The start of a brand new school year is thrilling; new faces, new classrooms, new teachers. For most, deciding where to sit during lunch break is probably the last thing on their mind. However, for the newly named senior Class of ‘23, who have college applications and every piece of coursework imaginable due, this is the only thing that matters. As Janice Ian of Mean Girls once said, “where you sit in the cafeteria is crucial”. And she’s right. Because as trivial as it seems, the Tent Plaza seating arrangement represents the social hierarchy of our college— and the twelfth graders are the apex predators.
What Dover students subconsciously but universally understand is that you don’t need a “Plastics squad” nor a “Queen Bee” to tell you what that seating arrangement may be. In fact, the Tent Plaza seating plan had been written out for you, in stone, before you even got there… before you even started high school.
It is a tradition as old as time that the stretch of black benches running from the Main Hall all the way to the High School Office belongs to the graduating class. And so on their first day of school, now with their elders gone and their spirits high, they charge under the white, canvas-covered pavilion and take what is rightfully theirs. A black bench tailored for a modest party of four now overwhelmed with eight to nine savage white-shirt seniors. But what makes this painfully uncomfortable bird poop and rain-prone row of IKEA picnic tables so appealing to Dover students?
It’s simple. Being smack-dab in the middle of campus, these benches are the most visible lunch seats in the whole school. It is a rite of passage that screams self-proclaimed power, and once you’ve acquired that, best believe you’re not giving it up.
One can’t help but see this behaviour as reflective of the typical high school teenage chick-flicks we know all too well. Except what differentiates our lunch room hierarchy is not popularity, it’s age. This may seem like a given—respect your elders and all—but where do you draw the line between younger grades just needing to wait their turn and senior exploitation of power? Any brave-enough white-shirt-wearing grade twelve student could walk up to a black bench full of blue-shirts and sit there anyway, intimidate them into slowly vacating, or worse, simply tell them to leave. More often than not, the younger grades will lower their heads and obey. The stereotypical teen movie usually serves as a cautionary tale of craving power from popularity and the dangers that come with sticking to the status quo, but no matter how this has been ingrained into us during our childhoods, Dover students seem to have no issue turning a blind eye to such power plays in this specific circumstance.
Perhaps a social hierarchy is okay if everyone agrees it is. Perhaps younger students graciously accept that this is the way things are because they know one day their time will come. Perhaps the system that we are describing is further from bullying but closer to a universally acknowledged behavioural standard of sticking it out and waiting your turn. And perhaps it’s not. Perhaps it’s what every twelfth-grade student argues it not to be: an excuse to torment those younger and more timid and in return feed their own sense of authority. And so, perhaps teenage chick-flicks have taught us nothing at all.
This is good.