ince launching Sweet Teen Club in February this year, Stacey and I have been bonding over all the things we saw movie teens do that totally baffled us. Things like ‘buying Baby Ruth bars’ and going to ‘track practice’.
I wrote about a few things I noticed here but a few more of cropped up that I can’t leave unaddressed. Here are a few things American teens do that fascinate Australians…
Cheer
It’s just not a thing in Australia. I went to all girls school across the road from an all boys school and there was just no opportunity for any kind of cheer squad situation. Even in government schools, it never seemed to catch on. Cheerleading exists in Australia but only for professional sports leagues or stand alone cheer competitions. I’m kind of glad we didn’t have cheerleading at school because it seems kind of pointless and in my opinion sport got enough air time at my high school as it is and certainly didn’t need any more in the form of a human applause machine.
Do ‘extra credit’ reports
This was not a thing you could do in Australian schools. Maybe if a kid got pneumonia and missed a term of school they might be able to do a make up assignment but unless you were failing there was no way to increase a grade by handing in extra work. You couldn’t be sitting on a B and hand in an extra assignment and get an A. That’s just not how it worked. You had one chance to hand in an essay and if you screwed it up, you screwed it up.
Drink milk
In every movie, TV and book American teens are always drinking milk. If you’re a regular listener of Sweet Teen Club you’ll know we’re very weird about this but the prominence of milk in American high schools is bizarre. You could buy plain milk at my high school tuckshop (which by the way was a hole in the wall with a grumpy middle aged lady standing in it, not a full on dining hall situation) but no one ever bought it. We also didn’t have tables. In ‘Straya we sit on the grass to eat our sausages rolls.
Be ‘tardy’
When I was in school ‘tardy’ certainly didn’t mean ‘late’ and I still get a bit uncomfortable whenever I hear someone say ‘tardy’. I’m like PC POLICE!!!! When I was kid ‘tardy’ was a shortening of the word ‘retarded’ which is not a nice word and most decent have stopped saying it now. Can we just say ‘late’ please?
Be in school ‘clubs’
We never had ‘clubs’. We had sports teams, a few bands and school plays twice a year. There was no Chess Club, Glee Club, Art Club or French Club. You either played netball or you got on stage or you did nothing at all. Those were the options and all of these options had a goal – like the school performance or the regional soft ball tournament. There didn’t exist any leisure clubs that were around just for the fun of it, which is a shame. I would have liked a Crochet Club or even a Book Club.
We are discussing all kinds of weird American-ness in this weeks Sweet Teen Club – we are discussing book number 8 in the Sweet Valley High series – Heartbreaker. This book is ridiculously confusing so let’s just say it’s about Jessica being bitch and also love triangles.
If you’re keen to listen to it here’s how you can do it –
iPhone users
Open up the podcast app on your phone (it already lives there so you don’t need to download it) and search for Sweet Teen Club. Then hit subscribe and you’re good to go.
Android users
The same as iPhone users but you just use the Android podcast app.
Desktop users
You can listen to it while you work at your computer – just click this link here.
You can also find the show notes and other bits and pieces here at the Jackrabbit site.
If you’re a 90s culture tragic like us please do join in and listen to the podcast – even if you haven’t read Sweet Valley High, we cover off a lot of hilarious 90s teen culture that will leave you cringing.
Use the hashtag #sweetteenclub and let us know where you listen to the show, what you’d like us to cover, and what you remember from 90s.
If you want to chat to us about the show (or anything really!) you can find us here.
Carly: Smaggle.com || @smaggle
Stacey: theveggiemama.com || @veggie_mama
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Are you American? Can you shed some light on these things? Are they real? Or just for show on TV?
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P.S Oh just a heads up, you can find me in all these places: Facebook, Twitter, Bloglovin, Instagram, YouTube and the Smaggle weekly newsletter. Just in case you’re into videos of baby animals being cute or people ice skating in dinosaur costumes.
14 Comments
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I must be turning into grumpy old lady early. I get so annoyed that perfectly normal, unexceptional words can’t be used anymore for fear of offence, because they have been corrupted to an unpleasant term. I had never heard that tardy has been used as you describe. Also on the cheer squad thing – it is a whole sport in itself now. Wasn’t when my kids were at school, but a lady I work with has younger kids – her daughter’s team got to the State finals. After sitting through excruciatingly loud music and watching a gazillion teams do their thing for 8 hours she was in dire need of medication. Xx
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I guess ‘tardy’ it was used when I was kid. We never used ‘tardy’ to mean late, it definitely meant the other thing when I was at school. Maybe it’s a little bit outdated now and that’s the problem? And the cheer thing that’s what I meant by stand alone cheer competitions – a mate of mine does them! I like the concept of cheering more when it’s a stand alone sport and they don’t exist as a cheer squad for a male dominated sport. It’s hard work and should be treated as an athletic endeavour on it’s own.
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I have no idea if this is right, but maybe “tardy” comes from the French “être en retard”, which means to be late. It could have started in the south where there were French colonies?
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That would make sense! I went to very low socio-economic primary schools in Australia which are the basis for the bastardising of most words so that’s probably where I got it from.
