This has reminded me of my long-standing commitment to making any class I teach a safe place for every student. I don't mean that in the way many people mean "safe" nowadays. I don't mean everyone is entitled to be agreed with or catered to. But what I do mean is that everyone should come in, be acknowledged for who they are, be encouraged for what they contribute, and treated respectfully by others, given the chance to make lasting friendships (whether they do or not is their responsibility).
The biggest threat to this safe environment is cliques. Just to clarify, a clique is not the same as a group of friends with similar interests. Cliques are controlling and insecure, usually held together for the purposes of power. Hurting and excluding others is a major thing for cliques. They are more common with girls, but exist with boys too (as evidenced by the little boy clique in our classroom right now).
I just had a valuable discussion with two others on Facebook about cliques. One person agreed with me about how damaging they are, and the need to separate them. The other person said that, rather than be split up, they need reminders to include others. As the discussion went on, though, it turned out this person was really using the term "clique" to just mean a group of close friends within a larger group. By that definition, I agree with him. Groups of friends may need an occasional reminder to include others, but they aren't usually attempting to exclude. They are held together by mutual respect and common interests, as opposed to cliques being held together by power and insecurity. Friendship is completely natural and to be expected. I have people I'm closer with than others at work, church, etc. Jesus had his twelve closest friends, and within that, he had his three he was even closer with. They certainly weren't a clique. When I talk about cliques, I'm talking about mean cliques, not simply close groups of friends. Just so we're clear on what I mean...
I feel that God has given me this passion to eradicate cliques wherever I encounter them. We all have a calling, and I feel this is mine. It isn't just best for other people the clique is hurting. It is best for the members of the clique. They're heading down a damaging road, and taking their power away can put them at the place where they're able to make needed changes in their lives.
I believe this is a spiritual battle. It is met with resistance at times. A while back, I was a junior high teacher. I taught a Bible class for a group of home-schooled kids. I did this for a few years. They were mostly very sweet kids. One girl in the group, though, was a problem. I'll call her Amanda (not her real name). Amanda would act embarrassingly shy. The first day of class, I had everyone go around the room and introduce themselves. This went well until it got to Amanda. She just covered her face. Her mother happened to be there, and she exclaimed. "My poor shy little girl!" and hugged her, adding to the awkward situation. Several of the kids who hadn't known Amanda before looked confused and embarrassed. What Amanda did was a lot more attention-getting than simply saying her name and letting us move on. She basically hijacked the class for several minutes. She was way too old for this, and her mother totally fed into it. Most shy students I have encountered are quiet when I first meet them, then slowly warm up over time. They generally don't say or do things to bring attention to themselves. Amanda did not fit any other experience I had of "shy". She was playing a game to get attention.
Amanda had a friend in the group. I'll call her Susan. Susan was actually a very sweet girl, but more of a follower. Not a pushover, but just not a control freak. Amanda latched onto her, and Susan didn't seem to know how to deal with it. Susan was a bit of an introvert herself, and Amanda's mom thought this was wonderful. She would always tell me how the two girls were exactly the same. As I got to know them, I found that I disagreed. Susan didn't act shy in ways that brought awkward attention. She was simply "go with the flow". I'll return to this.
We had two students in that class who really stood out to me. They were twins, a brother and sister. I'll call them Mark and Becky. They were kind, smart, and friendly to everyone. They had a confidence in who they were, and didn't need other people to make them happy. Like all of us, though, they wanted friendships. I personally bonded with these two, and loved the way they reached out to everyone, treating everyone in the group as a friend. Everyone liked them...except Amanda.
Amanda retreated from Becky. When Becky would reach out and talk to her, she wouldn't answer. She clung more tightly than ever to Susan, and got Susan away from Becky. Susan was never rude to Becky, but she didn't seem to know how to break free of Amanda. My heart went out to Becky. Here was this sweet girl who had it all going for her, being put at the bottom of the pecking order. So not happening! I don't do pecking orders in my class!
Amanda even did small, subtle things to keep her hold on Susan and hold Becky at a distance. We had a birthday tradition in our class. When it was a student's birthday, I would bring a card for the rest of the class to sign. On Becky's (and Mark's, as they were twins), Susan had signed her name. When Amanda saw it, she wrote and Amanda underneath, to include her name with Susan's in the card. A small gesture, but significant. She couldn't stand on her own, so she made a show of power by linking herself to Susan. The message there was "This is my friend, and together, we sign this card, as we do everything else together that you're not a part of."
