How to be Popular, Part I

Last week, I projected the following Quick Write on the board:

It's from this tumblr which is my favorite source for thought-provoking, visual writing prompts.

So, when I first read them this prompt, they looked at me like this - 

So then we googled "hierarchy," "algorithm," and "variables". Myriad was already a vocabulary word. They were still unsteady. They needed more scaffolding, which is a fancy education word for what I was about to do - reference Mean Girls. I reminded them of this scene where Cady is informed of the tribes in the cafeteria.

We identified who we thought would be at the top of the hierarchy at North Shore High School and the bottom. Then we talked about the variables that pushed the Mean Girls to the top of that peak. After which, they were ready to write. I told them they could write a narrative or informative piece on this theme - that directly answers the questions or just touches on them.

Several of their Quick Writes were post-worthy, but I'll start with this one from the younger brother of a boy I taught my first year. Enjoy.

"Formula of Popularity"

Some people would say, “John Grisham*! What do you know about popularity?”, and I would say EVERYTHING because I am very interpersonal; it’s just that I don’t care enough to put it in action. But for those of you that are conceited enough to want to become popular, here you go.

The formula of being popular: [height (chest hair)² - grade point average / athletic abilities + 2(wit + immaturity) (muscle size)³ + shoe size / waist size – inability to talk to women (drugs that will ruin your life) + (swaggin’ vocabulary x texting grammatically incorrectly) + stupidity] how “bad” you are = Popularity.

I know some of this stuff only comes from time/puberty, but some of this stuff you can control. For instance, if you work out a lot, your waist size will go down, and your muscle size and athletic ability will go up, thus raising your popularity.

Keep in mind that if any of you are like me, you won’t really care about this stupid thing called popularity, and you life will be a whole lot simpler. And if you read this, but don’t use it (like me), you will be classified as a dork or nerd, but you will be very popular in my book.

*Name changed to protect the innocent.