High School. The best four years of your adolescence. Or so everyone is told. But high school is not without its ups and downs. High school is full of jocks and pretty cheerleaders, nerds and brainiacs. Every high school no matter the size has cliques and social divisions. Melinda in Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak sees all the divisions in her high school and feels like an outsider like she doesn’t fit in. In every high school in every town in America there are cliques and people who don’t fit in them or who fit in more than one. However there is no way to escape the reality that is high school cliques.
You hear people talk about how at their high school there weren’t any cliques; everyone was friends with each other. Maybe truth is that everyone they were friends with was the ‘everyone’ that counted. Maybe it takes an outsider like Melinda to see the truth, to see all the divisions. Maybe we all see them but don’t want to do anything about them. Maybe we all just say that’s how it is, that’s how it’s always been, why change it?
I think the truth is we all feel comfortable inside our own cliques, in with our own friends. Maybe we see that lonely person sitting by themselves; maybe we are that lonely person. And maybe if we did reach out we could change the social structure just a little bit, or maybe it would all come crashing down. But it seems in reality we are all more comfortable not rocking the boat. In some ways we are all like Melinda, mute.
- Jessica Cervenka
I agree Jess, I always wonder about people who think that their school did not have cliques. I think a lot of people want to forget the fact that at one point or another they felt out of place. Maybe they create the school in their mind that they wished that they attended. Though I have not read Speak I imagine that it is powerful because so many people can identify with feeling like they are on the outside.
ReplyDeleteI read Speak sometime in Middle School, so I remember some of it. I remember liking it and it being a somewhat provocative book to read, but I don't think I connected too much with it. This might go into play with the fact that I didn't really feel like there were cliques in my middle school(we had a class of 28). Looking back I can see them, but at the time I didn't. This novel is probably a very a good read and very relatable to those teens who feel, like Melinda, an outsider.
ReplyDeleteAlisa Richter
I think that when people claim their school did not have cliques, they were lucky enough to have found a group of friends. High schools everywhere have at least one person who "doesn't belong," and high school students are notorious for not accepting those who are not like them. My group of friends in high school was very small and tight-knit, but I can definitely say that we were guilty of not letting any outsiders in. I hope that reading books like Speak can give others insight into what may be going on in the lives of "outsiders," and that so often, those people need a friend more than anybody else.
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