was always this divide between the “jocks”, who were usually always thought of as musclebound, attractive, physical paragons who were dumb as a box of rocks, and the “geeks/gamers”, who were typically imagined as nerdy, scrawny, generally unattractive bookworms, into board games, trading card games and video games, all things that in the early 2000’s were seen as “lame” or just for kids. But when I was leaving, I want to say around 2015-16ish, those two groups began to dissolve and form this kind of fusion clique of people who were both physically in shape and did sports as well as people who enjoyed the more “nerdy” kinds of things listed above, and it became less black and white. That’s my interpretation anyway.
This is such a great comment. I graduated in 2019 and there wasn't a single player on my HS Football Team that didn't play video games, and on my Rugby team there was even a group of 5-10 of us that held occasional Dungeons and Dragons games. The cliche of jocks vs nerds doesn't quite hold up as well as it used to.
I feel that this is the high school version of “Tech Bros” or those guys in their mid 20s that really guy into “grind culture”, since the kids who were part of this subculture usually morph into these archetypes once they leave high school
I’m surprised JJ didn’t mention marching bands, I’d say they have become a massive part of American high school culture as well. Edit: I’d say they are pretty common in almost every state. I haven’t seen many public high schools without ones.
I always found it bizarre that high school and college marching bands still wear Napoleonic-style military uniforms. Where and how did this tradition begin, and why do schools still do this?
@@loremipsum9444 good question. All I could come up with us it looks professional and sharp. I’m sure JJ will find the real answer if there is one. He has a skill for finding out information.
@@tigernotwoods914 not really from my experience. Marching bands seem to be the most common type of visual/performing arts at high schools I've been to and are almost always present at every home football game.
Speaking about the American school system, when I first heard the term “kindergarten”, it was in the context of “I’ll have you know that I graduated kindergarten” or “we were in kindergarten together” so at the time I thought kindergarten was an elite nursery school that middle class parents would send their kids, like the nursery equivalent of Harvard or Yale.
@@andrewg.3281 if the teacher reads the story of Stone Soup & announces that's what's for lunch tomorrow, it doesn't mean she's going to make you eat rocks
I’ve always been blown away by the difference in American high school experiences just a few decades created. My mom did have an experience much closer to the movies- she went to a decently-sized high school up north. There were definitely cliques, she had a bully, and one time my (awful) grandmother had her dress up as a HEFTY TRASH BAG for Halloween which would be traumatic for anyone lmao, and the bully literally picked her up and walked her down the hall going “I’m taking out the trash” as people laughed and watched before being deposited in a trash can. Mom eventually got the bully to stop during a different year by ripping her earrings out of her ears 🤢 Meanwhile I grew up in a small east Texas town and my high school experience was a world apart- there were certainly cliques in that you had your group of friends you’d spend most of your time with because you shared classes or clubs, but the athletes were all also part of theater or band, the nerds who were in student council and stuff were also the burnout potheads, and there was almost no actual, stereotypical bullying. More cyberbullying and sneaky crap.
What I love about the PETA poster "Would you dissect her?" showing a cute kitten, is that in my high school, we did dissect cats (much more mature ones, though). In middle school, it was cow eyes. However cruel the former may seem, I'm fairly certain these particular choices are examples of using what was already there. The cow eyes are leftovers of the butchering process, and the cats are strays that had been put down for entirely other reasons. My understanding is that in many places in the US today, frogs are animals that must be specifically cultivated if they are to be used for dissections.
Yeah, at my school frogs and cow eyes would be dissected in every normal biology class and cats, ducks, and all sorts of fun stuff would be dissected in the Ag science classes. I remember being pissed because the honors biology classes didn't dissect anything because we were expected to understand the anatomy without needing a physical example so I didn't get to dissect a frog like I wanted to and I still failed the anatomy test.
Yeah, I was like "Whaaaat?" when he said that. Granted, I'm Canadian but I wouldn't expect they'd be giving out the books down South for free either. It would run into quite a chunk of change.
Yup pretty sure my senior highschool yearbook was 50-80$ depending on personalizations and what not and the pictures weren’t free either 😂 had to pay a decent amount to get a framed sized version
As someone who isn't American, always made me wonder how accurate American high school gets portrayed, especially seeing how so many shows/movies always have bullies, parties, and gossips in them
American movies focused on high schools are super not realistic. As a high school teacher today, the sheer lack of teachers or administration present as students do crazy stuff in the hallways always gives me a laugh.
@@ghintz2156 that's interesting to me because my HS almost never had a teacher or Admin in the hallways. There was barely room for the students, we were shoulder to shoulder over all 3 floors, the stairs were legitimately like an 8 minute process. And the teachers only had the 10 minute passing period to prepare for the next class. If it wasn't in their classroom it wasn't something they super cared about unless they absolutely had to.
The SAT is really crazy. Speaking as someone who got a relatively good grade (1260), studying for the SAT is almost like it’s own subject. There are classes specifically just called ‘SAT Prep’, and moreso from just talking about like strategies for manipulating questions in a way. It’s really strange to be honest
Eh, sort of? SAT strategies have shown to only have a very limited effect. Like if you dont understand a passage, no SAT strategy will make it so that you do.
@@jhonklan3794 Year late but as someone recently graduating high school, no. I got a 1550 and did not read a single passage. Only skimmed. The strategies are real and they work. I also took the ACT which comparatively had less "strategy" and more actual testing
I had to pay every year (elementary through high school) so as a result I never got one :) covid hit while I was finishing up my junior year, but things got so bad at my house I had to drop out. Completely missed my senior year, but I really hope they gave that class some free goddamn yearbooks lmao
When I was a teenager growing up in England, my increasing awareness of American culture always made me feel like I was missing out on something. It seemed like American high school kids had much more exciting and interesting lives. The schools had sports stadiums, the kids had cars, they went to amazing parties all the time, the weather always looked better (the weather in northern England is mostly grey, dreary and cold without being properly cold for about nine or ten months of the year). It just seemed glamorous. I really wanted to be American.
I’ve heard from Brits say similar things. Which is funny, because a lot of American parents imagine British high schools to be so much better by comparison, which is why elite American private schools try so hard to copy British traditions. The show Gossip Girl is a good portrayal of that.
Completely agree. I’m American and went to an elite high school in California and I’d say that the parents and teachers cared so much about the students getting amazing grades and having a stellar extracurricular resume in order to prep for applications to the most prestigious universities, particularly the Ivy League universities. However, that only partially was on the minds of the students… getting a brand new Mercedes for their 16th birthdays or knowing the latest clique gossip was equally or more so the focus of the students.
@@chickenfishhybrid44 We can't drive off campus at school because the age at which you can get your licence is 17, and the high school leaving age is 16 (although I and many others stayed on until 18 to get the qualifications needed for university). We do have sports at school and the best students do compete against other schools, but what we lack is the culture best summed up by the expression "school spirit". In the UK we don't generally develop the same passion for our school and the rivalries with other schools are not as intense. The exception to this tends to be the upper class fee-paying schools, where school identity is very strong. It's just a different way of doing things. We don't even refer to finishing school as "graduation" - at least not when I left 20 years ago. You only graduated from university (college). Leaving school was just called that - leaving.
@@chickenfishhybrid44 Everybody in the UK will do sport in some form or another at school, and pretty much all schools will have teams that compete against other schools. But it's not on the scale or seriousness as in the US, in my entirely subjective experience. Every does PE class (Physical Education) which I think Americans generally know as gym class? Most schools have playing fields with soccer pitches on. My school had soccer pitches, rugby pitches, a cricket pitch and tennis courts, as well as a sand pit for the long jump lol. Our running track was on grass rather than a proper running track. I was lucky though, not all schools have that many facilities. The issue of schools (or rather the local government) selling playing fields for development is an issue in Britain. One thing we don't have are stadiums or bleachers or anything like that (usually). You only see them at some of the big fee-paying schools and colleges. Most people who get seriously into sports do it from outside school. They might initially show some flair or talent at school, but they'll have to join a separate club to make the make the most of it. Again, the exception is always the big fee-paying schools where things work differently, but most of us don't go.
Something I’ve noticed is a weird disconnect when a piece of media around high school get rebooted. Where they modernize it to fit in with current high school but that turns off old fans who can’t relate a new depiction. Like the best example I can give is the new Spider-Man films. Where I weirdly saw older people complaining the bully doesn’t physically beat up nerds or that the bully’s are just normal kids and not jocks. And how unrealistic that was. But as someone who just recently graduated it’s very realistic. I feel like it shows how quickly school movies age because I often can’t watch 90s high school movies because of how alien they are. Like jocks and cheerleaders having no interest outside sports. Or doing whatever they wanted. Like at my school athletes were under more pressure to stay out of controversy. It reminds me of how the Breakfast Club was once a super iconic movie but millennials bashed it for being super outdated and now us Gen Z’s rarely hear of it unless it’s a reference for parents
As someone who just recently graduated from an American high school 2 years ago, it can be frustrating watching any high school-related media as it all feels incredibly foreign and over-the-top. I would really love to see a movie or TV series that updates these tropes to make media for teenagers more authentic and genuinely relatable. I think the 2019 movie Booksmart did a pretty good job of showing how nowadays, a lot of the most "popular" kids in a given grade aren't just stupid jocks or bitchy mean girls; they may often be party animals, sure, but also have numerous different hobbies and interests, are genuinely kind to all the other students & respectful to teachers/staff, and are usually pretty academically driven. It'd be cool to have this taken a step further in movies or tv; showcasing the less strict/hierarchical nature of cliques would make for interesting, complex stories, and including caricatures of the cliques found in today's high schools to replace or supplement the older ones could be really engaging. A lot of the recent attempts (at least from what I've seen) seem to fall flat.
its just cuz your a zoomer the other movies depicted a more accurate picture of the time, its up to your generation to make movies that relate better to yall
You must have been one of the popular kids if you think they're kind and empathetic and the only reason they're respectful to teachers is because they're suck ups and know they can get away with torturing others students because the teachers are also former bitchy popular kids that still act like a clique.
While it's an anime and it's more meant to depict Japan, "Love is War" does a pretty decent job at depicting modern high school and teens in a way the rings fairly true, even for the Americas
My High School created a Pepperoni Roll that are famous locally. It's basically a very large Dinner Roll stuffed with ground pepperoni and cheese. You can pull the top off of it like you would a muffin and you can see the filling. They were served along with hot Pinto Beans and some Apple Sauce. After the school had to stop serving them because of regulations the Cafeteria Ladies opened a little place in town where they serve them as one of their staple items. I'm genuinely curious if other people have Similar experiences with local recipes/foods like this. I love this bit of local history and culture of my town.
Another fun fact/cultural reference: the "gross-out" art style on those cards is pretty clearly inspired by the art of Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, whose Rat Fink character became an icon of the 1960s Southern California hot rod subculture.
Rat Fink is still a big deal ! (at least here in San Diego lmfao - we still unironically play Sublime everywhere like its The Weeknd and have since 1992)
To any non-Americans reading this, for the love of god please don't consider Hollywood high school movies to be an accurate representation. I recently befriended a Finnish girl, and she was terribly disappointed when I explained that my high school life was nothing like Clueless or Mean Girls. I spent far more time in libraries and study halls than I did at parties.
Lol maybe YOU! Or maybe now a days… but Mean Girls is slightly exaggerated but yes, pretty accurate! Clueless is completely not accurate compared to most of the United States because it’s based in Beverly Hills, but if you were to go to school in Beverly Hills.. it IS COMPLETELY accurate!
Dude ikr! Whenever I meet Europeans I feel bad to completely let them down because high school in the US is pretty much nothing like how it's depicted in media. Not even vaguely similar in my recent experience at a typical suburban high school... But maybe there are a few places like in Southern California where it could make more sense?
On TV American High Schools always seemed to be having some big event Homecoming, Prom, etc. And you got to wear your own clothes, which were always cool/designer stuff. I always wondered when you did school work.
@@gemmeldrakes2758 American schools have a big distribution in quality. Basically, there are some schools where the kids are constantly busy with schoolwork, and are basically workaholics with little free time outside of homework -- and these schools feed much of the elite private universities and high quality public universities. Then, the other type of high school, which is a much larger portion of schools, students are mostly just screwing around and don't have all that much homework and such. So the latter type of school they have time to party all the time and have social drama and such as depicted in media. The contradiction with media's depiction though, is that the former type of school (the workaholic school) tends to be in wealthier schools districts, while the other is in poorer and more normal school districts. Weirdly, media shows the lifestyle of poorer schools yet through the lens of the wealthy areas, which although may exist in small pockets in the US, isn't all that common.
@@gemmeldrakes2758 Right after school you did your school work… OR, you could be like me and do your homework in the next class while ignoring the lecture or you do it on the way to school or on the lunch hour or get to school really early and do it in the library or while waiting for the bus or PSsshhh just copy someone else’s! Or just do it at home after you hangout with your friends at the park or the mall or to eat and then you would go home to your family and spend time in your room, you might catch up with family time if your parents wanted you to eat dinner together. And then on weekends, you pretty much do what you want if you don’t have family functions. School is more “fun” here… honestly, most of the time, even if you fail… they will still pass you in some areas. And yes we get excited about the dances! The parties… in the movies it is exaggerated, but, it’s close to pretty much how I experienced it…
@@rauldjvp3053 I think the only difference between America and Canada are the political and social differences. Culturally there are virtually zero differences
High School Teacher here. The last card is in association kind of with the Jock card. For a lack of a better term they are “Lift Bros.” In weight training (which because of high school football has becoming a class students can take instead of PE) there is an obsession with numbers- max weight, amount of reps, etc- that students from this clique really get into it. They often do play sports, but they don’t have too. Often the best lifters don’t equate into good players since they are more obsessed with the weights instead of the skill of the sport.
Another interesting thing is how in most "classic" high school movies/tv shows, the physical high school is almost always of a classical revival or Art Deco style, (i.e. popular 1910s-20s) and our stereotypical image of a high school fits as such. I think this is because of the fact that the US did indeed see a massive amount of public school construction around and after WW1, and even though the average high school today was probably built after WW2, people making movies in the 80s, 90s, etc remember their more 1920s-era schools. Everything from Springfield elementary, to sixteen candles, to HS musical has this style of school architecture...
