Buncha Nerds!
May. 12th, 2005 07:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewduckerJust 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.
Read the rest here.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2005-05-12 12:48 pm (UTC)The article has some interesting points, but I think it overlooks a lot of the nuances. It does bug me that the social position a person inhabits during high school is often taken to be an indication of their intellectual ability. There may well be some general truths in the stereotypes, but the last thing teenagers need is to have sweeping generalisations made about them.
no subject
Date: 2005-05-12 12:53 pm (UTC)That sounds like a sweeping generalisation to me.
:-P