Saints and Roughnecks

I thought the Saints and Roughnecks article was very interesting and I have to admit I was kind of shocked by it. I couldn't believe all these things the Saints were doing while still maintaining good grades and the role of leaders in their school, some of them even won very prestigious awards! I don't think we really have Roughnecks at our school, but we definitely have some Saints. However, I think there are some differences. First of all since our school and community is so big, not everyone has a certain perception of everyone else. I don't think there's really a group of kids that every teacher would just regard as good students because its likely they have no idea who the kid is. Same goes for the police. But they're are definitely people at school who take difficult classes, are involved in extra curricular activities, but get into some bad things outside of school. But again I see another difference. At our school I don't think there's any way someone who is regarded as "a smart kid" could skip half his classes and still get good grades. If they're known as smart, they're probably taking a lot of accelerated and AP classes and it's just not possible to miss that much school and not do homework and still do well. I don't know, maybe I'm just ignorant to what really goes on, but that's how I see it.