Ok so after doing a bit of research I have found that: For Springfield Elementary Lance Wilder, the background design supervisor for The Simpsons, was born in Lowell, Massachusetts on May 7, 1968 and raised in Chelmsford. Lance graduated from Chelmsford High School in 1986. The elementary school appearing in The Simpsons is based on what is now known as McCarthy Middle School, which was Chelmsford’s high school before the construction of the current Chelmsford High School in 1974. I also found that: "Chelmsford High School is a public, coeducational high school founded in 1917. The current building is located in North Chelmsford, Massachusetts, United States, and was built in 1974. Before 1974 the high school was located in the current McCarthy Middle School building." So basically the current "McCarthy Middle School" actually used to act as a high school. And said high school was found and built around 1917, and only changed buildings once the new current high school for Chelmsford was built in 1974. And the original The Simpsons background design supervisor went to the old building for his high school before the new one was completed. For 16 Candles Most of the exterior scenes and some of the interior scenes were filmed at Niles East High The auto shop scene was also filmed at Niles East High School, in the auto shop. Niles East was first opened in 1938 It had also been used in Weird Science and Pretty In Pink A cafeteria scene and a gym scene were filmed at Niles North High School. (Niles North was opened in 1964) So while this is perhaps the most "modern" high school you mentioned and had been built in the late 1930s, it still is a product of the first half of 20th century architecture and design. For High School Musical Salt Lake High School East or simply East High School based in Utah was where filming took place for the movie. The original building was completed in 1913, and the current structure was built in 1997. So make of that what you will, but the original building apparently for East High is the earliest build on this little list here it seems. So all in all, fittingly enough, for the schools in the movies and shows that you named, they were either built in or around the 1910s-20s like you had alluded to.
@@cruzgomes5660 I knew basically none of these specifics, but this is really cool to know. Niles East is interesting...it's definitely Art Deco but in a very bland way, still taking inspiration from those earlier styles.
@@williamminns9000 indeed. I'm still learning all these architecture terms so it was cool as well to read them from your initial comment and be able to put a name and term to this common school architecture style seen in pop culture that I hadn't even initially had realized at first till you pointed it out. Good informative discussion all around!
@@cruzgomes5660 For movies shot in LA, John Marshall High School in Los Feliz and Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood have been used too many times to count. It's surprising LeConte Middle School in mid-Hollywood isn't at the tippy-top of the list too since it's on the same block as Sunset Bronson Studios (the original Warner Bros lot and currently home to Netflix HQ).
This brought back a number of memories. My high school, the oldest in the area, was founded back in 1820 - as an Academy. It had several reorganizations until finally morphing into a "modern" high school in the early 20th century. The first yearbook was printed in 1908. The rectangular pizza thing has to be older than 1988 - I graduated in the early 80's, and rectangular pizza was already the norm - and had been for my entire school career. I would imagine it started by just using the equipment they had - those large rectangular baking trays are standard in any commercial kitchen.
I'm from Iowa and instead of frogs we dissected piglets. We're a very heavy agricultural state and whenever you raise large amounts of anything you're bound to get a fairly high number of stillbirths. As a result pigs make a good local alternative to frogs which would have to be shipped in from somewhere else. If I remember correctly I have dissected 3 over the years.
the concept of “jock culture” was always so interesting to me considering how i was both a football captain and debate team captain my senior year of high school - like how people from both football and debate would have generally negative preconceived notions about who i am once hearing that i participated in both things …
Dude! I'm not american but in here debate people hates MUN people. Most people from debate are actually sporty and consider debate as another sport due to its competitive nature.
I graduated from highschool in 2021. It was a private school that I went to for virtually my entire life, and I can say that the type of jock portrayed in most television was almost non-existent, and the few that did exist were not well-liked.
When I was in high school (a couple decades ago), I was a nerd (and a theatre nerd to make it worse) at a pretty big high school and one of my best friends was president of the student body and a captain on the football team. Another good friend was a cheerleading captain. The stereotypes didn't always fit, but there were those that fell right into those stereotypical behaviors. Just, in my experience, you could always find people in each group that were good people.
It would be interesting if you did a video about how "Iconic American" things became associated with American iconography, with stuff like baseball, apple pie, fast food, hot dogs, diners, small towns etc.
@@deepspacecow2644agree, although I’m bot american I graduated in 2022 and tbh highschool was a boring experience when it comes down on cliques etc. it doesn’t really exist anymore.
I feel like gen z won’t have nostalgia for high school the way filmmakers used to. As a gen z I feel like I’dbe more likely to make content with the “classic” American high school setting than what I actually grew up with
I think I can explain the "Zachaton" card. Back when I graduated from High School (1987) there was a subculture of students (mostly male) that were called the "VoTech Bros". VoTech is basically "shop class" on steroids (it included classes in auto mechanical repair, auto body, welding and other "industrial arts") So these were the guys that would go on to bypass college (although many would go to trade schools) and become auto mechanics, general contractors, plumbers, welders, etc (and frankly we need more of that and less college prep, but I digress). I would suspect that in this day and age, the "VoTech Bros" have probably started to incorporate more of what the internet is calling "Maker culture" (so more electronics work, computer programming and "hacking" and 3d printing) So the new breed of VoTech Bros includes some aspects of geek culture mixed with gear head culture.
This seems like a very solid guess. Can't say I've experienced that culture too much while I was in high school, but I imagine it's probably pretty common in states like California
That one is a mishmash that im unfamiliar with. I've def met dorky metal heads that are programmers, but not ones that want to get (or seem like they are) jacked with muscles. Looks like dude is on the hellraiser puzzle box, and then wanting to kick some ass.
I think that's a pretty good hypothesis. I went for voc tech (tho, for heath occ) but there were also automotive/mech (which included some regular trade exp) and ag at that location, too. My regular school offered wood and metal shop, and CAD was actually taught by that man as well. He also ran robotics. A lot of his students were either muscled, nerdy, or hicks, or a weird combination of the three (as he seemed to be). This was 20+ years ago, too.
@@codya30 Do you mind if I ask when you graduated? (just a rough answer like "mid 90s" or whatever it actually is, you don't have to be specific if you prefer). I kinda wonder how the whole votech scene evolved.
@@Zundfolge As far as I know, my school had students attending vocation classes in the neighboring town for years before I attended them. I took both classes, 1 and 2 my junior and senior year. I graduated in 2006. All the voc classes had a required extracurricular component or two. In Health and Human Services, we had HOSA (Health Occupational Students of America) for both years, as well as onsite shadowing medical personnel the second year. I can't say for sure what the other classes consisted of. Culinary had their own restaurant in the school and the auto class had a garage and I know they learned welding and a few other things not strictly related to automobiles. I vaguely remember them needing to apprentice at a real shop or something similar as well, but I could be wrong. I loved my classes and what I was learning at the time but ultimately, it was a waste of time. I still have an affinity/interest for medicine but I wish I took either the business voc class or shop/auto. Or A/V, since I started in the event production industry in high school, before I even started the voc classes. I would have been much more educated in what ended up being my career for most of my adult life. I wish I had better directions as a kid but at the same time, and moreso, I really wish we'd stop pushing directions on children. Not just college degrees but trades, military, monetizing hobbies, everything.
Would love to see JJ take on the 90's "after school special," where family-aimed TV shows would depict high schoolers dealing with bullying, smoking, drugs, alcohol, racism, se ual assault, and more. They took real problems and worked them out in entirely unreal ways.
I'm a person who opted out of doing the actual frog dissection in favor of a virtual version. I actually did ask why we didn't do a virtual human dissection instead and I was told that it's because everyone, regardless of choosing real or virtual dissection, needs to follow the same lesson plan to keep in line with the curriculum.
I’d love to see a part two to this video. We’re so unsure of what to classify as American culture, yet we all agree that high school is an integral part of it.
Some fun new high school stereotypes that you may have never heard of: the Emo (yes, different from the goths), the fine arts, the anime/manga, and the soccer girls, to name a few. There’s also some very specific names that people use in high school to describe a person’s behavior! I’m sure you’ve heard of “the Karen”, but do you know what a “Kyle”, a “Hot Cheeto Girl”, or a “Joker Kid” is?
I’m vaguely familiar with Kyle as kinda like the “skater” kid asshole. I have no clue what a Joker Kid or a Hot Cheeto Girl is. Btw I graduated high school in 2020 so I probably should know about this…
Hot Cheetos girls and Emo kids are pretty old things I’d say,. I was an emo kid back when the MySpace band/underground hardcore bands became a thing and started in my sophomore/junior year. The super early stages of it popped off when I was in high school, and I graduated in ‘08. Back when, if you were a guy and wanted some extra super skinny jeans, you had to wear girls jeans 😂 I was on more of the hardcore/metal side of it so no neon colors or crazy color “accessories”. Girls black jeans with studded belts, super tight black band T’s, vans/or converse, sweat band or bandana head bands, and the quintessential ridiculous straightened long hair. And to think we had any room to make fun of goth kids 🤣
@@Bacon__SteezBurger hard to think of the last time ive seen an emo kid a la myspace era... i remember evolving from a scene kid in my early highschool days to a metalhead goth by the time i graduated. havent really changed since. interesting to see how we've all grown out of emo/scene fashion and music and grew into other subcultures that have been around for much longer. turns out it was a phase, sorry mom lol makes me wonder how "e-kids" will turn out. i think theyre the modern equivalent of emo/scene kids of the 2000s/2010s
I was expecting high school to be a lot more regimented than it actually was. Yeah there were sporty kids and goth kids, but there was a lot of overlap. A lot of the goths were also theatre kids, and a lot of the jocks were “gear heads” (our term for the “hickish”, to use a JJism, guys who worked on cars) The cheerleaders did drama and played in band. We had nerds, but we didn’t have the big overlap between nerds and band kids. Being able to play music actually made you pretty cool in my small American town/farming community. This was also at the very beginning of the rise of nerd culture, the first iron man came out in my sophomore year of high school and video games were already mass culture so being into games and following that kind of news was no longer too childish or nerdy to follow video game news, unless you liked Nintendo. If you had a Wii and played anything other the Super Smash Brothers on it then you were a giant dweeb. Ahhh….memories
@@BlastinRope I think the Marvel movies kind of represent a death of nerd culture as an insular thing, but it has undoubtedly become a big part of mass culture. The idea of following deep lore for any nonreal setting has traditionally been considered childish, and adults who continue to do these things have been considered quite weird honestly, so this shift to having to have watched 10+ movies to know who the characters are in the new movie is a change that I have seen in my lifetime.
Yep I think Glee really exaggerates this in particular. It's set in a small town, but filmed in a large high school (~640 students) where all of the students know each other across grades and they all perpetuate cliques and popularity tropes. And the cheerleaders wear their skimpy uniforms every single day...
Yearbooks were not free in my Pennsylvania high school, or middle school before that. Not being able to get a yearbook served as another way for poor kids to feel excluded in school, alongside things like book fairs.
I think that making stories take place in High School makes sense in a lot of countries. Virtually in any developed/Western country, the vast majority of all people attend HS. Literally almost everyone you would market a work of fiction to has been to a High School, so it is easy to relate. Also, High School in every country is a very unique period of someone's life: you change biologically (puberty), you have your first real-life experiences (be it romantic, friendly, professional, academic etc.), and you basically have your whole life ahead of you to plan out and dream about. It is literally when we "come of age", so having "coming of age" stories take place there is only natural
Fun fact: Sloppy Joes are not a thing in Australia. As an American, my father would occasionally make it for me, but apparently it didn’t taste the same for some mysterious reason that he could never work out. He’d also regularly make corn bread - which was definitely an acquired taste. Ah, thanks for the memories 🙂🐿❤️🌈 Dissection frogs being a “big business” has blown my mind. I’m not totally surprised, it’s just one of those things that you would never think about...until you do. P.s the ending......? lol 😂
here in the Philippines, we do dissect our frogs (theres also an option to dissect squids) as well for Science/General Biology, but we have to get them ourselves
My favourite depiction of high school is the TV show Daria. When it came out, I was a little over ten years out of high school so recent enough to remember the cultures but distant enough to start to be nostalgic. The show appeals to my sense of humour and I saw as one who is more intellectual and has a small circle of friends a bit of resemblance with Daria herself. Both my grandmothers born about 1900 attended one room rural schools until completing grade 8 being needed on the farm and to learn household skills they would eventually need as a housewife
One of the most cliché that I see is bullying. It feels like a very common plot point in any american media that takes place in highschool. I've switched many schools during my childhood and I've never encountered any bullying. Whenever I see high school bullies in media it makes me cringe. Is bullying really so common in the US or are kids there just unable to take/do banter I'm from central Europe for context.
Same in Japanese high school cliches most of their conflict is a male main character gotten a harem and he needs to choice who’s his one of his life Or High school students gotten powers and will defeat the villaim At least these are Better than USA
I have noticed this also. I have encountered many people who may try to inhabit the “bully” stereotype, they are mostly laughed at or excluded for being mean or cruel. I think it’s less of there being a pervasive bullying culture, and more so shows tend to take things that somewhat exist (mean people) and take it to an extreme to create an obvious enemy for the main character to deal with.
Bullying really isn’t a thing here in the U.S. anymore. Sure you might get the occasional teasing or mean comments but I haven’t seen any prolonged harassment or physical intimidation.
I literally got picked up and put into a trash can by older students in the early 2000's. And that's just one example of bullying I experienced, but I figured it's the most outlandish, extreme example that people might consider to be cliche or unrealistic. Just because it didn't happen to you didn't mean it wasn't happening. Obviously not everyone got bullied. Not everyone was the small, quiet kid that got picked on.
FYI: Amy Chua has does not actually advocate for the methods seen in her book, she views it as more of a memoir of her experiences first growing up and then parenting
@@자시엘 Nah, it creates people who might have success in the rat race, but feel crippled by the pressure to perform, and follow the path set out for them. I'd rather have people that think creatively, question all authority, feel free to follow their own interest, and cooperate with others as equals.
