The Breakfast Club Research Paper

The book outsiders is a amazing and interesting novel.In the book their are two gangs named Socs and Greasers.The socs are the upper class with money ,cars, and nice houses in a good area.The greasers are lower class and all they have is their hair, the bond of other each, and they live in a type of hood.They are complete different people but they still share lots of things in common.They also have lots of differences.

     John Hughes’ 1985 film, The Breakfast Club, gives countless examples of the principles of interpersonal communication. Five high school students: Allison, a weirdo, Brian, a nerd, John, a criminal, Claire, a prom queen, and Andrew, a jock, are forced to spend the day in Saturday detention. By the end of the day, they find that they have more in common than they ever realized.

Have you ever noticed in “The Outsiders” the differences and the similarities between the Greasers and the Socials? Well I will be explaining and showing why the Socials and Greasers are different and why they are the same. I will also be giving evidence supporting Ponyboys thought that Greasers and Socials are the same.

Whether groups are formed for social or task oriented purposes, the ability to produce and maintain a sense of affiliation, peer support and collaboration is important for overall group functioning. The cohesion of a social group is produced through the establishment of a set of group norms, which are later defined as a guide for conduct accepted within a group of individuals. However, in order for a group to perform and produce results, the team leader should guide his/her team through the proper stages of group development, which includes the following steps: forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning. Although teams should follow all these stages of group development, the forming and the norming stages are the most important,

Example 1 – Andrew displays Identity Diffusion when he conforms to peer pressure and follows the acceptable behavior of the group. When the group decides to leave the library, he also follows even though he know the teacher has strictly forbade them from leaving their chair.

The movie The Breakfast Club was released in 1985, and is based on a group of five high school students from stereotypical cliques; the popular, jock, nerd and the outcasts, who all wind up stuck together for Saturday detention. Throughout the movie many themes present themselves such as teenage rebellion, peer pressure and family issues as the students get to know each other. The most prominent theme throughout the movie is the student’s placement in the social structure of the school. From the very different reasons why they are in detention to the way that they are all treated differently by the principle, their social placement is evident.

Brian Johnson, or the “Brain,” in the movie The Breakfast Club, possess thought processes evident in Piaget’s Formal Operational Period stage in his theory of cognitive development. During Piaget’s Formal Operational Period, people begin to “apply their mental operations to abstract concepts in addition to concrete objects;” their thinking is hypothetical, systematic, reflective and logical (Weiten, 448). Brian asks himself existential questions like “Who do I think I am? Who are you? Who are you?” as he brainstorms Mr. Vernon’s assignment for the students in detention; these thoughts are abstract. His thought processes are also logical since he’s extremely intelligent; being part of the math, Latin and physics club requires some advanced thinking skills. Additionally, he understands how concrete applications like engineering stem from abstract concepts like Trigonometry. He also reasoned that if he took a class like Shop that “dopes” take, he could pass that class easily to maintain his GPA; such reasoning requires complex thinking. Finally, his thinking is reflective, especially when he ponders the permanence of the Breakfast Club’s friendship and describes how he steps outside himself to analyze what he sees. Unfortunately, when he observes himself, he’s highly critical and despises his “true” self; he possess a highly negative view of himself, labeling himself a failure, eventually leading to suicidal thoughts and actions.

In the beginning of the novel, Ponyboy develops feeling for Cherry who he met at a movie. But due to the fact that Ponyboy is a Greaser and Cherry is a Soc, society states that “you don’t see a grease and a Socy cheerleader together that often.” (Hinton 30) Ponyboy being greaser is set apart from the rest of society because of his cloths, hair and financial status.”Our hair labeled us greasers, too- it was our trademark. The one thing we were proud of.”(Hinton 71) This barrier was created because society labels people based on their appearance. Though they both have feelings for eachother, society thinks that they can’t be together because of their different social party. This obstacle was not resolved, though Ponyboy and Cherry may see more in each other then Socs and greasers, society as a whole still separates them. Ponyboy and Cherry learn from each other that everyone has problems, “Maybe the two different worlds we lived in weren’t so different. We saw the same sunset.” (Hinton

