Criminology was taught by one Buddy Longo, a figure of legend around the halls of SHHS. I have no idea how Buddy was qualified to teach the class, other than the fact that he knew a lot of cops and had a friend who was supposedly some kind of former spy, who came in one day to show us the Zapruder film ("Look how his head comes off! Like the lid of a cookie jar.") Buddy LOVED serial killers, and would enrapture us with stories about Edmund Kemper eating his mother's larynx like he was reading "Make Way for Ducklings" to preschoolers.
I can't believe you did that, Bobby. I thought you were cool. But you know what? You're not cool. Not at all. You know what you are? You're a narc. And a social reject. You think you're all big now? Because you wrote a paper in the The American Sociological Review? That doesn't make you big. It makes you a loser. You think anyone's going to want to hang out with you now? Good luck, dickwad.
Oooooh. Oooooooh. Bullying is so bad. It's such a problem in society. And it's so misunderstood!
"Most victimization is occurring in the middle to upper ranges of status… What we [...]
Oh, it's been a while since we last checked in on America's Zero Tolerance For Violence and Bullying Public Schools. I would say they are pretty much still hotbeds of people beating each other up and other people filming them on their phones.
Later this year, America's dream factory will foist upon an already blooded-up America a remake of 1984's Red Dawn. It's probably the most unnecessary, irresponsible, Sinophobic film in America's history, and that's saying a lot. And it will be just in time for midterm elections already foul with the tea party's red-white-and-blue jingoism. What a time for it-America's relationship with China hasn't been this crucial since, say, 1941.
From time to time, The Awl offers its space to normal, everyday people with a perspective on national issues. Today, we're pleased to bring you this report by Tom Scocca, who at this time has some thoughts about high school football.
Hurry up and enjoy your rugged NFL action while you can, America! Also your willing soldiers and what's left of your competent builders, hard-working truckers, and anyone else who applies guts and effort to get through adversity. The Washington Postbrings a report from the high school football fields where the character of the next American generation is being molded-or rather, not molded, because who wants [...]
"Odd Future is filled with tons of controversy and they're going to have a lot trouble moving forward, becoming 'mainstream.' But Tyler the Creator is going to work hard at that. And so far he has a ton of Notre Dame fans. But even haters." —Some students at the tony Los Angeles Catholic school Academy of Notre Dame de Namur love the rap group Odd Future. Others do not. Student documentarian Arman Mahramzade examines the phenomenon.
I grew up in a town called Little Silver, New Jersey. In the same town, a year behind me in school, was a girl named Erika Simonian. We were friends in high school, sharing a fondness for dirty jokes, and sitting next to each other in Mr. Woodward's physics class. She became a musician as an adult, and married a guy named Steve, and they've started a band together and named it Little Silver. (Which is a better name for a band, I think, than a town.) They've just released their first record, an EP called The Stolen Souvenir, and made the video above, which features the [...]
Fall of 1985, my freshman year at Red Bank Regional high school, there was a kid whose locker was down the hall from mine who came to school dressed in ill-fitting clothes that had holes in them. His name was Damion. I didn't know him, but I sat behind his friend John in history class. Damion was very short and very skinny and his hair was often messed up. Other kids teased him. One day news went around the school that he had squared off to fight another kid, this guy Jeff, who was much bigger than him, and that Damion had pulled out a knife and made Jeff [...]
So in high school we were forced to buy this English language handbook called Warriner's. The book was bright red like an biohazard needle drop box, but that has nothing to do with the fact that the faculty revered it. Some teachers, particularly the much older ones, referenced it regularly. The Jesuits, who could be iffy on the existence of God and other metaphysical questions, were dogmatic about whatever the hell Warriner's decreed. Its rules of grammar and composition were gospel.
With a gay couple named prom king and queen in Sanford, Maine, and an alleged lesbian-gay male prom king and queen pair at a charter school in Hialeah, FL, and a trans prom queen and gay male prom king in Davie, Florida, one must ask: are the kids actually alright? Well, probably. The downside is that, allegedly according to alleged students in Florida, their prom queen is allegedly kind of a gossipy meanie. But hey, that's the very definition of equality, when mean girls can come in any stripe and connive their way to the most important and meaningful social position in high school! Don't worry, [...]
Since at least the 1980s, Evanston Township High School—the only (and extremely large) high school serving the suburb directly north of Chicago—has been both incredibly diverse and incredibly two-tracked. There was a lunch cafeteria for white people and a lunch cafeteria for black people—also, to its credit, an (at least somewhat) more integrated cafeteria for the freaks. That is where the smoking courtyard used to be, today's young people may be astounded to hear! Likewise, in classes there's a track for white people and some other non-black people and then a track for pretty much everyone else. Summer school classes, for instance? Nearly entirely black. Now, the school's [...]
A Gizmodo-explained exploit of a long-dormant text-message command for the microblogging service Twitter that resulted in celebrities being potentially, gasp, forced to follow regular old folks resulted in, among other things, every user's follower/following count being reset to zero temporarily while the Twitter honchos figured out how to close the loophole. (I was actually wondering how many people used Twitter's SMS functionality — which was the original reason behind the service's 140-character-per-message-constraint, and which was the culprit behind this forced-following epidemic — just the other day! It would seem the answer is "not many, especially among employees of the company's beta-testing department.") Anyway, all is back to [...]