Zachaton, Muscle Mage is the trope of shop class teachers. They tend to be burly old men with big beards and are mechanical repair "wizards". Also, they often double as coaches for the schools sports teams
That would explain the screen with Fortran 77 code on it. (For reference, the "GOTO" statement in Fortran has been deprecated since 1990 for causing a lot of problems. Fortran is already an old programming language, and if you see the "GOTO" statement being used, it means both the code and the user are likely very old. Or you're a physicist like me and you're stuck with Fortran because it makes numbers go brr.)
i love how informative you are in your videos, like how you explain things that might seem obvious to americans/westerners but might seem foreign to other cultures. amazing channel, hope to see more from you :)
Fun fact, parts of the show Glee was filmed at a high school that I live near. I have a short story to go along with this fact. Once my mom and her friend had decided to hang out and since my mom knew that her friend had like the show Glee when they passed the school my mom told her thats where parts of it were filmed her friend had become really excited.
That last one is definitely a riff on tech bros. This wasn't a thing when I was in high school, but I saw it in college. Easily put, it's a large subset of the engineering school that's real into weight lifting. I got my degree in Computer Science and I'd often go to the gym with other guys working at Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Electrical Engineering. A lot of them had a sense of pride about it and would boast about how much better they were than the business students (who where in the same building as most of the engineering classes) for going harder at everything.
I’m pretty sure the card that stumped you was a play on the weightlifting subculture in American HS. We have a large height lifting room where it is popular to lift, in my high school. We even have a class for it.
This is my inclination, too. I think the playing card alludes to tracking weight lifting stats. We also had weight lifting classes at all three of our high schools.
the tech references are probably alluding to how these guys are always punching numbers into myfitnesspal or other trackers/spreadsheets and in general lifters tend to be more stereotypically dorky than "jock" propers.
It’s a reference to the recent growth of a sub group of jocks who are not just advanced at sports, but also really good at/really interested in math, science, and technology. It’s an interesting mix for someone to be because for a long long time, the geeks and nerds did not get along with jocks and you couldn’t be both at once. (At least, it was uncommon to be both at once.)I would call them tech jocks or stem jocks. You can see he’s holding a barbell which has glyphs (a visual joke about computer code being hard to understand) on it. He’s advancing upwards over these buildings with circuits on them, which seems to me like a reference to how these kids who are good at both sports and STEM tend to get really good grades and favoritism in school because they are favorites of both coaches, students, and teachers. Some people are also saying it has to do with Hackathons (coding competitions) which makes sense because he’s holding a trophy, and I think hackathons give trophies to the winning hacking team.
I don’t know how long you’ve been on TH-cam but I just discovered your channel and as a fellow Canadian I find it my duty to go back and watch everything!!!
Glee club has actually transformed somewhat into what we call Show Choir. A group of singers on stage doing dance routines, usually with a small band behind stage providing soundtrack. I participated in the Show Band a few years in HS going to different competitions around Iowa and they are huge! My dad went to HS in the early 90's and participated in Swing Choir, it seems the name has changed over time
Yeah, in my high school years, there was a Choir which was a large number of students singing on risers, but then there was also Show Choir, which was more dance routines/more contemporary music, which is what you would call the Glee Club
He forgot to separate elementry school from middle school. For the ones who don't know; Elementry k-5 (grade) 5-11 (age), Middle 6-8 (grade) 11-14 (age) and Highschool 9-12 (grade) 14-18 (age). As somebody who lives in the USA this is what I and many others experience (This depends if you went to public school or not). And your age can differ if you skip or stay back a grade.
I don’t think I’ve seen anyone mention this yet, but probably the most common feature that is missing from anything set in a high school is the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC). To sum it up, it’s a program where one of the branches of the US armed forces sponsors a unit in a school. Retired servicemen, usually sergeants or higher, teach those classes and we learn some stuff about drill and once a week we wear the branch’s uniform and get graded on it. It also comes with a PT day every week and a test we have to take twice a semester. JROTC is based off of ROTC in colleges but are very different. The college program sends you directly into service as an officer while JROTC doesn’t make you enlist, but you can enlist with a higher rank. In my school, it’s also an alternative to PE and health, giving you the credits alongside elective credits, although this isn’t the case for some schools where you still have to take PE. Oftentimes, we participate in drill competitions with other schools even if they don’t have a program under the same branch. There’s an academic competition we do every year with other schools. We often go to a local orienteering competition (using a map and compass to go from point A to point B to point C and then all the way back to point A). Probably the coolest thing about the program is that it’s more often led by the students. We have a group of cadet officers, rank and all, who come up with ideas and plans while the instructors help make them happen. I got to be the guy leading the orienteering teams. And if this sounds like a massive recruitment scheme, it is, but the instructors are told to tell you that it’s not. We love it anyways. As for the very few depictions I know, I can only recount 2. The currently running comedy “The Goldbergs” has an episode revolving around a character joining his high school’s program. Spider Man Homecoming has one classmate in the background in uniform. It still baffles me how little this rather common feature of American high schools gets left out. Even just one or two extras in uniform or a side character who happens to do it, but nope! We get nothing. Also a bunch of us are nerds, like, the vast majority of us are nerds.
I was not “in” jrotc, but all through high school I was a part of the varsity rifle team that they organized. The team was about 50% jrotc and 50% general population when I was there and the command sergeant major and colonel were lovely to everyone. It was an incredibly interesting subgroup in high school with their own winter dance and award ceremonies at the end of the year.
My high school had one, Air Force unit. We were definitely the minority and categorized as the "weird" kids since we did questionable things. But when we needed to be serious, we will pull through. I had more fun cheering my JROTC peers at their sport tournaments than my school games.
My school had ROTC. They were very proudly racist and self proclaimed themselves the Rot-C N***s(word that rhymes with Rot-C and in reference to national socialism. They were very interestingly non homophobic and would defend (with violence) any kid getting picked on. Often led to recruitment. Was bizarre.
I’m glad that someone noticed the kid in the background of the Spider-Man movie. I re-watched it recently and paused at that moment. I don’t remember why but maybe it’s just some nostalgia. I do that if there’s an actual service member in a movie though too. Because I like to see how accurate their ribbon racks are to their age, branch of service, and established lore. 😂. I once caught a young Canadian officer in a show that I was watching (modern day setting) having American service ribbons from Vietnam on. Lmao. Always get a good laugh out of those kind anachronisms.
I believe that final card could be an allusion to two different things: - A robotics club where students from different highschools make robots and compete against eachother to fulfill a certain task, like throwing a ball through a hoop, or climbing up stairs, or using monkey bars, etc. - An electronic sports club, where gamers from different highschools would compete against eachother in video games. I personally remember the former at my highschool and I can't recall if the latter existed, but it wouldn't surprise me if some highschools did have an electronic sports team.
I remember the nasty rectangular pizzas in grade school, but when our new high school was built, it pokevolved into pizza pucks that I have mixed feelings on, even a decade later. Texture was better, but the taste was cheap, and the options at school were limited to enhancing the flavor. So I settled on the only thing that gave it a kick, which was to douse the entire pizza puck in black pepper until one could actually smell it across the room. I call it a puck because of the shape, but it was actually pretty large, about 6 inches in diameter. And this is a legit measurement, not a "I'm trying to get luck so this 3.5 inches is actually 6" measurement. I never dissected a frog, I dissected a rabbit.
In my freshman biology class, instead of dissecting frogs, we dissected rats. I was expecting them to be kept in individual little sterile boxes or something, so imagine my surprise when my bio teacher pulled out a *giant bag of dead rats* and slammed them on the counter
I'm a cutting-edge baby boomer, born 1945 and graduated High School 1963. I remember a lot of the things described here, but don't have many fond memories of high school. When I got to college it was like being released from prison. Never cared for shows like "Happy Days," "Kotter," etc.; or movies like "Grease" or "Ridgemont High." They were either completely inaccurate or too painfully accurate. Still, I really enjoyed this post because there was a lot of the historical information I had never even heard of or thought about. Great job.
Tachaton is robotics club. Basically you get all the stem kids in a room, give them an assignment, watch them make a machine to move a ball or chuck a disc. Its really fun
As someone from Quebec who attended an all-girls private school with a uniform, I almost never saw my high school experience reflected in the media. My favorite high school media was Azumanga Daioh, which despite being japanese was much closer to my way of life than American teen shows.
In regards to ADHD meds, it's not always used to treat behavior, it's used to treat the symptoms someone with ADHD experiences. I wasn't diagnosed until I was 22 and Ritalin has massively improved my well-being and has helped me get to milestones that I always had difficulty achieving. I wish I had been diagnosed earlier because the meds might have helped me actually do my homework and read at a normal pace. It also helps my anxiety and binge eating disorder and I was a severely anxious overweight teenager. There is a problem with an over diagnosis of adhd in children, but for the ones with ADHD, trying out medications to see if they work shouldn't be as stigmatized as it is. It shouldn't be the only tool to manage ADHD, but it can be one tool
My county has a arts focused High School that doesn't have one but previously did but was shut down for being bad and we are not a big Football talent base to begin with.
I was surprised, too, that it was “only” 70%, but a lot of high schools in big cities do not have access (and/or the budget) to the field/equipment necessary for running a football program. In NYC, for example, how many high schools have football teams? Nowhere near the 70% mark. 😎
@@Marylandbrony Ugh we live in a pretty " uppity" town/tri-city area, so unfortunately there is an (alleged) pay-to-play/be on the higher ups' good side/know the right people aura to be able to play. Almost like a school district(s) based classist society.
I meant to add that we also have a very arts-based program(s) in our districts, which I was part of. I played Violin for 10 years, I also played Volleyball and was a cheerleader - only 1 year each. I don't think I was "cool enough" for the sports teams and my family definitely did not suck up to any sports directors lol.
SAT doesn't actually stand for Scholastic Aptitude Test anymore. It used to, but after it was shown that you can artificially increase your score by cramming they dropped the claim that it was an "aptitude test". Now SAT just stands for SAT. Also, high school yearbooks are anything but free I'm afraid. I went to a fairly affluent high school, and they charged all of us like $100 per yearbook. I have 4.
As an American I always found the SAT's interesting as in our part of the country we had to take ACT tests which I'm told are near identical but out of like 30 instead of a few hundred.
I'll be honest, I graduated in 2002 and I generally found many of the portrayals of American high School that others consider cliche to be fairly accurate if slightly exaggerated. The only thing that I really always looked at and felt was incorrect was the amount of free time that high schoolers seem to have in movies and television shows. I would also point out that for the majority of America elementary school is kindergarten through 5th grade which would be 5 to 10. Middle school is usually grades 6,7 and 8 and high school would be grades 9, 10, 11 and 12. These are usually called freshman, sophomore, Junior, and senior years.
The history of Junior High didn’t come up much in my research but I feel like it’s a newer idea. At least where I lived, it was just being introduced when I was a teen.
@@JJMcCullough I think maybe the classic big text saying “child labor laws” probably would have worked ok, but honestly the way it ended up was more entertaining for me 😂 Keep up the great work JJ I make sure to watch all your videos as they come out, love from Australia 🇦🇺
@@BinglesP and they still all cost forty dollars lol. I think to buy every expansion pack is like eight hundred dollars so it’s definitely one of those situations where you’re morally in the right pirating it for everything it has
The most annoying part of these is how alienated you feel when you were lame in high school and didn't get to take part because everyone around you looks back on high school with nostalgia.
Thinking of Europeans watching American TV and thinking they have our high school culture figured out reminds me of those "weebs" who think watching anime gives them a firm grasp of Japanese high school. Fun fact: the roof of Japanese high schools are locked (for obvious reasons) and you probably wouldn't want to eat lunch up there anyway.
I suspect Archie Comics (debuting in the 1940s) has a high degree of responsibility for the spread of high school cliches. You name it - the jock, the nerd, the bully, the klutz, the blustering principal, the cranky lunchlady - Riverdale High's got it.
I have no idea about other places but in East Asia and India high school is a really stressful period where you're expected to study 8+ hours so you can get into a decent college. I'm in an elite college rn and literally no one here remembers high school fondly. The syllabus of our entrance tests is equivalent to what you'd learn in the first year of your college and all of high school. Only 1-10% actually succeed. Asiometry has a good video on this
Men I’m so glad I was born in balkans, we also have a sort of SAT but its not nearly as hard like you guys have it. I would literally die there no joke
I’m American and in High-school, We didn’t dissect frog since middle school but just last spring dissected pig fetuses from pigs that were up for slaughter, this might be due to me being Minnesotan since we have a major pork industry but We do the dissections though and it’s not unethical.
I went to high school in the 1980s and we went beyond frogs, in grade 10 or 11 biology we had the option to dissect cats. you could opt-out and many students did. Despite having three pet cats at home I took the option and found it fascinating. it didn't turn me into a serial killer or anything, it was just like any other machine's internals. PETA would have freaked.
The Muscle Mage is likely just a reference to nerd subculture becoming mainstream, to the extent that you've got those who would formerly be considered high school jocks hanging out and playing Magic the Gathering at lunch.
Honestly, the most accurate depiction of at least modern high school is the Netflix series American Vandal. There's just something the show does that makes it feel so right amidst all of the sitcoms and John Hughes movies that may have been accurate decades ago, but no longer hold as much water compared to the modern, technology-centric high school.
You forgot to mention two of the best high school tropes the masterpieces of modern art that are found on the stalls of the boys bathroom and the janitor being having some insane previous job (ex. My high school janitor used to be a professional soccer player for El Salvador)
OUR JANITOR WAS A CAVE EXPLORER. like professional spelunker who wrote like THE book about it for our area. The geology class would have him lead one field trip a year. His name was Pierre or Claude or something. Dude was crazy and I have no idea what happened him.
I was diagnosed with ADHD when in elementary in 1999, I was medicated and it helped a lot, today as an adult I don't need it anymore, but even today it helps out if I need to do heavy socialization with "normal people" lol (primarily work events a few times a year). But I had a lot of friends who never seemed hyper at all, or distracted when non medicated, whose parents just seem like they listened to a counselor at school that said their kid had add.
In the early 2000s in a West TN college-prep private high school, stereotypes included "smart kids", athletes, pretty girls, popular/party/reckless people, musicians (prone to go into home school to go pro), and based on whichever main club someone belonged to over time.
More miniscule high school stereotypes that I have encountered: -Chalkboards, and the common usage of chalk over other things -Hand-cranked pencil sharpeners -Seat-desk hybrid, or "unidesks" -Carrying backpacks around instead of individual books -Roll calls
I would love to see a follow up video about the different Secondary School cliches around the world. Everyone whose ever seen an Anime probably knows most of the Japanese high school stereotypes but I'm curious about the rest of the world too. Like for example in my country Germany the High School stereotypes seem to be primarily centred around our multi tiered secondary school system where every branch has its own cliches rather than having a unified catalogue of characters that exist across every school. Like how people who attend the "Hauptschule" are stereotyped as low class, low educated and most often also heavily ethnic or pseudo ethnic if they happen to be white while people who attend the "Gymnasium or Oberschule" are stereotyped as stuffy, stresst out overachivers who either become doctors or end up as overqualified office workers.