The iconic coming-of-age movie The Breakfast Club, focuses on the development of five, seemingly very different high school students. In the movie we are presented with the five main characters all with stereotypes that they identify with. Claire is the princess or the beauty queen, John, often referred to by his last name “Bender,” is the criminal, Brian is the brain or the nerd, Andrew, is the athlete, a wrestler , and finally Allison is the basket case or the weirdo. The story is set in saturday detention where they are forced to spend eight hours with people from other cliques that they would normally never interact with. The day progresses and the characters interact with one another, smoke, dance, break rules, and reveal very personal parts of themselves with the others. The story ends with some of the characters making an attempt to change their identity with the realization that even with the boxes they have been put into they are not that different from one another.

There are two conflicts that are mainly presented in The Outsiders. First, Ponyboy feels unloved by his brother Darry. Ponyboy feels this way when he’s walking home from the movies and is yelled at for walking home alone when nobody would go with him. Darry states many times to Ponyboy “use your head.” Also in the novel, Johnny goes through man vs fate because he can’t escape his death. He believes that his death was for a great purpose and that the kids live have greater value than his, but he still doesn’t want to die.

Have you ever read a very hard hitting and the phenomenal story about rival gangs and the effect it has on the lives of the people and the society. In The Outsiders, is a story of 14-year-old Ponyboy Curtis and his two older brothers, Soda and Darry. The boys are orphans and struggle to stick together in their lower-class neighborhood, known as the East Side. They and their friends are part of a gang of tough street boys called the Greasers. Even though other people might think you're unimportant and below them. You will always have your friends and family. In The Outsiders, we see the idea of the difference in the society based on the economic level of the characters, honor among the lawless and violence among the youth.

The Breakfast Club was an extraordinary film that dealt with teenagers in detention. Although it looked like a regular movie, it had deep meanings involved with it. The movie showcases a circle of teens who are completely different from each other. At first they didn’t interact with one another, but as the movie goes on they begin to become close friends. The Breakfast Club does a great job at exemplifying the dynamics of a group in society because there are so many associations of people who interact with each other even if the interests are completely different. The characters in the movie move from an out group to an in group because they all felt like outsiders towards each other, but as time was going on in detention they were starting to really like each other. They became an in group towards the end of the movie because they made their own grouping, which they referred to it as “The Breakfast Club”.

The Outsiders is a book that changed the style of young adult writers because it went off from the genre that young adult writer were using during that time period. The reader sees the everyday problems that teenagers were going through, “I can’t take much more

Claire Standish or “the princess” portrays the stereotypical popular teenage girl in The Breakfast Club. She is in detention with everyone else because she decided to skip class and go shopping, which also plays into the stereotypical teen girl image. It can also be assumed that she is spoiled and rich since her father tried to get her out of detention but failed, and she mentions to the group that her parents only use her to get back at the other one. She brings a fancy lunch of sushi while the other teens either have nothing or the standard lunch one’s parents might pack for them. There are a couple of times in the movie that she brings up her social standing and could even be considered as looking down on those who are not as popular as her. Even closer towards the end of the movie she informs the others that if they were to say hello to her in the hallway in front of her friends, she would have no choice but to ignore them. By the end of the movie, she has opened up to everyone else about her fears of letting her peers down and has formed a close relationship with Bender.

The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee are extremely influential novels that can teach great lessons to teenagers and adults. One of The Outsider’s main themes is; everybody has different problems, but everybody is still the same. This theme is shown throughout the entire novel and explains it well. There are two different groups in the setting of The Outsiders, the socs and the greasers. The socs are the rich kids that drive nice cars and get into a lot of trouble without being punished by their parents, and the greasers are the less wealthy kids that fight with the socs and wear greased back hair and leather jackets. Both of these groups are completely different people, but they still live in the same city and see the same environment. As Ponyboy states “Maybe the two different worlds we lived in weren’t so different. We saw the same sunset” (Hinton).