Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

This chapter describes life at Permian High, beginning with the pep rally, which features the school band, the Majorettes, and the cheerleading team, the Pepettes. The educational curriculum at Permian High is intellectually unstimulating and unchallenging. Even the accelerated classes are “hardly a hotbed of intellectual give-and-take,” and many teachers do not devote their entire classes to teaching and instead rely on videos to teach for them. Permian High produces below-average results on test scores and few academically excellent students. The teachers blame different factors, such as parenting, family incomes, and even desegregation, to explain the school’s decline in student performance. While a few Permian High students are gifted academically, they do not have the high social status that the football players enjoy.

The author examines the social reality of Permian High for female students who feel pressured to participate in the cheerleading team and are not encouraged to apply themselves academically. The most popular female students are cheerleaders, while the most respected males are the Panthers football players.

One benefit of being a Panthers player is receiving attention and presents from the Pepettes, though these cheerleaders sometimes push back against the expectation that they behave like a “personal geisha girl” (149), though not with much success.