21:02 The would you dissect her card is very ironic because my 9th grade biology teacher literally said before we dissected frogs that she got to dissect cats and it’s possibly one of the most haunting things she said, especially since how nauseous I felt after dissecting just a frog.
21:37 I believe it’s a reference to the “Tech Geek” cliché where a kid is obsessed and owns all the latest technologies and shows them off. Think Cookie from Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide
When I was younger I used to dream of studying in an American high school. I don't know if it was because of too many movies and cartoons but I kinda dreamed of being surrounded by nerdy nerds, goofy bullies, provocative cheerleaders, lockers in the corridors etc. Having experienced high school in Italy and in Perú I've got to admit that the Italian one was closer than the Peruvian one. The first was in a big building and without a dress code while the second was in a smaller building packed with students from kindergarten to the last year of secondary and with uniforms.
As someone who graduated American high school in 2019, my experience was way different to any movies or TV shows I’ve seen portraying this aspect of American life. I also grew up on the east coast which is way different than other areas of the US. In my school there were groups of friends, often based on mutual interests (sports, academics, anime, etc), and there were some “loner” kids that would hang out by themselves or with 1/2 people, but there weren’t many kids that were bullied or ostracized, just ignored or overlooked. There were kids that were “popular” but it was because they knew lots of other kids and had an outgoing personality; mean kids were not “popular”. There’s more I can say to describe the modern high school experience, but you get the picture. What I really wish is for Hollywood to actually interview modern kids about what it’s really like to go to school these days, ESPECIALLY post pandemic.
I would have loved to see Sex Education in your analysis of film/tv high school tropes, because it's such an odd but interesting mix of UK and US culture, and 70's/80's nostalgia and tropes mixed with very contemporary issues, identities and culture (it all seems rather intentional as well, instead of just out-of-touch nostalgic writers) . Another good contemporary take on the genre is Booksmart.
Here in Latin America we have a lot of European influence very embedded into our culture, so our schools have European traditions like having uniforms and all that. I remember when I was a teen that “American high schools” started to appear in my city aimed at snobby high class people with names like: Harvard High school or Colombo-American High school, offering “American style” education. It was just normal high schools with American cliches like: no uniforms, fraternities (in high school lol), qualifications with letters instead of numbers, classes starting at 9 instead of 7 am, cheerleader teams and, the best of all: hallways with lockers! Just like in the movies!!!
That would be interesting to me. I just recently started working in a hospital and holy smokes, caffeine is SO much a part of the culture, it's kind of wild to me. I knew caffeine was a big thing in hospitals due to the intense and around-the-clock nature of the work, but I didn't know how prominent it really is.
I think there's definitely a european immigrant origin to coffee culture in the US. Apart from the British and Irish who prefer tea, most europeans are avid coffee drinkers, particularly Italians and Nordic peoples who migrated to the US in great numbers.
I love how you always give your videos like "Clichés of American Highschools" when the actual video is just you analyzing a card game you like. Ngl, I don't mind this.
I just graduated high school this year, and to me the Zachaton card seems refer to a clique of students, which although similar to jocks, are seemingly obsessed with weightlifting and attaining a muscular body. I think this to be a relatively new kind of cliché (if it can be considered one at all) which has developed out of the broader ongoing fitness trend popularized by social media. At least where I live almost every high school has a weightlifting room, which largely exist to serve the sports teams at the high school. Athletes usually take a weightlifting class during their school day or have weightlifting workouts before or after school with their teams in addition to any other practices they might have. For example, I played soccer all four years for my high school and most of my teammates took weightlifting as a class. The Zachaton card seems to distinguish between a jock (a person who plays sports) versus a fitness obsessed teen (who does not play a sport, but is rather only fitness obsessed). At my high school it was not uncommon for there to be this type of fitness obsessed teen who did not play sports, but took weightlifting as a class. In fact, there were leaderboards posted in the weight room for people who lifted a certain amount. The term "Zachaton" seems to imply Zach is the stereotypical name of this fitness obsessed teen (which does seem befitting.) And the machine part references the over-obsessed nature of the fitness culture which "Zach" prescribes to; it is almost sacrilegious to take a day off lifting for this type of fitness obsessed teen, hence the machine part. The symbols on the weights hints towards the almost worship-like nature of fitness culture.
Except... the trophy with upside down cross on it and skull? I think whoever made this card is having a private fantasy about something that none of the rest of us are privy to...
@@mercster no it’s about a new subculture of computer nerds/weebs who are really into lifting. I read a comment that described it better than I ever code. But the name “Zachathon” is a play on the word hackathon. I’ll find the comment and paste it.
@@mercster I think "Zachaton" is a play on the word "Hackathon" which is a competition in which programmers are grouped together in teams to create a program in a limited time frame, ranging from about a whole weekend to a whole week or month. Game Jams are a subset of this in which people go together to make a video game under a certain theme such as a word or phrase. Although, this is more of a College activity than a high school activity The phrase on his chest is an infinite loop in the BASIC programming language in which it will print the phrase "KICK ASS" repeatedly. This is more speculation, but I did notice that there is an interesting subset of programmers who are strangely into weight lifting and self sufficiency such as Mental Outlaw and Luke Smith. It could also be that high school teachers also double as coaches for sports teams. It could be that the computer teacher might be a weight lifting teacher. Edit: Zachaton's face and beard does slightly resemble Richard Stallman, an Open Source advocate and key developer/founder of the GNU/Linux project. The comment was from “Unfit Ninja”
@@homedepot. LOL, dude, I read that comment already and completely disagree with it, if you scroll up you'll see. There is no way on God's green earth that the figure has anything to do with Richard Stallman. That guy is just a guy deep into hacker culture (as am I) but guessing and reading into it things that aren't there. He may have slight aspects of it right, but he's by no means "cracked the code." He's entitled to his opinion as are you, but I can guarantee you... that aint it. ;-)
My highschool had tremendous overlap between clicks. We had an “after prom” party in 12th grade and almost everyone who could go did go. Sports kids, hicks, drama nerds, anime geeks. Love to all.
Gen-Xer from the US here. We had rectangular cardboard pizza well before 1988. Also, Pizza Pockets are very much a Canadian signifier. I never ran into Pizza Pockets before coming to Canada. As far as compact microwave pizza experiences go, they are distinctly different. Sweeter, softer, and a little bit smaller than Hot Pockets. Hot Pockets also have a wider variety of flavors. It’s possible Show Choirs - distinct from other school choirs - fill the gap once held by Glee Clubs.
Breaking news! I got a DM from the artist of the game who explained the mystery card:
"The creator of the game has been including depictions of past tournament winners in the games as 'champion cards,' so if someone takes the top trophy at one of the Epic Spell Wars tournaments, they get to be added to a future game. That guy was a sort of burly tattooed dude who was into weightlifting so I made him look like a Masters of the Universe character and his real name is Zach."
Fun fact: George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Franklin D. Roosevelt were all cheerleaders in college.
I fondly remember tossing up Eisenhower, and watching him execute a double twist in a very short skirt.
I wanna see that
No fuckin way... Lolol
So was George H.W. Bush, family tradition of sorts
Lol
Just a note about American High School yearbooks. I can only speak for my experience at my schools, but yearbooks we're not free. They were actually quite pricey ($80-100+ USD), and if you couldnt come up with the cash, you missed out on what was made to be a "quintessential" school experience.
***Edit: spelling correction
I only bought the first year and last year books. You got a pic of almost everyone you knew that way.
Yep, my twin sister and I had to share ours because we we’re going spend over $100 for the same book for 4 years
@@Drawfield Dude I feel dumb now, my twin and I should've done that.
@@juliesrail6886 only bad thing was who got to take it to which class to have people sign it - thankfully ours had extra signing pages so one of us got the book and the other got the extra pages
yeah I was a bit thrown off when JJ said yearbooks were free. That was never the case for me. I only had yearbooks for my freshman (9th) and senior (12th) years because my parents didnt want to spend the money on them.
I think “Zachaton” is a play on the word “Hackathon” which is a competition in which programmers are grouped together in teams to create a program in a limited time frame, ranging from about a whole weekend to a whole week or month. Game Jams are a subset of this in which people go together to make a video game under a certain theme such as a word or phrase. Although, this is more of a College activity than a high school activity
The phrase on his chest is an infinite loop in the BASIC programming language in which it will print the phrase “KICK ASS” repeatedly.
This is more speculation, but I did notice that there is an interesting subset of programmers who are strangely into weight lifting and self sufficiency such as Mental Outlaw and Luke Smith. It could also be that high school teachers also double as coaches for sports teams. It could be that the computer teacher might be a weight lifting teacher.
Edit: Zachaton’s face and beard does slightly resemble Richard Stallman, an Open Source advocate and key developer/founder of the GNU/Linux project.
This is what I immediately thought.
Very nice explanation
I graduated in 2020 and can attest to the weird computer-nerd-gym-bro hybrid that has emerged
It also looks like there's multiple references to He-Man and the Masters of the Universe.
@@joshuapolacheck8879 Was about to that.
I think it’s really interesting that the stereotypical “American High School” is all based upon stereotypes from the 80’s. High school now-a-days in the States is quite different. We definitely still have the shells of those stereotypes, but I’ve never seen a TV show or movie about some of the newer cliques that high schoolers talk about.
I feel like you will, but the people living through it now need to get old enough to be the ones making the tv shows and movies.
What I would say is that nowadays lines between "cliques" are a lot more blurry so if you're trying to write a simple highschool story then it would be more difficult than just using these well defined and tried and true cliques. You'd need more depth than most highschool media wants to put in the effort to add
cliques like what?
@@Thenomnomfairy The classic archetypes for highschool such as nerd, jock, cheerleader, etc. He mentioned a lot of them in the video
@@fortgaming9058 I think he's asking about the newer cliques?
As an American who grew up in the Midwest, I can say that I've never seen the Canadian style pizza pockets before, but have had countless hot pockets. In fact, they are so ubiquitous that I and everyone I know use the brand name "Hot Pockets" as a generic, like Kleenex.
Same here. I've never seen that other kind.
Came looking for this comment; I had no idea Pillsbury made a pizza pocket.
pizza pops are pretty good
Living across eastern US, I have only ever seen the rectangular hot pocket as well
To be fair as a Winnipeger. We have known both "Pizza Pops" and Hot pockets. The Pizza pop used to be sold direct by the inventor (i think) then he sold the concept to Pillsbury. As a kid we had both available to us, but I would say I have eaten somewhere around 99/1 ratio of Pizza Pops to Hot pockets, not because they were not available, but because they were just better. I only found out in my mid thirties that Pizza pops were an invention in my hometown.
As a Malaysian, my first impression of American high school based on movies is that there is full of bullying and fighting, and friendship between girls are always so fake, as there is so much betrayal and talking behind your back. And there are also cliques. If you sit at the wrong seat in the canteen, you will be bullied. And there is a constant struggle to be popular. If you try to be popular but your efforts go awry, you will be shamed forever and your name in high school will forever be tarnished. Basically very bad impressions. But apparently American high school isn't all doom and gloom according to the comments in this video.
Bullying and fighting is real. At my school we had lots of gangs so that was the source of most of the fighting. But not 100% i knew someone that was threatened with a gun walking home, and someone else that had boiling water poured on her. There are a lot of fake people especially more popular people. Betrayal is a problem. Lots of friendships end terribly or one friend relentlessly bullies the other friend until they cant handle it anymore. But no it isn't all doom and gloom depends on the crowd you hang out with mostly
cliques dont rlly exist neither does popularity most ppl mind their business but yeah there are some fake ppl
For the most part you'd be correct in your assumptions
Depends on the high schools. Some are worst than others. My 2 highschools were very normal, believe it or not. So if you went there fearing expectation, than be relieve it wasn't the case
Idk my expereince is just hangout with freinds. Im sure all that heppened but i didnt notice. And cliques were not so enforced. You could say i was part of 3 different ones. No one really cared what else you did as long as you were freindly.
Fun fact: The College Board, trying to distance themselves from the SAT’s initial intent to determine aptitude/natural ability (bc it was based on eugenics and stuff), has made the SAT an empty acronym now. Technically the SAT doesn’t stand for scholastic aptitude test now, it stands for nothing 🤷♂️
Fuck empty acronyms
Fuck College Board
I’m confused how is the SAT based on eugenics?
@@TACTICALwaffle2 There was a belief that logic and intelligence was innate for people, thats in part where some of the really weird questions origin from.
That seems metaphorically resonant now
My dad is a Chinese immigrant to America and his only exposure to American high schools was from 80's movies and one day he pulled me aside and very seriously said "Listen... if you are getting bullied by the jocks, you can tell me." and then I had to inform him that sort of bullying really only happened in teen movies.
That's not entirely true. I believe it was more prevalent in the past, however, there are still schools where bullying is a problem.
@@cassidyjewel3639It's both exaggerated in movies and outdated.
Also, in my experience, jocks and bullies tend not to be the same people.
I was the kid that would be bullied mercilessly by the jocks in a stereotypical American high school. In reality the other students stuck to their cliques and just ignored the solitary awkward types like me.
Yep, I had more people bothering me because they saw me alone and felt bad than people trying to mess with me.
I had a similar experience. By the time senior year came around I barely had any friends. If there's a 10 year reunion, I don't know if I'll go because there's probably only 2 people I would talk to.
I would have gone through the same thing but I was more outgoing and had no problem sitting with other people like the jocks I was nervous around people but if I felt they was friendly enough I was outgoing
I was always told that I'd be beaten up in high school, but honestly only my locker suffered. Kids would jam the lock in the little pocket thingy or write homophobic slurs, but that's all. This was Canada in the early 2010s.
