A School’s Seating Arrangement: Why we keep our place and not wander across the educational battlefield

A School’s Seating Arrangement: Why we keep our place and not wander across the educational battlefield

I’m perplexed as to why we sit the way we do throughout a typical school day with different seats at different occasions – it’s like your personal demon and angel on your shoulder has been replaced by the cool kid and the nerd

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Angelica King

The Guardian, Monday 7 October 2013

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High School Musical, teaching kids to break away from their inner nerd and sit with the popular kids. Photograph: http://www.hsmespanol.com/Translations.htm

I’m guessing my reader, (just the one reader, never plural) will be wondering why I’m writing such a pointless article on the unwritten, stereotypical code of eating and seating in very typical schools. Well, I’ll tell you this. Nothing is ever pointless unless it is an unsharpened pencil.

As an aside, I am aware that this article has been done time and time again, making no effort to please the audience of one so feel free to make like a fish and swim away. So I’m giving you the opportunity not to take the bait and move on to the next hooking column you come across.

Anyway, It’s not that I have an issue with seating arrangements in school. Coincidentally, I find it very convenient as it stops some little guys just making a fool of themselves by getting wounded by a soldier from a different side and getting sent back to camp to recuperate. My general wonderment comes from the idea that these set places are done subliminally through ourselves. We don’t get told to sit at the back of the classroom, learn nothing, get detention a record number of times a week. Of course not. We subconsciously choose to sit at the front of the class, make small talk with the teacher and remind everyone there was work due in that lesson. Guess where I used to fit into this brutal hierarchy?

If on your first day you fall into the trap of constantly putting your hand up and being the quietest in the class, you may have just marked yourself for the whole of your secondary school life. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think for a second being part of the popular crowd gets you anywhere in life other than wishing you paid attention in school and not planned on getting smashed on the Sunday, perfect for the next day, like Monday’s weren't bad enough. There’s stigma attached to all these different stereotypical cliches and I guess it depends on whether you want to be loved by everyone in that moment or be thankful in the future. These conflicts occur in all of us, everyday we could remember where social groupings led the world. Everyday students make the choice to waft between the sides and be labelled a traitor by which ever side you originally chose. Is it really worth it to get 50 likes on your profile picture, 10 new messages, 15 new friend requests and God only knows how many re-tweets. Soon enough it just becomes a feud between the nerds and the cool people, the smarties and the cool guys; soon enough the battlefield is drawn and on one side are the goodie two shoes lot and the never any good gang. I feel like I should be waving a white flag in surrender as I feel the feud split the whole of Earth into two separate hemispheres.

Perhaps it’s not a good idea for me to bring about these unresolved issues from my unconscious to brew in my reality and allow my one reader to go through the same thing as they judge me. In the spirit of school life, “break time”!

Nowadays, I don’t feel that it’s quite as big of an issue as I may make out it to be as the next generation seem to have one major thing in common… technology. Every single soul glued to a laptop, mobile, any if not all of those Apple products. Remember when that just used to be fruit and not a brand.

But in TV Shows and films I never fully understood their grasp on the grouping system. I mean Goths, Punks, Cheerleaders, Football Players. There’s just too many groups and too many of them. The list just continues on for ever, similar in the way that this article seems to not want to come to an effortless closing. I fail to see the point of these groups. Sure, everybody has their own rules and they all end up with similar interests but I believe humans are much more complicated than just one label, what I’m trying to say is that child who sleeps at the back of the class, there’s more to them than just sleepy, the dwarf that ran away from home.

I think that’s all on the subject. Now go swim back to your school before they leave without you.