Law school is a weird version of television high school

Are American high schools really like the ones they show on TV and in the movies? Are there jocks, who date the cheerleaders and bully the nerds? Are there homecomings and dances, sports competitions, unintended pregnancies with hilarious consequences, geeks mustering up the courage to take on the popular kids, and all those other things?

I ask because I didn't go to a high school like that. While there were cliques and coteries (the stoners, for instance), their composition was mostly based on their members' ethnicity or musical interest. I think we might have had a basketball team, and a few guys liked to run around the track, but I don't remember any jocks. There might have been nerds. However, if there was any sharp division between any two groups at the school, it was between the special eders and the retards. The distinction between the two was that the special eders took a yellow bus to school and got caught when sneaking into the building after cutting class while the retards walked or used public transportation and usually didn't get caught. Most of the school fell into the latter category. I don't remember there ever being a dance, homecoming, pep rallies, etc. We didn't even have lockers or trophy displays. Maybe we had all these things and I just hung out with the stoners too much, but I doubt it.

While high school wasn't like the high school TV says it is, law school was, but in a weird, unsettling way. First, there were lockers. There were dances, the Barrister's Ball being the most significant. There was a trophy display case in the hall. There were various events that were, beneath their scholarly veneer, pep rallies. Now, that's perhaps a little weird, but not unsettling.

What I find unsettling is that jocks at law school are actually nerds. Whereas in a television high school the jock plays some sort of sport, in law school he (or she) is bespectacled and on the moot court team. These are the people that win the trophies. The popular people, apart from the jocks, are also nerds. They belong to the law review. Just as in television high school there are degrees of popularity, there are in law school. The lesser popular are on the lesser journals--international law, urban law, entertainment law, or whatever they were. There are also lesser jocks, like those on the alternative dispute resolution team.

All the way at the bottom of the popularity chain is the person like me. The unknown outsider who hates being there. We know the type from TV. If the story isn't told from the nerd's or geek's point of view, it's told from his (this is usually an indi film, while the nerd's story is from a bigger studio--probably because the nerd market is bigger than the loner market). Here I am telling it. What's weird about it is that on TV this lowly high schooler is there because it's mandatory. In law school this person is there voluntarily, for unknown reasons, even to himself.

He is so unnoticed that not even the bullies are aware of him. Yes, law school has bullies.* Unlike TV high school, they hide on the internet in places like this. Their bullying, like their racist, sexist, and homophobic comments scrawled on desks in the lower levels of the library, is largely ignored. Until, however, it leads to something like this. Then every law school-affiliated person quickly tries to denounce it, while in their heads relieved that they weren't caught for whatever god-awful thing they've been doing. Some of the bullies turn on the exposed bullies. Sharks feasting on wounded brethren, it's beautiful.

*When I wrote that, I honestly thought it was surprising that law school has bullies. What was I thinking? It's probably because it's time for bed. It should be surprising that not everyone in law school is a bully. They are lawyers in training, after all.

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