As someone who attended American public schools K-12 and graduated high school in 2018, I think the Zachaton card is a relatively new clique that was emerging when I graduated. In America, there was always this divide between the “jocks”, who were usually always thought of as musclebound, attractive, physical paragons who were dumb as a box of rocks, and the “geeks/gamers”, who were typically imagined as nerdy, scrawny, generally unattractive bookworms, into board games, trading card games and video games, all things that in the early 2000’s were seen as “lame” or just for kids. But when I was leaving, I want to say around 2015-16ish, those two groups began to dissolve and form this kind of fusion clique of people who were both physically in shape and did sports as well as people who enjoyed the more “nerdy” kinds of things listed above, and it became less black and white. That’s my interpretation anyway.
This is such a great comment. I graduated in 2019 and there wasn't a single player on my HS Football Team that didn't play video games, and on my Rugby team there was even a group of 5-10 of us that held occasional Dungeons and Dragons games. The cliche of jocks vs nerds doesn't quite hold up as well as it used to.
I second this interpretation. This was me in HS
I feel that this is the high school version of “Tech Bros” or those guys in their mid 20s that really guy into “grind culture”, since the kids who were part of this subculture usually morph into these archetypes once they leave high school
Yeah i also graduated around the same time and video games were literally what the cool people did
Nerdy stuff is mainstream now sadly .
I’m surprised JJ didn’t mention marching bands, I’d say they have become a massive part of American high school culture as well.
Edit: I’d say they are pretty common in almost every state. I haven’t seen many public high schools without ones.
I think marching bands are a bigger thing in the south than the US as a whole.
I always found it bizarre that high school and college marching bands still wear Napoleonic-style military uniforms. Where and how did this tradition begin, and why do schools still do this?
@@loremipsum9444 good question. All I could come up with us it looks professional and sharp. I’m sure JJ will find the real answer if there is one. He has a skill for finding out information.
@@tigernotwoods914 not really from my experience. Marching bands seem to be the most common type of visual/performing arts at high schools I've been to and are almost always present at every home football game.
@@tigernotwoods914 i don’t think so, they seemed just as big in wisconsin as in texas (i’ve lived in both)
Speaking about the American school system, when I first heard the term “kindergarten”, it was in the context of “I’ll have you know that I graduated kindergarten” or “we were in kindergarten together” so at the time I thought kindergarten was an elite nursery school that middle class parents would send their kids, like the nursery equivalent of Harvard or Yale.
I graduated kindergarten
@@jefferynelson that's really impressive. Can you bless us with some of your knowledge you gained from there?
@@andrewg.3281 if the teacher reads the story of Stone Soup & announces that's what's for lunch tomorrow, it doesn't mean she's going to make you eat rocks
@@andrewg.3281 make sure not to run with scissors
I dropped out of kindergarten back in the day.
He should make a second part: There are so many clichés that couldn't be fit in this video!
I’ve always been blown away by the difference in American high school experiences just a few decades created. My mom did have an experience much closer to the movies- she went to a decently-sized high school up north. There were definitely cliques, she had a bully, and one time my (awful) grandmother had her dress up as a HEFTY TRASH BAG for Halloween which would be traumatic for anyone lmao, and the bully literally picked her up and walked her down the hall going “I’m taking out the trash” as people laughed and watched before being deposited in a trash can. Mom eventually got the bully to stop during a different year by ripping her earrings out of her ears 🤢
Meanwhile I grew up in a small east Texas town and my high school experience was a world apart- there were certainly cliques in that you had your group of friends you’d spend most of your time with because you shared classes or clubs, but the athletes were all also part of theater or band, the nerds who were in student council and stuff were also the burnout potheads, and there was almost no actual, stereotypical bullying. More cyberbullying and sneaky crap.
What I love about the PETA poster "Would you dissect her?" showing a cute kitten, is that in my high school, we did dissect cats (much more mature ones, though). In middle school, it was cow eyes. However cruel the former may seem, I'm fairly certain these particular choices are examples of using what was already there. The cow eyes are leftovers of the butchering process, and the cats are strays that had been put down for entirely other reasons. My understanding is that in many places in the US today, frogs are animals that must be specifically cultivated if they are to be used for dissections.
Frog breeding for scientific purposes is something of an industry, yes.
High school near where I live still disects cats interestingly.
Yeah, while I never ended up doing it in my classes, I did hear of other classes in my school that had ended up dissecting cats.
my high school dissected baby pigs
Yeah, at my school frogs and cow eyes would be dissected in every normal biology class and cats, ducks, and all sorts of fun stuff would be dissected in the Ag science classes. I remember being pissed because the honors biology classes didn't dissect anything because we were expected to understand the anatomy without needing a physical example so I didn't get to dissect a frog like I wanted to and I still failed the anatomy test.
19:20 I don't think yearbooks are generally offered for free. In my school there was usually a fairly hefty price between $30 - $60 to get them.
Yeah, I was like "Whaaaat?" when he said that. Granted, I'm Canadian but I wouldn't expect they'd be giving out the books down South for free either. It would run into quite a chunk of change.
Yup pretty sure my senior highschool yearbook was 50-80$ depending on personalizations and what not and the pictures weren’t free either 😂 had to pay a decent amount to get a framed sized version
mine was wierd, everyone got it but we sourced the money from adverts in the yearbook
I think the cheapest I paid in middle school was $40 and it only went up as I got older.
My high-school ones were $90 if you waited too long to buy them
As someone who isn't American, always made me wonder how accurate American high school gets portrayed, especially seeing how so many shows/movies always have bullies, parties, and gossips in them
It's been 20 years since I was in high school but that's basically right from my perspective and memory.
American movies focused on high schools are super not realistic. As a high school teacher today, the sheer lack of teachers or administration present as students do crazy stuff in the hallways always gives me a laugh.
Those are actually the more accurate parts of American hs.😆
@@ghintz2156 that's interesting to me because my HS almost never had a teacher or Admin in the hallways. There was barely room for the students, we were shoulder to shoulder over all 3 floors, the stairs were legitimately like an 8 minute process. And the teachers only had the 10 minute passing period to prepare for the next class. If it wasn't in their classroom it wasn't something they super cared about unless they absolutely had to.
Not at all
The SAT is really crazy. Speaking as someone who got a relatively good grade (1260), studying for the SAT is almost like it’s own subject. There are classes specifically just called ‘SAT Prep’, and moreso from just talking about like strategies for manipulating questions in a way. It’s really strange to be honest
Eh, sort of? SAT strategies have shown to only have a very limited effect. Like if you dont understand a passage, no SAT strategy will make it so that you do.
I don't think so. It's a cumulative knowledge test, so studying won't help much. I certainly didn't study for mine.
i got the same score and i was on xanax throughout high school. just depends on the person and how they learn
Sounds like the JEE or NEET exam we have here
@@jhonklan3794 Year late but as someone recently graduating high school, no. I got a 1550 and did not read a single passage. Only skimmed. The strategies are real and they work. I also took the ACT which comparatively had less "strategy" and more actual testing
6:42 "Edge-lord neckbeard"
- lose 2 social status
- Then deal 3 damage to each foe with higher Social Status
This one made me chuckle
maybe it's just a canadian vs. US thing, but my high school yearbooks were ABSOLUTELY NOT FREE LMAO. i had to pay 70 dollars for my senior one.
Ya got ripped off fam it was only 40 bucks in my hs
@@Alessandro_Berlusc seems like we both got ripped off, JJ got his for $0 lol
I didn't buy mine because it would be 100 dollars. Hell no 💀
I had to pay every year (elementary through high school) so as a result I never got one :) covid hit while I was finishing up my junior year, but things got so bad at my house I had to drop out. Completely missed my senior year, but I really hope they gave that class some free goddamn yearbooks lmao
In my high school in the US, my senior yearbook was over $100
When I was a teenager growing up in England, my increasing awareness of American culture always made me feel like I was missing out on something. It seemed like American high school kids had much more exciting and interesting lives. The schools had sports stadiums, the kids had cars, they went to amazing parties all the time, the weather always looked better (the weather in northern England is mostly grey, dreary and cold without being properly cold for about nine or ten months of the year). It just seemed glamorous. I really wanted to be American.
I’ve heard from Brits say similar things. Which is funny, because a lot of American parents imagine British high schools to be so much better by comparison, which is why elite American private schools try so hard to copy British traditions. The show Gossip Girl is a good portrayal of that.
Completely agree. I’m American and went to an elite high school in California and I’d say that the parents and teachers cared so much about the students getting amazing grades and having a stellar extracurricular resume in order to prep for applications to the most prestigious universities, particularly the Ivy League universities. However, that only partially was on the minds of the students… getting a brand new Mercedes for their 16th birthdays or knowing the latest clique gossip was equally or more so the focus of the students.
@@chickenfishhybrid44 We can't drive off campus at school because the age at which you can get your licence is 17, and the high school leaving age is 16 (although I and many others stayed on until 18 to get the qualifications needed for university).
We do have sports at school and the best students do compete against other schools, but what we lack is the culture best summed up by the expression "school spirit". In the UK we don't generally develop the same passion for our school and the rivalries with other schools are not as intense. The exception to this tends to be the upper class fee-paying schools, where school identity is very strong.
It's just a different way of doing things. We don't even refer to finishing school as "graduation" - at least not when I left 20 years ago. You only graduated from university (college). Leaving school was just called that - leaving.
do you still feel that way, is the real question?
@@chickenfishhybrid44 Everybody in the UK will do sport in some form or another at school, and pretty much all schools will have teams that compete against other schools. But it's not on the scale or seriousness as in the US, in my entirely subjective experience. Every does PE class (Physical Education) which I think Americans generally know as gym class? Most schools have playing fields with soccer pitches on. My school had soccer pitches, rugby pitches, a cricket pitch and tennis courts, as well as a sand pit for the long jump lol. Our running track was on grass rather than a proper running track. I was lucky though, not all schools have that many facilities. The issue of schools (or rather the local government) selling playing fields for development is an issue in Britain.
One thing we don't have are stadiums or bleachers or anything like that (usually). You only see them at some of the big fee-paying schools and colleges.
Most people who get seriously into sports do it from outside school. They might initially show some flair or talent at school, but they'll have to join a separate club to make the make the most of it. Again, the exception is always the big fee-paying schools where things work differently, but most of us don't go.
Something I’ve noticed is a weird disconnect when a piece of media around high school get rebooted. Where they modernize it to fit in with current high school but that turns off old fans who can’t relate a new depiction. Like the best example I can give is the new Spider-Man films. Where I weirdly saw older people complaining the bully doesn’t physically beat up nerds or that the bully’s are just normal kids and not jocks. And how unrealistic that was. But as someone who just recently graduated it’s very realistic. I feel like it shows how quickly school movies age because I often can’t watch 90s high school movies because of how alien they are. Like jocks and cheerleaders having no interest outside sports. Or doing whatever they wanted. Like at my school athletes were under more pressure to stay out of controversy. It reminds me of how the Breakfast Club was once a super iconic movie but millennials bashed it for being super outdated and now us Gen Z’s rarely hear of it unless it’s a reference for parents
Aye it's still iconic, even for Gen Z. Might not feel like it just came out yesterday, but it aged fairly well.
As someone who just recently graduated from an American high school 2 years ago, it can be frustrating watching any high school-related media as it all feels incredibly foreign and over-the-top. I would really love to see a movie or TV series that updates these tropes to make media for teenagers more authentic and genuinely relatable.
I think the 2019 movie Booksmart did a pretty good job of showing how nowadays, a lot of the most "popular" kids in a given grade aren't just stupid jocks or bitchy mean girls; they may often be party animals, sure, but also have numerous different hobbies and interests, are genuinely kind to all the other students & respectful to teachers/staff, and are usually pretty academically driven.
It'd be cool to have this taken a step further in movies or tv; showcasing the less strict/hierarchical nature of cliques would make for interesting, complex stories, and including caricatures of the cliques found in today's high schools to replace or supplement the older ones could be really engaging. A lot of the recent attempts (at least from what I've seen) seem to fall flat.
its just cuz your a zoomer the other movies depicted a more accurate picture of the time, its up to your generation to make movies that relate better to yall
The one I like is 21 Jump Street when the guys are surprised that the “cool kids” are the academic ones that take things seriously
As someone who went to school in Australia, I always assumed the portrayals of American school in media were accurate when I was younger.
You must have been one of the popular kids if you think they're kind and empathetic and the only reason they're respectful to teachers is because they're suck ups and know they can get away with torturing others students because the teachers are also former bitchy popular kids that still act like a clique.
While it's an anime and it's more meant to depict Japan, "Love is War" does a pretty decent job at depicting modern high school and teens in a way the rings fairly true, even for the Americas
My High School created a Pepperoni Roll that are famous locally. It's basically a very large Dinner Roll stuffed with ground pepperoni and cheese. You can pull the top off of it like you would a muffin and you can see the filling. They were served along with hot Pinto Beans and some Apple Sauce.
After the school had to stop serving them because of regulations the Cafeteria Ladies opened a little place in town where they serve them as one of their staple items.
I'm genuinely curious if other people have Similar experiences with local recipes/foods like this. I love this bit of local history and culture of my town.
Those sound awesome. What damn regulations would keep something that awesome from kids.
Another fun fact/cultural reference: the "gross-out" art style on those cards is pretty clearly inspired by the art of Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, whose Rat Fink character became an icon of the 1960s Southern California hot rod subculture.
Rat Fink is still a big deal ! (at least here in San Diego lmfao - we still unironically play Sublime everywhere like its The Weeknd and have since 1992)
It also reminds me of 90's skater punk.
Reminded me of Garbage Pail Kids
To any non-Americans reading this, for the love of god please don't consider Hollywood high school movies to be an accurate representation. I recently befriended a Finnish girl, and she was terribly disappointed when I explained that my high school life was nothing like Clueless or Mean Girls. I spent far more time in libraries and study halls than I did at parties.
Lol maybe YOU! Or maybe now a days… but Mean Girls is slightly exaggerated but yes, pretty accurate! Clueless is completely not accurate compared to most of the United States because it’s based in Beverly Hills, but if you were to go to school in Beverly Hills.. it IS COMPLETELY accurate!
Dude ikr! Whenever I meet Europeans I feel bad to completely let them down because high school in the US is pretty much nothing like how it's depicted in media. Not even vaguely similar in my recent experience at a typical suburban high school... But maybe there are a few places like in Southern California where it could make more sense?
On TV American High Schools always seemed to be having some big event Homecoming, Prom, etc. And you got to wear your own clothes, which were always cool/designer stuff. I always wondered when you did school work.