Very quickly, I changed the seating arrangement. I separated Amanda and Susan. I wasn't unkind. I didn't leave Amanda all alone. I seated Becky beside her. I moved everyone, so it didn't look like I was singling Amanda out. I didn't come down on Amanda in any way. But believe me, I heard all about it from Amanda's mom (who still maintained what a sweet, innocent, perfect child she was). She told me I "traumatized" her every time I didn't give her her own way. It almost got to the point where I was afraid to check my email, because Amanda's mom was constantly accusing me of "traumatizing" her baby.
Susan did perfectly fine without Amanda. She bonded with everyone. She just needed Amanda's stifling grip removed. I struggled with Amanda and her mother for a few years. The apple hadn't fallen far from the tree. Amanda's mother would talk to me (as well as others) in exclusive ways. For example, she asked one woman (the preschool teacher for the group), "When is your baby due?" when she wasn't pregnant. It was obvious she wasn't pregnant. Mrs. Amanda was just mean, trying to put this other woman down to build herself up. At the time, I was single, and Mrs. Amanda would say, "I feel so sorry for you! It must be so awful not to have a wonderful husband like I do." She was just nasty like that.
Every time Mrs. Amanda wanted her point to be taken seriously, she would begin with, "The Holy Spirit told me...". The set up here is that if we disagree with her, we're disagreeing with God. That was giving herself a security base. One time (this made me want to vomit), she said, "My husband's taking me on a cruise to Jamaica, and he wants me to wear a bikini, because he thinks I look sexy that way, so I'm going to be godly and submit to him." R-i-i-i-i-i-ght!
She tried to get between other women and myself. I would be talking to other moms of my students, and Mrs. Amanda had to cut in and invite them over in front of me, but not invite me. One time, she didn't like something I had said in my class. Rather than tell me privately, she did it in front of others, and implied that all the moms were mad at me and had come to her. I felt horrible to have offended so many people, and I went and apologized to all of them...and it turned out they knew nothing about it, and hadn't been offended anyway. Mrs. Amanda had lied to me to make herself look like the center of the power. Like the whole community revolved around her. I confronted her with her lie, and she immediately said, "Satan is using you to attack me!" Sure he was. More like the other way around.
Mrs. Amanda continued trying to find ways to exclude me and be a mediator between me and other moms. She seemed almost terrified I would talk to or be friends with other women. When I took her power away and contacted them outside of class hours, when she wasn't around, she couldn't let this go. She went to the higher ups, and had me dismissed from my position. She told some ridiculous stories about me. For whatever reason, she was believed and I was let go. I was humiliated and hurt...but God redeemed in multiple ways. What she meant for evil, God meant for good.
My point in sharing this is to illustrate how the ringleader of a clique operates. It's about power to cover up insecurity. They are horrified of losing their power. Both Amanda and her mom worked this way. On TV shows, cliques are seen as targeting weak and clueless people, but that isn't reality. Usually, cliques want the weak and clueless to be part of them. Its the strong and confident people who are targeted. They pose a threat to the ringleader. The ringleader and their lackeys want to remove the threat.
Cliques can leave lifelong scars. One of the people who was a part of this discussion I referred to earlier shared how she still has nightmares because of the mean girls she went to school with. Personally, I was a target of cliques in junior high. For many years, I believed something was wrong with me. I couldn't see how this all worked, that I was somehow a threat. I thought I was ugly, or unworthy or...fill in the blank. It didn't help that I was a teenager in the shallow and materialistic 90's (before the days of High School Musical that made people in TV and movie land realize it was okay to be part of other groups). On 90's TV, you couldn't be both smart and pretty. Smart was almost a negative thing, and earned the reputation of being a "nerd" (which is now a label worn with pride, thankfully!). I hated being a teen in the 90's. I feel more nostalgic for my 80's childhood than my 90's teen years. Yet even in my idyllic 80's life, there were cliques. I just had enough nice people around me to ignore them. By God's grace, one of the mean girls from junior high later wrote me a heartfelt letter, apologizing. That couldn't have been easy, and I know God was at work.
I have found that this is a battle God has called me to fight. I want to be that teacher students remember as their advocate. The one who saw what was happening and did all in my power to stop it. Removing the clique's power can be intimidating, but it needs to be done. I refuse to be the teacher who was scared of the clique and let it continue, and even became buddy-buddy with it. No way! know that God has already changed lives through my efforts (this is Him, not me). It's a battle worth fighting.
Thank you for taking on this subject. Working with our junior high foster boys, there was a lot of this going on. You have described the process very well. When you are right in the thick of it, it's hard to know what hit you. These boys were moved so often, they were constantly trying to fit in. This can be so heartbreaking, especially when you don't understand what's going on.
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