Buncha Nerds!

[andrewducker]

Just posted this on my link blog, and then realised that it deserved a wider audience.  I'm fairly sure I've posted it before, but it could definitely do with the exposure.

I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular.

Why? To someone in school now, that may seem an odd question to ask. The mere fact is so overwhelming that it may seem strange to imagine that it could be any other way. But it could. Being smart doesn't make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor does it harm you in the real world. Nor, as far as I can tell, is the problem so bad in most other countries. But in a typical American secondary school, being smart is likely to make your life difficult. Why?

The key to this mystery is to rephrase the question slightly. Why don't smart kids make themselves popular? If they're so smart, why don't they figure out how popularity works and beat the system, just as they do for standardized tests?

Read the rest here.

Comments

[xquiq.livejournal.com]

A very interesting article.

Personally, when I was at school, I didn't really care that the popular kids didn't like me, as I had very little respect for most of them. I knew I was leaving and it didn't matter anyway. I suppose in many ways I was 'playing a different game'.

Equally, I was quite lucky in some respects: while people tried to bully me or give me a hard time, 'tried' was the operative word.

In some ways I miss school. I actually really enjoy studying things for their own sake, which is something I don't have the luxury of doing at the moment. It was important to me, but I can see why it doesn't work for some children and also that it bears little relation to work in an office environment.