@@gemmeldrakes2758 American schools have a big distribution in quality. Basically, there are some schools where the kids are constantly busy with schoolwork, and are basically workaholics with little free time outside of homework -- and these schools feed much of the elite private universities and high quality public universities. Then, the other type of high school, which is a much larger portion of schools, students are mostly just screwing around and don't have all that much homework and such. So the latter type of school they have time to party all the time and have social drama and such as depicted in media.
The contradiction with media's depiction though, is that the former type of school (the workaholic school) tends to be in wealthier schools districts, while the other is in poorer and more normal school districts. Weirdly, media shows the lifestyle of poorer schools yet through the lens of the wealthy areas, which although may exist in small pockets in the US, isn't all that common.
@@gemmeldrakes2758 Right after school you did your school work… OR, you could be like me and do your homework in the next class while ignoring the lecture or you do it on the way to school or on the lunch hour or get to school really early and do it in the library or while waiting for the bus or PSsshhh just copy someone else’s! Or just do it at home after you hangout with your friends at the park or the mall or to eat and then you would go home to your family and spend time in your room, you might catch up with family time if your parents wanted you to eat dinner together. And then on weekends, you pretty much do what you want if you don’t have family functions. School is more “fun” here… honestly, most of the time, even if you fail… they will still pass you in some areas. And yes we get excited about the dances! The parties… in the movies it is exaggerated, but, it’s close to pretty much how I experienced it…
I love how he calls the USA and Canada collectively “American.” It really highlights how similar our culture is.
To me anglo-americans and anglgo canadians are basically the same as someone from a different part of the world.
Canada is the same with usa. Both shitholes
It's just like Malaysia and Singapore. They like bickering on how different their cultures are, but they are basically the same
i just figured canadian culture was like "we're not american guys" though being like almost identical to a regular american
@@rauldjvp3053 I think the only difference between America and Canada are the political and social differences. Culturally there are virtually zero differences
High School Teacher here. The last card is in association kind of with the Jock card. For a lack of a better term they are “Lift Bros.” In weight training (which because of high school football has becoming a class students can take instead of PE) there is an obsession with numbers- max weight, amount of reps, etc- that students from this clique really get into it. They often do play sports, but they don’t have too. Often the best lifters don’t equate into good players since they are more obsessed with the weights instead of the skill of the sport.
Another interesting thing is how in most "classic" high school movies/tv shows, the physical high school is almost always of a classical revival or Art Deco style, (i.e. popular 1910s-20s) and our stereotypical image of a high school fits as such. I think this is because of the fact that the US did indeed see a massive amount of public school construction around and after WW1, and even though the average high school today was probably built after WW2, people making movies in the 80s, 90s, etc remember their more 1920s-era schools. Everything from Springfield elementary, to sixteen candles, to HS musical has this style of school architecture...
If i remember correctly HSM was an actual highschool from like Utah or something. I just found that interesting
Ok so after doing a bit of research I have found that:
For Springfield Elementary
Lance Wilder, the background design supervisor for The Simpsons, was born in Lowell, Massachusetts on May 7, 1968 and raised in Chelmsford. Lance graduated from Chelmsford High School in 1986. The elementary school appearing in The Simpsons is based on what is now known as McCarthy Middle School, which was Chelmsford’s high school before the construction of the current Chelmsford High School in 1974.
I also found that:
"Chelmsford High School is a public, coeducational high school founded in 1917. The current building is located in North Chelmsford, Massachusetts, United States, and was built in 1974. Before 1974 the high school was located in the current McCarthy Middle School building."
So basically the current "McCarthy Middle School" actually used to act as a high school. And said high school was found and built around 1917, and only changed buildings once the new current high school for Chelmsford was built in 1974. And the original The Simpsons background design supervisor went to the old building for his high school before the new one was completed.
For 16 Candles
Most of the exterior scenes and some of the interior scenes were filmed at Niles East High
The auto shop scene was also filmed at Niles East High School, in the auto shop.
Niles East was first opened in 1938
It had also been used in Weird Science and Pretty In Pink
A cafeteria scene and a gym scene were filmed at Niles North High School.
(Niles North was opened in 1964)
So while this is perhaps the most "modern" high school you mentioned and had been built in the late 1930s, it still is a product of the first half of 20th century architecture and design.
For High School Musical
Salt Lake High School East or simply East High School based in Utah was where filming took place for the movie.
The original building was completed in 1913, and the current structure was built in 1997.
So make of that what you will, but the original building apparently for East High is the earliest build on this little list here it seems.
So all in all, fittingly enough, for the schools in the movies and shows that you named, they were either built in or around the 1910s-20s like you had alluded to.
@@cruzgomes5660 I knew basically none of these specifics, but this is really cool to know. Niles East is interesting...it's definitely Art Deco but in a very bland way, still taking inspiration from those earlier styles.
@@williamminns9000 indeed. I'm still learning all these architecture terms so it was cool as well to read them from your initial comment and be able to put a name and term to this common school architecture style seen in pop culture that I hadn't even initially had realized at first till you pointed it out. Good informative discussion all around!
@@cruzgomes5660 For movies shot in LA, John Marshall High School in Los Feliz and Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood have been used too many times to count. It's surprising LeConte Middle School in mid-Hollywood isn't at the tippy-top of the list too since it's on the same block as Sunset Bronson Studios (the original Warner Bros lot and currently home to Netflix HQ).
This brought back a number of memories. My high school, the oldest in the area, was founded back in 1820 - as an Academy. It had several reorganizations until finally morphing into a "modern" high school in the early 20th century. The first yearbook was printed in 1908.
The rectangular pizza thing has to be older than 1988 - I graduated in the early 80's, and rectangular pizza was already the norm - and had been for my entire school career. I would imagine it started by just using the equipment they had - those large rectangular baking trays are standard in any commercial kitchen.
I'm from Iowa and instead of frogs we dissected piglets. We're a very heavy agricultural state and whenever you raise large amounts of anything you're bound to get a fairly high number of stillbirths. As a result pigs make a good local alternative to frogs which would have to be shipped in from somewhere else. If I remember correctly I have dissected 3 over the years.
I’m from Minnesota, and we also dissected piglets instead of frogs.
I'm also from Iowa, I dissected one piglet, but only the accelerated class in the school got to do it. Everyone else did frogs.
we dissected a rabbit here in the NC. We also did frogs before but for the big final project of the final year, we got a bigger specimen
the concept of “jock culture” was always so interesting to me considering how i was both a football captain and debate team captain my senior year of high school - like how people from both football and debate would have generally negative preconceived notions about who i am once hearing that i participated in both things …
Did you wear your letterman jacket 24/7?
Being part of two clubs that hate each other has always been an interesting experience.
Dude! I'm not american but in here debate people hates MUN people. Most people from debate are actually sporty and consider debate as another sport due to its competitive nature.
I graduated from highschool in 2021. It was a private school that I went to for virtually my entire life, and I can say that the type of jock portrayed in most television was almost non-existent, and the few that did exist were not well-liked.
When I was in high school (a couple decades ago), I was a nerd (and a theatre nerd to make it worse) at a pretty big high school and one of my best friends was president of the student body and a captain on the football team. Another good friend was a cheerleading captain. The stereotypes didn't always fit, but there were those that fell right into those stereotypical behaviors. Just, in my experience, you could always find people in each group that were good people.
It would be interesting if you did a video about how "Iconic American" things became associated with American iconography, with stuff like baseball, apple pie, fast food, hot dogs, diners, small towns etc.
I would love to see gen z high school inspired shows now as a lot has def changed from even the 2000s high school experience.
It would likely be boring imo
@@deepspacecow2644agree, although I’m bot american I graduated in 2022 and tbh highschool was a boring experience when it comes down on cliques etc. it doesn’t really exist anymore.
I feel like gen z won’t have nostalgia for high school the way filmmakers used to. As a gen z I feel like I’dbe more likely to make content with the “classic” American high school setting than what I actually grew up with
I think I can explain the "Zachaton" card. Back when I graduated from High School (1987) there was a subculture of students (mostly male) that were called the "VoTech Bros". VoTech is basically "shop class" on steroids (it included classes in auto mechanical repair, auto body, welding and other "industrial arts") So these were the guys that would go on to bypass college (although many would go to trade schools) and become auto mechanics, general contractors, plumbers, welders, etc (and frankly we need more of that and less college prep, but I digress).
I would suspect that in this day and age, the "VoTech Bros" have probably started to incorporate more of what the internet is calling "Maker culture" (so more electronics work, computer programming and "hacking" and 3d printing) So the new breed of VoTech Bros includes some aspects of geek culture mixed with gear head culture.
This seems like a very solid guess. Can't say I've experienced that culture too much while I was in high school, but I imagine it's probably pretty common in states like California
That one is a mishmash that im unfamiliar with. I've def met dorky metal heads that are programmers,
but not ones that want to get (or seem like they are) jacked with muscles. Looks like dude is on the hellraiser puzzle box, and then wanting to kick some ass.
I think that's a pretty good hypothesis. I went for voc tech (tho, for heath occ) but there were also automotive/mech (which included some regular trade exp) and ag at that location, too. My regular school offered wood and metal shop, and CAD was actually taught by that man as well. He also ran robotics. A lot of his students were either muscled, nerdy, or hicks, or a weird combination of the three (as he seemed to be). This was 20+ years ago, too.
@@codya30 Do you mind if I ask when you graduated? (just a rough answer like "mid 90s" or whatever it actually is, you don't have to be specific if you prefer). I kinda wonder how the whole votech scene evolved.
@@Zundfolge As far as I know, my school had students attending vocation classes in the neighboring town for years before I attended them. I took both classes, 1 and 2 my junior and senior year. I graduated in 2006. All the voc classes had a required extracurricular component or two. In Health and Human Services, we had HOSA (Health Occupational Students of America) for both years, as well as onsite shadowing medical personnel the second year. I can't say for sure what the other classes consisted of. Culinary had their own restaurant in the school and the auto class had a garage and I know they learned welding and a few other things not strictly related to automobiles. I vaguely remember them needing to apprentice at a real shop or something similar as well, but I could be wrong. I loved my classes and what I was learning at the time but ultimately, it was a waste of time. I still have an affinity/interest for medicine but I wish I took either the business voc class or shop/auto. Or A/V, since I started in the event production industry in high school, before I even started the voc classes. I would have been much more educated in what ended up being my career for most of my adult life. I wish I had better directions as a kid but at the same time, and moreso, I really wish we'd stop pushing directions on children. Not just college degrees but trades, military, monetizing hobbies, everything.
Would love to see JJ take on the 90's "after school special," where family-aimed TV shows would depict high schoolers dealing with bullying, smoking, drugs, alcohol, racism, se ual assault, and more. They took real problems and worked them out in entirely unreal ways.
the more you know ✨✨✨✨
I'm a person who opted out of doing the actual frog dissection in favor of a virtual version. I actually did ask why we didn't do a virtual human dissection instead and I was told that it's because everyone, regardless of choosing real or virtual dissection, needs to follow the same lesson plan to keep in line with the curriculum.
I’d love to see a part two to this video. We’re so unsure of what to classify as American culture, yet we all agree that high school is an integral part of it.
Some fun new high school stereotypes that you may have never heard of: the Emo (yes, different from the goths), the fine arts, the anime/manga, and the soccer girls, to name a few. There’s also some very specific names that people use in high school to describe a person’s behavior! I’m sure you’ve heard of “the Karen”, but do you know what a “Kyle”, a “Hot Cheeto Girl”, or a “Joker Kid” is?
I’m vaguely familiar with Kyle as kinda like the “skater” kid asshole. I have no clue what a Joker Kid or a Hot Cheeto Girl is. Btw I graduated high school in 2020 so I probably should know about this…
Hot Cheetos girls and Emo kids are pretty old things I’d say,. I was an emo kid back when the MySpace band/underground hardcore bands became a thing and started in my sophomore/junior year. The super early stages of it popped off when I was in high school, and I graduated in ‘08. Back when, if you were a guy and wanted some extra super skinny jeans, you had to wear girls jeans 😂 I was on more of the hardcore/metal side of it so no neon colors or crazy color “accessories”. Girls black jeans with studded belts, super tight black band T’s, vans/or converse, sweat band or bandana head bands, and the quintessential ridiculous straightened long hair. And to think we had any room to make fun of goth kids 🤣
@@Bacon__SteezBurger hard to think of the last time ive seen an emo kid a la myspace era... i remember evolving from a scene kid in my early highschool days to a metalhead goth by the time i graduated. havent really changed since. interesting to see how we've all grown out of emo/scene fashion and music and grew into other subcultures that have been around for much longer. turns out it was a phase, sorry mom lol
makes me wonder how "e-kids" will turn out. i think theyre the modern equivalent of emo/scene kids of the 2000s/2010s
This one deserves a Slowpoke meme. Mid-2000s middle school and high school was almost nothing but Emo.
@@Bacon__SteezBurger Cheeto girl is actually an outdated term now or at least in my highschool we now call them Taki girls instead
I was expecting high school to be a lot more regimented than it actually was. Yeah there were sporty kids and goth kids, but there was a lot of overlap.
A lot of the goths were also theatre kids, and a lot of the jocks were “gear heads” (our term for the “hickish”, to use a JJism, guys who worked on cars)
The cheerleaders did drama and played in band.
We had nerds, but we didn’t have the big overlap between nerds and band kids. Being able to play music actually made you pretty cool in my small American town/farming community.
This was also at the very beginning of the rise of nerd culture, the first iron man came out in my sophomore year of high school and video games were already mass culture so being into games and following that kind of news was no longer too childish or nerdy to follow video game news, unless you liked Nintendo. If you had a Wii and played anything other the Super Smash Brothers on it then you were a giant dweeb.
Ahhh….memories
The iron man movie was the beginning of the end of nerd culture, not the beginning lol
Yes, I've long wondered if this obsession with named cliques was just old-fashioned or if it was always just an exaggeration to begin with.
@@BlastinRope I think the Marvel movies kind of represent a death of nerd culture as an insular thing, but it has undoubtedly become a big part of mass culture.
The idea of following deep lore for any nonreal setting has traditionally been considered childish, and adults who continue to do these things have been considered quite weird honestly, so this shift to having to have watched 10+ movies to know who the characters are in the new movie is a change that I have seen in my lifetime.
