Philosophers and historians long have sought the E
MC2 of human relations: a sociological law as unvarying as those of physics.
Baron de Montesquieu, the father of modern political science, thought he had discovered that climate determines a nation`s mores. Alas, central heating and air conditioning did in that neat equation. Karl Marx was convinced that history proves the inevitability of socialism. His theory came tumbling down with the Berlin Wall.
Curiously, such heady thinkers never notice that the object of their intellectual quest sometimes lies right beneath their noses. Or today, more correctly, their children`s noses.
Consider, for example, the following simple experiment. Push a cafeteria tray past the steam table in virtually any high school in the land. At the head of the line, a fundamental law of sociology stares you right in the face: The pecking order of adolescent America is determined by who shares which table with whom during lunch period.
”If I date a boy,” says Dani Tyler, a student at Oak Park-River Forest High School, ”in the eyes of other students, I`m joining the group who sits at his table.”
Like any society, a student body has its cliques and its outcasts. By a longstanding, if unspoken, assumption of secondary education, each group studiously avoids the other`s territory while picking at macaroni and cheese and congealed banana pudding between, say, general science and solid geome try. So a high school`s social rankings are daily mapped by the geography of its lunchroom, as this reporter discovered in recently updating his data
(originally gathered as a 1950s teenager) via a series of lunch-period expeditions to some representative big-city, suburban and small-town high schools.
Now it is true that should an outsider sit down with them, young people may try to refute the proposition that not all lunchroom tables are created equal. Students might have come to lunch straight from, say, a civics midterm exam for which they had to memorize: ”America is a democracy.”
Stunted social life
Indeed, putting on their best company manners, students at Von Steuben High School, on Chicago`s Northwest Side, protested that while snobbery may infect other lunchrooms, theirs is free of that social disease.
During a recent noon hour there, Rachel Levin, a junior, explained how relieved she was when her family decided against moving to a new home beyond the city`s limits, which would have meant transferring to Niles Township High School. In suburban schools, Levin declared, lunch tables are strictly ranked. Her tablemate Sandra Soto, a senior who recently moved to Chicago from Worcester, Mass., added that small-town students are also much too conscious of who is ”in” and who is ”out.” She was delighted when her father got a new job in Chicago last year, liberating her from what she considered small-minded lunchroom gossip.
”Of course, you see that table over there?” said Amber Locke, a junior, interrupting her friends` hymn to urban democracy. ”That`s where the social misfits sit.”
Locke`s candor was infectious. Her tablemates then admitted that the most terrifying decision of freshman year had been picking the table to join for lunch. A bad choice, they recalled, could have stunted their social life for semesters to come.
Precious Williams, senior class president, explained that Von Steuben`s lunchroom is specially equipped so students can avoid navigating the uncharted sea of tables that confronts a student his first day in school. She pointed to a table down front traditionally occupied by the two faculty members assigned to monitor the lunchroom.
”A new kid usually eats at the teachers` table while figuring out which group he wants to sit with or hoping to be `tapped` by other kids to come join them,” Williams said.
She cautioned, though: Lunching at the monitors` table for a few days might mark a newcomer, in other students` eyes, as a thoughtful type who looks before leaping. But overstaying his welcome there could leave him permanently stranded on the lowest rung of the teens` social ladder.
”Nobody wants to be seen as teacher`s pet,” Williams said.
Gretchen Waltenbaugh, a senior at Oak Park-River Forest High School, still thanks her lucky stars that, early on, a more experienced youngster took her in hand. Her school has two student dining rooms, which students call North Lunch and South Lunch.
”Another student told me: `North is for nerds,` ” recalled Waltenbaugh, who was dining in the South lunchroom. She cautioned that she couldn`t vouch for her fellow student`s assessment of the other dining room.
”To this day, I`ve never set foot in there.”
The lipstick lesson
At Lockport High School in Will County, upperclassmen provide a similar, if more forceful, orientation for new students, reports Gary Galle, a freshman. Actually, Lockport High School is reserved for juniors and seniors; freshman and sophomore classes are held in a building in a different part of town. But a few musically talented freshmen are bused to the high school for band practice, then stay for lunch before heading back. Two tables` worth of them huddle together in one corner of the students` dining room.