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I’m in the UK and I’ve always been confused about the milk thing too! I’ve never seen an actual human being drink as much milk as Americans do on TV shows. What’s with that?!
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That’s totally it – in Australia grown ups just don’t drink milk. I mean if people want to drink milk that’s totally cool but to Aussies, you might as well be eating baby food that’s how weird it is for us.
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I see you’re drinking 1%, is that because you think you’re fat?
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I live in a tourist town and talk to people from all over the world. Despite all the questions they have about Americans (wal-mart, inordinate amounts of cheese, prom, our obsession with superiority) I have never heard these 5!
FYI, the glamorous life of a cheerleader generally begins and ends in high school (sure a handful continue at college but unless it’s a huge sports school, it’s not the same as high school “prestige”). Professional cheerleaders in the US are generally walked all over (http://www.cosmopolitan.com/career/a49568/nfl-cheerleader-confessions/).
No extra credit? No clubs?!?! Really? What did you do for the 45 minutes between school ending and track practice?
Never even considered tardy to be an inappropriate word but now it’s all I see… BTW, you only hear it in schools… no one says “I was tardy to the office.”
Americans do drink a lot of milk. It’s the go-to dinner beverage for most families. We could guarantee a stop at the store if we told Dad we were running low on milk. I wish we could have eaten lunch outside… where I grew up in NY we were usually up to our waist in snow and lucky if it broke 5 C between October to March….
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After school activities generally start straight after school, otherwise you’d probably hang out and smoke behind the gym. 🙂
I didn’t think people used ‘tardy’ as grown ups I also think I just went to a dodgy primary school and it’s probably a totally fine word to use.
Eating lunch outside was fine in summer but we had to eat outside in winter too – sometimes in 5 degree Celsius cold. It’s quite ridiculous now I think about it.
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If you weren’t tied up in a club, you were in detention… or smoking in the woods behind the school…
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wait – milk WITH dinner? I mean I know I say it all the time, but it’s a lot of bloody milk! The dairy corporations must have excellent public relations messages. You couldn’t pay me to drink that much milk. This is fascinating.
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Oh this is so true! We longed for an eat-in cafeteria, actual metal lockers with combination locks (we just had pigeon holes for our stuff) and cheering. Actually, we longed for subjects other than the basics and funding for the Rock n Roll Eisteddfod that went beyond hiring the bus to get to Adelaide but that’s a country thing. You played team sports for the town you lived in, not the school.
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Interesting!… In the US, generally you only play for club/town teams if a) the school didn’t have your sport or b) you were really good and went to the town team’s practice after the school team’s practice. Either way, you generally needed to come from a family with a bit of money to spare because school teams are free (uniform, basic facilities/supples, transportation) while town teams charge you for all that stuff.
We knew metal lockers were awesome. That’s why we put such care into decorating the inside and breaking into our friends to surprise them for birthdays, holidays, Tuesdays… any excuse really.
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Hi I’m in the US (Cincinnati) and….the milk. Oh god the milk. I hate milk. I was forced to drink it my whole life but stopped as I got older. We kids always had to drink a cup of milk with dinner, and at school you could be forced to have milk too, if your parents paid for it- you could bring your own lunch or buy the hot lunch or the cold lunch and you had the option of buying milk separately, so like you could bring your lunch from home but then buy just the milk, if you wanted. Sometimes we bought the school lunch, but usually we had lunch from home because school food is gross. But we always had to buy the milk. Calcium, you know. God I hate milk. As for cheerleading yes cheerleading is huge in high school. Cheerleaders can be known as clique-y and mean, but they’re not all like that. Cheer is something that you now have to start at a really young age or you won’t be good enough yet by the time you’re in school. There are cheer teams for kids as young as like 4. But high schl cheer is huge. As for being tardy, that gets you detention…I know from experience and lots of detentions lol. The word tardy sounds stupid, doesn’t it? All the high school clubs, yep, there are usually a lot…I went to a super small school (only 40 kids per graduating class…some schools have thousands of kids per graduating class) and we hardly had any clubs but we did have a lot of theater clubs, French club, debate club (debate was big in my schl), chess club, model u.n., and a bunch of like environmental clubs. But that was not a lot of clubs, most schools have way more. Don’t knock extra credit, that’s how I got through school 😉 lol But really most teachers do not give extra credit if you haven’t already shown you’re working hard. What I mean is, you can’t skip assignments and then want to make them up later. Extra credit is for students who turned in all their assignments and are putting full effort into the class but maybe just don’t have as high a grade as they are striving for so they will go to the teacher and ask if there are any additional assignments they could do to help bring up their grade. Most teachers will let you do extra work if they see that you really care about the class. But some teachers don’t allow it. Even the ones that DO allow it, don’t allow it if they feel the student is just using extra credit because they need points since they were lazy with assignments earlier in the semester. My aunt is a teacher and it drives her nuts when ppl ask hey can I do extra credit and she is like no because you were just scooting by the whole semester..she will give extra credit to help students she know are trying to do better. Also….I used to love reading Sweet Valley!!