RIP me.
I got a heart but my comment has an awkwardly phrased area where my train of thought went weird that I desperately want to edit lol
Yep I think Glee really exaggerates this in particular. It's set in a small town, but filmed in a large high school (~640 students) where all of the students know each other across grades and they all perpetuate cliques and popularity tropes. And the cheerleaders wear their skimpy uniforms every single day...
Yearbooks were not free in my Pennsylvania high school, or middle school before that. Not being able to get a yearbook served as another way for poor kids to feel excluded in school, alongside things like book fairs.
Yup, same at my schools in Alaska.
I think that making stories take place in High School makes sense in a lot of countries. Virtually in any developed/Western country, the vast majority of all people attend HS. Literally almost everyone you would market a work of fiction to has been to a High School, so it is easy to relate. Also, High School in every country is a very unique period of someone's life: you change biologically (puberty), you have your first real-life experiences (be it romantic, friendly, professional, academic etc.), and you basically have your whole life ahead of you to plan out and dream about. It is literally when we "come of age", so having "coming of age" stories take place there is only natural
Fun fact: Sloppy Joes are not a thing in Australia.
As an American, my father would occasionally make it for me, but apparently it didn’t taste the same for some mysterious reason that he could never work out.
He’d also regularly make corn bread - which was definitely an acquired taste.
Ah, thanks for the memories 🙂🐿❤️🌈
Dissection frogs being a “big business” has blown my mind.
I’m not totally surprised, it’s just one of those things that you would never think about...until you do.
P.s the ending......? lol 😂
here in the Philippines, we do dissect our frogs (theres also an option to dissect squids) as well for Science/General Biology, but we have to get them ourselves
My favourite depiction of high school is the TV show Daria. When it came out, I was a little over ten years out of high school so recent enough to remember the cultures but distant enough to start to be nostalgic. The show appeals to my sense of humour and I saw as one who is more intellectual and has a small circle of friends a bit of resemblance with Daria herself. Both my grandmothers born about 1900 attended one room rural schools until completing grade 8 being needed on the farm and to learn household skills they would eventually need as a housewife
One of the most cliché that I see is bullying. It feels like a very common plot point in any american media that takes place in highschool. I've switched many schools during my childhood and I've never encountered any bullying. Whenever I see high school bullies in media it makes me cringe. Is bullying really so common in the US or are kids there just unable to take/do banter
I'm from central Europe for context.
Same in Japanese high school cliches most of their conflict is a male main character gotten a harem and he needs to choice who’s his one of his life
Or
High school students gotten powers and will defeat the villaim
At least these are Better than USA
In 2000s Portugal bullying was more about money extortion than teasing
I have noticed this also. I have encountered many people who may try to inhabit the “bully” stereotype, they are mostly laughed at or excluded for being mean or cruel. I think it’s less of there being a pervasive bullying culture, and more so shows tend to take things that somewhat exist (mean people) and take it to an extreme to create an obvious enemy for the main character to deal with.
Bullying really isn’t a thing here in the U.S. anymore. Sure you might get the occasional teasing or mean comments but I haven’t seen any prolonged harassment or physical intimidation.
I literally got picked up and put into a trash can by older students in the early 2000's. And that's just one example of bullying I experienced, but I figured it's the most outlandish, extreme example that people might consider to be cliche or unrealistic. Just because it didn't happen to you didn't mean it wasn't happening. Obviously not everyone got bullied. Not everyone was the small, quiet kid that got picked on.
FYI: Amy Chua has does not actually advocate for the methods seen in her book, she views it as more of a memoir of her experiences first growing up and then parenting
Good, because it sounds like a awfully authoritarian way to raise your kid.
Thank you for saying this!
@@KarlSnarks it’s a great way
@@자시엘 Nah, it creates people who might have success in the rat race, but feel crippled by the pressure to perform, and follow the path set out for them. I'd rather have people that think creatively, question all authority, feel free to follow their own interest, and cooperate with others as equals.
@@KarlSnarks lol
Zachaton, Muscle Mage is the trope of shop class teachers. They tend to be burly old men with big beards and are mechanical repair "wizards". Also, they often double as coaches for the schools sports teams
Add into it the weird He Man references for some reason
@@JagerLang maybe them being macho manly men who still are living in the 80's?
Yeah, it's a shop teacher. I think that display on his chest is similar so that "check engine" diagnostic machine.
That would explain the screen with Fortran 77 code on it. (For reference, the "GOTO" statement in Fortran has been deprecated since 1990 for causing a lot of problems. Fortran is already an old programming language, and if you see the "GOTO" statement being used, it means both the code and the user are likely very old. Or you're a physicist like me and you're stuck with Fortran because it makes numbers go brr.)
@@jstrandquist Not like those NumPy/SciPy whippersnappers!
i love how informative you are in your videos, like how you explain things that might seem obvious to americans/westerners but might seem foreign to other cultures. amazing channel, hope to see more from you :)
Fun fact, parts of the show Glee was filmed at a high school that I live near.
I have a short story to go along with this fact.
Once my mom and her friend had decided to hang out and since my mom knew that her friend had like the show Glee when they passed the school my mom told her thats where parts of it were filmed her friend had become really excited.
That last one is definitely a riff on tech bros. This wasn't a thing when I was in high school, but I saw it in college. Easily put, it's a large subset of the engineering school that's real into weight lifting. I got my degree in Computer Science and I'd often go to the gym with other guys working at Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Electrical Engineering. A lot of them had a sense of pride about it and would boast about how much better they were than the business students (who where in the same building as most of the engineering classes) for going harder at everything.
I’m pretty sure the card that stumped you was a play on the weightlifting subculture in American HS. We have a large height lifting room where it is popular to lift, in my high school. We even have a class for it.
This is my inclination, too. I think the playing card alludes to tracking weight lifting stats. We also had weight lifting classes at all three of our high schools.
definitely, it's a big thing in the jock groups at my school
the tech references are probably alluding to how these guys are always punching numbers into myfitnesspal or other trackers/spreadsheets and in general lifters tend to be more stereotypically dorky than "jock" propers.
It also has refrences to computer science and hacking competitions though. Kinda stumped me
It’s a reference to the recent growth of a sub group of jocks who are not just advanced at sports, but also really good at/really interested in math, science, and technology.
It’s an interesting mix for someone to be because for a long long time, the geeks and nerds did not get along with jocks and you couldn’t be both at once. (At least, it was uncommon to be both at once.)I would call them tech jocks or stem jocks.
You can see he’s holding a barbell which has glyphs (a visual joke about computer code being hard to understand) on it.
He’s advancing upwards over these buildings with circuits on them, which seems to me like a reference to how these kids who are good at both sports and STEM tend to get really good grades and favoritism in school because they are favorites of both coaches, students, and teachers.
Some people are also saying it has to do with Hackathons (coding competitions) which makes sense because he’s holding a trophy, and I think hackathons give trophies to the winning hacking team.
I don’t know how long you’ve been on TH-cam but I just discovered your channel and as a fellow Canadian I find it my duty to go back and watch everything!!!
Glee club has actually transformed somewhat into what we call Show Choir. A group of singers on stage doing dance routines, usually with a small band behind stage providing soundtrack. I participated in the Show Band a few years in HS going to different competitions around Iowa and they are huge! My dad went to HS in the early 90's and participated in Swing Choir, it seems the name has changed over time
Yeah, in my high school years, there was a Choir which was a large number of students singing on risers, but then there was also Show Choir, which was more dance routines/more contemporary music, which is what you would call the Glee Club
He forgot to separate elementry school from middle school. For the ones who don't know; Elementry k-5 (grade) 5-11 (age), Middle 6-8 (grade) 11-14 (age) and Highschool 9-12 (grade) 14-18 (age). As somebody who lives in the USA this is what I and many others experience (This depends if you went to public school or not). And your age can differ if you skip or stay back a grade.
I don’t think I’ve seen anyone mention this yet, but probably the most common feature that is missing from anything set in a high school is the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC). To sum it up, it’s a program where one of the branches of the US armed forces sponsors a unit in a school. Retired servicemen, usually sergeants or higher, teach those classes and we learn some stuff about drill and once a week we wear the branch’s uniform and get graded on it. It also comes with a PT day every week and a test we have to take twice a semester. JROTC is based off of ROTC in colleges but are very different. The college program sends you directly into service as an officer while JROTC doesn’t make you enlist, but you can enlist with a higher rank.
In my school, it’s also an alternative to PE and health, giving you the credits alongside elective credits, although this isn’t the case for some schools where you still have to take PE.
Oftentimes, we participate in drill competitions with other schools even if they don’t have a program under the same branch. There’s an academic competition we do every year with other schools. We often go to a local orienteering competition (using a map and compass to go from point A to point B to point C and then all the way back to point A).
Probably the coolest thing about the program is that it’s more often led by the students. We have a group of cadet officers, rank and all, who come up with ideas and plans while the instructors help make them happen. I got to be the guy leading the orienteering teams.
And if this sounds like a massive recruitment scheme, it is, but the instructors are told to tell you that it’s not. We love it anyways.
As for the very few depictions I know, I can only recount 2.
The currently running comedy “The Goldbergs” has an episode revolving around a character joining his high school’s program.
Spider Man Homecoming has one classmate in the background in uniform.
It still baffles me how little this rather common feature of American high schools gets left out. Even just one or two extras in uniform or a side character who happens to do it, but nope! We get nothing.
Also a bunch of us are nerds, like, the vast majority of us are nerds.
I was not “in” jrotc, but all through high school I was a part of the varsity rifle team that they organized. The team was about 50% jrotc and 50% general population when I was there and the command sergeant major and colonel were lovely to everyone. It was an incredibly interesting subgroup in high school with their own winter dance and award ceremonies at the end of the year.
My high school had one, Air Force unit. We were definitely the minority and categorized as the "weird" kids since we did questionable things. But when we needed to be serious, we will pull through.
I had more fun cheering my JROTC peers at their sport tournaments than my school games.
My school had ROTC. They were very proudly racist and self proclaimed themselves the Rot-C N***s(word that rhymes with Rot-C and in reference to national socialism.
They were very interestingly non homophobic and would defend (with violence) any kid getting picked on. Often led to recruitment.
Was bizarre.
I’m glad that someone noticed the kid in the background of the Spider-Man movie. I re-watched it recently and paused at that moment. I don’t remember why but maybe it’s just some nostalgia.
I do that if there’s an actual service member in a movie though too. Because I like to see how accurate their ribbon racks are to their age, branch of service, and established lore. 😂.
I once caught a young Canadian officer in a show that I was watching (modern day setting) having American service ribbons from Vietnam on. Lmao.
Always get a good laugh out of those kind anachronisms.
I believe that final card could be an allusion to two different things:
- A robotics club where students from different highschools make robots and compete against eachother to fulfill a certain task, like throwing a ball through a hoop, or climbing up stairs, or using monkey bars, etc.
- An electronic sports club, where gamers from different highschools would compete against eachother in video games.
I personally remember the former at my highschool and I can't recall if the latter existed, but it wouldn't surprise me if some highschools did have an electronic sports team.
There actually is a robotics club card already so I don’t think it’s that.
I wonder whether it alludes to fantasy RPGs in some way? Possibly online ones?
The intersection of these two could also be Lego Robotics
I am actually writing a short story with American high school and subcultures being a central piece of the story. This was very helpful!
I remember the nasty rectangular pizzas in grade school, but when our new high school was built, it pokevolved into pizza pucks that I have mixed feelings on, even a decade later. Texture was better, but the taste was cheap, and the options at school were limited to enhancing the flavor. So I settled on the only thing that gave it a kick, which was to douse the entire pizza puck in black pepper until one could actually smell it across the room. I call it a puck because of the shape, but it was actually pretty large, about 6 inches in diameter. And this is a legit measurement, not a "I'm trying to get luck so this 3.5 inches is actually 6" measurement.
I never dissected a frog, I dissected a rabbit.
In my freshman biology class, instead of dissecting frogs, we dissected rats. I was expecting them to be kept in individual little sterile boxes or something, so imagine my surprise when my bio teacher pulled out a *giant bag of dead rats* and slammed them on the counter
I'm a cutting-edge baby boomer, born 1945 and graduated High School 1963. I remember a lot of the things described here, but don't have many fond memories of high school. When I got to college it was like being released from prison. Never cared for shows like "Happy Days," "Kotter," etc.; or movies like "Grease" or "Ridgemont High." They were either completely inaccurate or too painfully accurate.
Still, I really enjoyed this post because there was a lot of the historical information I had never even heard of or thought about. Great job.
Tachaton is robotics club. Basically you get all the stem kids in a room, give them an assignment, watch them make a machine to move a ball or chuck a disc. Its really fun
I grew up thinking high school would be like the breakfast club or mean girls. But mind was actually quite nice
As someone from Quebec who attended an all-girls private school with a uniform, I almost never saw my high school experience reflected in the media. My favorite high school media was Azumanga Daioh, which despite being japanese was much closer to my way of life than American teen shows.
In regards to ADHD meds, it's not always used to treat behavior, it's used to treat the symptoms someone with ADHD experiences. I wasn't diagnosed until I was 22 and Ritalin has massively improved my well-being and has helped me get to milestones that I always had difficulty achieving. I wish I had been diagnosed earlier because the meds might have helped me actually do my homework and read at a normal pace. It also helps my anxiety and binge eating disorder and I was a severely anxious overweight teenager.
There is a problem with an over diagnosis of adhd in children, but for the ones with ADHD, trying out medications to see if they work shouldn't be as stigmatized as it is. It shouldn't be the only tool to manage ADHD, but it can be one tool
I'm genuinely surprised at the statistic of "only" 70% of our High Schools here in the U.S. have football teams!
My county has a arts focused High School that doesn't have one but previously did but was shut down for being bad and we are not a big Football talent base to begin with.
I was surprised, too, that it was “only” 70%, but a lot of high schools in big cities do not have access (and/or the budget) to the field/equipment necessary for running a football program. In NYC, for example, how many high schools have football teams? Nowhere near the 70% mark. 😎
@@Marylandbrony Ugh we live in a pretty " uppity" town/tri-city area, so unfortunately there is an (alleged) pay-to-play/be on the higher ups' good side/know the right people aura to be able to play. Almost like a school district(s) based classist society.
