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

[gomichan.livejournal.com]

There are a lot of very good points in this essay, but I think he's missing something fairly important. At least according to my observations, nerds appear to have deliberately singled themselves out.

I'm pretty damned smart, but I was very popular in high school. Not the cheerleader/football-player type of popular (though I did play some sports), but the kind where anyone in school felt okay talking to me, and I got invited to a lot of good parties. Intelligence honestly has fuckall to do with it. I didn't /work/ at being popular, either; I honestly didn't give a damn. I just had fun, spoke my mind, and feared nothing. I unapologetically used words the tanning-booth set didn't understand, busted ass in the library, and chatted with the Math Team boys about Clarke and Asimov. I wore some seriously weird clothes. I never, ever sucked up to the artificial nobility. And yet I was popular. What made me Not A Nerd?

The way nerds identified themselves was by their thoughts, interests, and abilities. But the other kids didn't see any of that. What they saw was this:

1. Dresses like my grampa.
2. Walks like he's in a bouncy-castle.
3. Talks like he can't breathe.
4. Won't make eye contact.
5. Can't discuss anyone's interests but his own.
6. Fears/disdains others outside his group.

In both the high schools I went to, several of the most popular kids got top grades in math and science; several of the most shunned nerds had the intellectual capacity a damp ham sandwich.

Presumably it was somewhat different in the essay-writer's experience, but I still feel that an air of resentful self-congratulation taints this otherwise interesting article.

... Okay, done speechifying. Didn't mean it to get that long. ;p