”If I made a mistake and sat over there, they would probably initiate me,” Galle said.
”They might take me into the bathroom,” he explained, ”and paint me with lipstick, so I`d remember freshmen don`t eat lunch with juniors and seniors.”
Such customs can seem harsh to an adult whom the passing decades have rendered blissfully amnesiac to his own teenage barbarisms. So it is helpful to recall that the high school years mark a dividing point on the human lifespan. Grade schoolers being trundled around in the back of the family station wagon rarely ask: ”Where am I headed in life?”
Adolescence moves those issues to center stage. At Lockport High (and no doubt elsewhere), some students candidly say, they make a first stab at answering such thorny questions by looking around the lunchroom to see which kids they don`t want to grow up to be like.
Lockport High draws students from the town and the surrounding countryside. Lockport is a blue-collar community where families may live in the same neighborhood as their immigrant ancestors. Its suburban area is home to upper-middle-class families, and moving vans are a more-common sight, as breadwinners are transferred in and out of the community by corporate employers.
”Lockport kids have never been elsewhere,” said Ray Dykstra, a junior, explaining why he shares a table with other suburban-bred students. ”Of course, they call us snobs.”
The wannabes
Other students use stronger epithets when describing who sits at other tables in their lunchroom. But one of the most damning phrases is perfectly printable in a family newspaper: ”wannabes,” a term frequently heard at both Oak Park-River Forest and New Trier Township High Schools.
”A wannabe wants to sit at the jocks` table even though he`s not quite a jock himself,” explains Jendan McQuitter, a junior at Oak Park-River Forest. ”A wannabe will be buddies with you in class, but she sends out signals saying, `Don`t sit with me at lunch, you might tarnish my image,` ” says Jenny Wright, a senior at New Trier.
Apparently it doesn`t pay, especially socially, to volunteer either to entertain your high school or defend your country.
At both Oak Park-River Forest and Lockport, wide berth is given to tables populated by the school`s theater group. There, the exuberant displays of emotion apparently prove intimidating to the bulk of high schoolers who merely want to fit in, not create a scene.
The sight of ROTC uniforms around a table also inspires some students to eat elsewhere, says Nick Parrilli, a senior at Lockport.
Parrilli explains the phenomenon (which was just as true in this interviewer`s day): Other students think ROTC members choose one-period-a-day military service as an alternative to gym because they are unfit for physical exercise. Indeed, he has formulated Parrilli`s Law of Social Acceptance:
”You can be fat and still popular in school,” said Parrilli, ”but not both fat and in ROTC.”
Some older taboos have fallen, though. Time was when bright high school students kept quiet about it. But New Trier`s students now map their lunchroom in terms of ascending IQs, singling out the ”smarts” table where the school`s Asian-American students gather.
”Other students think we`re brains?” said Albert Kim, a senior. ”They should listen in back there.”
He pointed to the table behind, which seemed to be occupied by students of various ethnic backgrounds. But it was hard to tell, because the occupants had their heads buried in textbooks, not even looking up to shove a bit of sandwich in their mouths.
”At that table, they speak physics,” Kim said.
Escape to freedom
At Oak Park-River Forest, where the South lunchroom is reserved for jocks, smarts, preppies and those who take their rock music in less than mind- numbing decibels, one group of ”outs”-who eat in the North lunchroom-have transformed their stigma into something of a merit badge.
”They call us `rejects,` ” noted Dave Harmantas, a sophomore. ”So we`ve adopted the term, too, and turned it into a matter of pride.”
Bobbi Schaper, a junior, had migrated to the same table from the South lunchroom when she started dating a North lunchroom boy. She says the move brought with it an unexpected measure of intellectual freedom.
”Over there, all they know to talk about is clothing, nails and hair,”
Schaper said. ”But over here, we can talk about a lot more things, like . . . like. . . .”
”Yeah,” said Noah Scott, helping her out. ”We`re a melting pot. We know about every subject under the sun. For instance, the other day we discussed the fact that the shelf life of Twinkies is 17 years.”
”No, isn`t it 12 years?” someone else at the table said.
”OK, I guess we don`t know the shelf life of Twinkies,” Scott replied.
”Does that make us any less desirable to have lunch with?”
