Freshman Observations

Watching the freshman has brought back so many good memories to me from that year, but it has also proven to me that most freshman act very much alike. They all come from their junior highs which have a significantly smaller population than that of Fremd. Much like a small town, in junior high when you did something everyone knew about it. There was gossip everywhere from the scoop about who was going out with who to the little stuff like who got their cartilage pierced. When those junior highers first enter the high school environment as freshman they don't expect it to be any different, just bigger. Thankfully, it is different than that of a junior high environment, but most won't notice it until they become sophmores.

The girls. Their main focus is their image and what other people, especially upper classmen, percieve them as. For this reason you always see them in groups. They are not safe alone. They must have a partner to walk from class to class with them. This is especially noticable at lunch when have to go into the lunch lines. There are those who bring their lunch and who buy it. Those who bring it are often faced with the serious problem of having their support group decrease dramatically when their friends have to go wait in the lunch line. Rather than been seen as weak and unpopular the few that would be left at the table waste their time going with their friends in line to buy nothing. When in their group, the freshman are confident and want to show that they can handle high school. This often results in them being obnoxiously loud and overwhelmingly outgoing. This behavior is often ridiculously annoying to the upperclassmen which is why the freshman are most oftenly avoided. When freshman girls don't have their supporting friends with them, you see a totally new set of behaviors emitted. They are often quiet and in the halls are often seen with their head down and walking with a determined pace to get to their safe zone of colleagues.

Freshman boys are not as easy to pick out by their behavior, but their dramatically smaller bodies aren't easy to miss either. We've all gone through sex ed. and know that the maturation of boys comes later than that of girls so that's not the main point we are going to focus on now. The boys are often introduced to the upperclass boys earlier through sports, especially football, so they know how to handle themselves better in high school. Also the boys don't care as much about their image as girls do so you see that being popular is less of a priority amongst guys. The classic groups from junior high still stay pretty much disintegrated from each other and they do tend to poke fun at those that traditionally fall in the lower popularity levels to boost their egos every once in a while.

Whether it be the height of your popularity or the height of your person, freshman are definitely recognizable and can be sifted out from that of the rest of the high school population easily.