I meant to add that we also have a very arts-based program(s) in our districts, which I was part of. I played Violin for 10 years, I also played Volleyball and was a cheerleader - only 1 year each. I don't think I was "cool enough" for the sports teams and my family definitely did not suck up to any sports directors lol.
SAT doesn't actually stand for Scholastic Aptitude Test anymore. It used to, but after it was shown that you can artificially increase your score by cramming they dropped the claim that it was an "aptitude test". Now SAT just stands for SAT. Also, high school yearbooks are anything but free I'm afraid. I went to a fairly affluent high school, and they charged all of us like $100 per yearbook. I have 4.
Yea, I've never heard of a school giving out yearbooks for free. They usually were pretty steeply priced as a matter of fact.
@David Silva why would anyone want 4 yearbooks??
@@kilrati good fire starter and nutritious too
As an American I always found the SAT's interesting as in our part of the country we had to take ACT tests which I'm told are near identical but out of like 30 instead of a few hundred.
I had to take both, but both are being phased out nowadays.
ACT has more of a focus on science, SAT has more of a focus on English
I'll be honest, I graduated in 2002 and I generally found many of the portrayals of American high School that others consider cliche to be fairly accurate if slightly exaggerated. The only thing that I really always looked at and felt was incorrect was the amount of free time that high schoolers seem to have in movies and television shows. I would also point out that for the majority of America elementary school is kindergarten through 5th grade which would be 5 to 10. Middle school is usually grades 6,7 and 8 and high school would be grades 9, 10, 11 and 12. These are usually called freshman, sophomore, Junior, and senior years.
The history of Junior High didn’t come up much in my research but I feel like it’s a newer idea. At least where I lived, it was just being introduced when I was a teen.
@@JJMcCullough I think the mid to late '60s if I'm not mistaken
I love how at 3:25 the line “Child Labor Laws” is kind of shouted out enthusiastically compared to the rest of the lines before and after it 😂
I was originally going to have a graphic at that point but I couldn’t think of anything
@@JJMcCullough I think maybe the classic big text saying “child labor laws” probably would have worked ok, but honestly the way it ended up was more entertaining for me 😂
Keep up the great work JJ I make sure to watch all your videos as they come out, love from Australia 🇦🇺
This seems very appropriate, given that The Sims 4 is coming out with a new expansion focusing on American high school culture!
**sighs** **grabs wallet**
Wait, did they do university already, are they skipping it for HS or is that one a mixed expansion?
@Harris H goddamit.
*Reinstalls Origin*
*Pulls out wallet*
Thanks for the info though
The Sims 4 is STILL getting expansion packs?
@@BinglesP and they still all cost forty dollars lol. I think to buy every expansion pack is like eight hundred dollars so it’s definitely one of those situations where you’re morally in the right pirating it for everything it has
The most annoying part of these is how alienated you feel when you were lame in high school and didn't get to take part because everyone around you looks back on high school with nostalgia.
Thinking of Europeans watching American TV and thinking they have our high school culture figured out reminds me of those "weebs" who think watching anime gives them a firm grasp of Japanese high school. Fun fact: the roof of Japanese high schools are locked (for obvious reasons) and you probably wouldn't want to eat lunch up there anyway.
I suspect Archie Comics (debuting in the 1940s) has a high degree of responsibility for the spread of high school cliches. You name it - the jock, the nerd, the bully, the klutz, the blustering principal, the cranky lunchlady - Riverdale High's got it.
I have no idea about other places but in East Asia and India high school is a really stressful period where you're expected to study 8+ hours so you can get into a decent college. I'm in an elite college rn and literally no one here remembers high school fondly. The syllabus of our entrance tests is equivalent to what you'd learn in the first year of your college and all of high school. Only 1-10% actually succeed. Asiometry has a good video on this
Men I’m so glad I was born in balkans, we also have a sort of SAT but its not nearly as hard like you guys have it. I would literally die there no joke
Happy 38th birthday JJ!
I hope you reach 800k subscribers today and a million by the end of 2022!
🥳🎂🎈🎉🎊🎁
Thanks so much!!
I’m American and in High-school, We didn’t dissect frog since middle school but just last spring dissected pig fetuses from pigs that were up for slaughter, this might be due to me being Minnesotan since we have a major pork industry but We do the dissections though and it’s not unethical.
For the record, I paid roughly $80 for each of my high school yearbooks in the 2000s/2010s, and I don’t know anyone who received one for free.
I went to high school in the 1980s and we went beyond frogs, in grade 10 or 11 biology we had the option to dissect cats. you could opt-out and many students did. Despite having three pet cats at home I took the option and found it fascinating. it didn't turn me into a serial killer or anything, it was just like any other machine's internals. PETA would have freaked.
The Muscle Mage is likely just a reference to nerd subculture becoming mainstream, to the extent that you've got those who would formerly be considered high school jocks hanging out and playing Magic the Gathering at lunch.
Honestly, the most accurate depiction of at least modern high school is the Netflix series American Vandal. There's just something the show does that makes it feel so right amidst all of the sitcoms and John Hughes movies that may have been accurate decades ago, but no longer hold as much water compared to the modern, technology-centric high school.
Those Disney bully’s that never actually exist, they won’t call you a nerd, they’ll put a pipe bomb in your mailbox
You forgot to mention two of the best high school tropes the masterpieces of modern art that are found on the stalls of the boys bathroom and the janitor being having some insane previous job (ex. My high school janitor used to be a professional soccer player for El Salvador)
OUR JANITOR WAS A CAVE EXPLORER. like professional spelunker who wrote like THE book about it for our area. The geology class would have him lead one field trip a year. His name was Pierre or Claude or something. Dude was crazy and I have no idea what happened him.
I was diagnosed with ADHD when in elementary in 1999, I was medicated and it helped a lot, today as an adult I don't need it anymore, but even today it helps out if I need to do heavy socialization with "normal people" lol (primarily work events a few times a year).
But I had a lot of friends who never seemed hyper at all, or distracted when non medicated, whose parents just seem like they listened to a counselor at school that said their kid had add.
In the early 2000s in a West TN college-prep private high school, stereotypes included "smart kids", athletes, pretty girls, popular/party/reckless people, musicians (prone to go into home school to go pro), and based on whichever main club someone belonged to over time.
More miniscule high school stereotypes that I have encountered:
-Chalkboards, and the common usage of chalk over other things
-Hand-cranked pencil sharpeners
-Seat-desk hybrid, or "unidesks"
-Carrying backpacks around instead of individual books
-Roll calls
I'm 56 years old. You just described my school days. We had all those items more than 40 years ago. 😂😂
@@russbear31 All that still exists at my school. Maybe it's because it's too expensive to replace idk
you forgot lockers
my school doesn't have some of these we just do everything on our laptop
only unidesks, hand-crankers and backpacks are true and those arthritis givers are on their way out.
I would love to see a follow up video about the different Secondary School cliches around the world. Everyone whose ever seen an Anime probably knows most of the Japanese high school stereotypes but I'm curious about the rest of the world too.
Like for example in my country Germany the High School stereotypes seem to be primarily centred around our multi tiered secondary school system where every branch has its own cliches rather than having a unified catalogue of characters that exist across every school.
Like how people who attend the "Hauptschule" are stereotyped as low class, low educated and most often also heavily ethnic or pseudo ethnic if they happen to be white while people who attend the "Gymnasium or Oberschule" are stereotyped as stuffy, stresst out overachivers who either become doctors or end up as overqualified office workers.
in Indonesia inter-school rivalry can be so fierce it could turn into a big battle royale
8:50 Fun Fact: The University of Minnesota, was the first school in the USA to have a Cheerleading squad, all the way back in 1851.
I think Michigan also claims to have invented it
21:02 The would you dissect her card is very ironic because my 9th grade biology teacher literally said before we dissected frogs that she got to dissect cats and it’s possibly one of the most haunting things she said, especially since how nauseous I felt after dissecting just a frog.
21:37 I believe it’s a reference to the “Tech Geek” cliché where a kid is obsessed and owns all the latest technologies and shows them off.
Think Cookie from Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide
When I was younger I used to dream of studying in an American high school. I don't know if it was because of too many movies and cartoons but I kinda dreamed of being surrounded by nerdy nerds, goofy bullies, provocative cheerleaders, lockers in the corridors etc.
Having experienced high school in Italy and in Perú I've got to admit that the Italian one was closer than the Peruvian one. The first was in a big building and without a dress code while the second was in a smaller building packed with students from kindergarten to the last year of secondary and with uniforms.
Yo fui en México y mi escuela imitaba mucho del sistema de EU. Fue muy divertido
Aunque los casilleros, anuarios y eso nunca existieron :-(
As someone who graduated American high school in 2019, my experience was way different to any movies or TV shows I’ve seen portraying this aspect of American life. I also grew up on the east coast which is way different than other areas of the US. In my school there were groups of friends, often based on mutual interests (sports, academics, anime, etc), and there were some “loner” kids that would hang out by themselves or with 1/2 people, but there weren’t many kids that were bullied or ostracized, just ignored or overlooked. There were kids that were “popular” but it was because they knew lots of other kids and had an outgoing personality; mean kids were not “popular”.
There’s more I can say to describe the modern high school experience, but you get the picture. What I really wish is for Hollywood to actually interview modern kids about what it’s really like to go to school these days, ESPECIALLY post pandemic.
As an American, I can confirm… something. Idk I didn’t watch the video yet
I would have loved to see Sex Education in your analysis of film/tv high school tropes, because it's such an odd but interesting mix of UK and US culture, and 70's/80's nostalgia and tropes mixed with very contemporary issues, identities and culture (it all seems rather intentional as well, instead of just out-of-touch nostalgic writers) . Another good contemporary take on the genre is Booksmart.
Here in Latin America we have a lot of European influence very embedded into our culture, so our schools have European traditions like having uniforms and all that.
I remember when I was a teen that “American high schools” started to appear in my city aimed at snobby high class people with names like: Harvard High school or Colombo-American High school, offering “American style” education. It was just normal high schools with American cliches like: no uniforms, fraternities (in high school lol), qualifications with letters instead of numbers, classes starting at 9 instead of 7 am, cheerleader teams and, the best of all: hallways with lockers! Just like in the movies!!!
JJ we need a video on coffee/caffeine culture in America!
That would be interesting to me. I just recently started working in a hospital and holy smokes, caffeine is SO much a part of the culture, it's kind of wild to me. I knew caffeine was a big thing in hospitals due to the intense and around-the-clock nature of the work, but I didn't know how prominent it really is.
I think there's definitely a european immigrant origin to coffee culture in the US. Apart from the British and Irish who prefer tea, most europeans are avid coffee drinkers, particularly Italians and Nordic peoples who migrated to the US in great numbers.
I love how you always give your videos like "Clichés of American Highschools" when the actual video is just you analyzing a card game you like. Ngl, I don't mind this.
I just graduated high school this year, and to me the Zachaton card seems refer to a clique of students, which although similar to jocks, are seemingly obsessed with weightlifting and attaining a muscular body. I think this to be a relatively new kind of cliché (if it can be considered one at all) which has developed out of the broader ongoing fitness trend popularized by social media.
At least where I live almost every high school has a weightlifting room, which largely exist to serve the sports teams at the high school. Athletes usually take a weightlifting class during their school day or have weightlifting workouts before or after school with their teams in addition to any other practices they might have. For example, I played soccer all four years for my high school and most of my teammates took weightlifting as a class.
The Zachaton card seems to distinguish between a jock (a person who plays sports) versus a fitness obsessed teen (who does not play a sport, but is rather only fitness obsessed). At my high school it was not uncommon for there to be this type of fitness obsessed teen who did not play sports, but took weightlifting as a class. In fact, there were leaderboards posted in the weight room for people who lifted a certain amount.
The term "Zachaton" seems to imply Zach is the stereotypical name of this fitness obsessed teen (which does seem befitting.) And the machine part references the over-obsessed nature of the fitness culture which "Zach" prescribes to; it is almost sacrilegious to take a day off lifting for this type of fitness obsessed teen, hence the machine part. The symbols on the weights hints towards the almost worship-like nature of fitness culture.
I think you're right, this is the best explanation I've seen.
Except... the trophy with upside down cross on it and skull? I think whoever made this card is having a private fantasy about something that none of the rest of us are privy to...
@@mercster no it’s about a new subculture of computer nerds/weebs who are really into lifting. I read a comment that described it better than I ever code. But the name “Zachathon” is a play on the word hackathon. I’ll find the comment and paste it.
@@mercster I think "Zachaton" is a play on the word "Hackathon" which is a competition in which programmers are grouped together in teams to create a program in a limited time frame, ranging from about a whole weekend to a whole week or month. Game Jams are a subset of this in which people go together to make a video game under a certain theme such as a word or phrase. Although, this is more of a College activity than a high school activity
The phrase on his chest is an infinite loop in the BASIC programming language in which it will print the phrase
"KICK ASS" repeatedly.
This is more speculation, but I did notice that there is an interesting subset of programmers who are strangely into weight lifting and self sufficiency such as Mental Outlaw and Luke Smith. It could also be that high school teachers also double as coaches for sports teams. It could be that the computer teacher might be a weight lifting teacher.
Edit: Zachaton's face and beard does slightly resemble Richard Stallman, an Open Source advocate and key developer/founder of the GNU/Linux project.
The comment was from “Unfit Ninja”
@@homedepot. LOL, dude, I read that comment already and completely disagree with it, if you scroll up you'll see. There is no way on God's green earth that the figure has anything to do with Richard Stallman. That guy is just a guy deep into hacker culture (as am I) but guessing and reading into it things that aren't there. He may have slight aspects of it right, but he's by no means "cracked the code." He's entitled to his opinion as are you, but I can guarantee you... that aint it. ;-)
My highschool had tremendous overlap between clicks. We had an “after prom” party in 12th grade and almost everyone who could go did go. Sports kids, hicks, drama nerds, anime geeks. Love to all.
Gen-Xer from the US here. We had rectangular cardboard pizza well before 1988.
Also, Pizza Pockets are very much a Canadian signifier. I never ran into Pizza Pockets before coming to Canada. As far as compact microwave pizza experiences go, they are distinctly different. Sweeter, softer, and a little bit smaller than Hot Pockets. Hot Pockets also have a wider variety of flavors.
It’s possible Show Choirs - distinct from other school choirs - fill the gap once held by Glee Clubs.