"Nobody's really free until nerd persecution ends."
Posted on 06/02/2008 1:55:29 PM PDT by Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus
When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same popularity. We graded them from A to E. A tables were full of football players and cheerleaders and so on. E tables contained the kids with mild cases of Down's Syndrome, what in the language of the time we called "retards."
We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without looking physically different. We were not being especially candid to grade ourselves as D. It would have taken a deliberate lie to say otherwise. Everyone in the school knew exactly how popular everyone else was, including us.
(Excerpt) Read more at paulgraham.com ...
Excellent essay! Very, very accurate description of what it's like in way too many schools. The essay is worth reading twice or thrice, and it should be required reading for school teachers and school boards. And I thought what I went through a few decades ago was hell. I'm glad I didn't have any kids that would have had to endure this more recent and much worse school hell.
I was about 4' 11' on my 11th birthday. Similar weight. On my 12th birthday, my size 6C feet had grown to 10EE and I was 6' 3/8" and 110 lbs. My parents went crazy trying to keep clothes that fit on my hide over that year. On my 13th birthday I was 135 lbs. By age 16 I was 155 lbs on graduation day from high school. Those PE classes during football season weren't much fun when the guy on the other side was a 210 lb varsity football player.
It sucked to be always the last one chosen for a team in PE. Getting the best score on tests and papers in the other classes always had a quiet air of schadenfreude. Academic and athletic prowess have little correlation.
I love that show... and Two and a Half Men. Same writer I think. In fact, one of my favorite quotes from that show involves you... well... your screen name at least... "Sacajaweau is not a big bag of jaweau!"
One would think that rural schools would be better, but our rural school with only a hundred kids per grade is nearly what he describes. The big city schools are, apparently, worse -- what he describes may be an understatement when applied to such metro schools.
Jealousy! Everyone knows that nerds are great in bed while “whitecaps” (ie Jocks) prefer showering with eachother in front of their “top”, er, “coach.”
Hot chick?
You're an Engineer too.
*snicker*
When I graduated from college, the engineering students were chanting “we got jobs!” and the business students yelled back “working for us!”.
That really is over simplifying it. Part of what makes a nerd a nerd is his or her fairly inept social skills. Mastering futures trading doesn't improve one's social skills. And nerds still have to compete with more charming, comparably successful individuals.
A lot of those women swooning at the nerd at the 10th anniversary are not great prizes themselves, and probably never were.
Women do consider financial success attractive in a man, but it's not the only thing. And as I said, it's not really that rare and the duds still have to compete with more dominant, more assertive, and more sexually appealing successful men. That swooning you mention is really overstated,
IN my senior class the smartest kid in the class was also the class president and the city teenager of the year.
You mean I'm the ONLY cool kid here?!?
I don't think this is exactly true. Good social skills are very valuable at every stage of life. They may not be the whole main event, but they are important. Brains are important, too, but it's not the whole main event either. It's strange that this is presented as an either-or proposition. The two skillsets are not mutually exclusive at all.
Ping for later...
My favorite variation is a saying from architecture shool... The A and the F students teach... the B and the D students work for the C students.
Very true!
As for your claim about the "popular guys being a success", I would say that is true at the private, selective school I went to, but when you get to your Joe Schmoe average public high school, the bully/jock types usually wind up sitting on their a-s at the tavern, talking about the good old days, while the geeks they teased were smart enough the get out of that hole.
Its all very complex. Charm without brains can only get you so far, and vice versa.
Anyone who consistently gets a 97% on a chemistry test which was being graded on a curve is unpopular.
Those who look/act the part catch the most hell, though.
The vital thing is for nerds to have nerds for parents. Nerd parents can do things like play role games with them, make bottle rockets using mentos and lots of other off the wall stuff.
We raised three and were able to give them full nerd reign even if it meant marathon sessions of slashdot.org., or tomshardware.com.
We are the proud nerds of proudly nerdy engineers who make lots and lots of money who are married to lovely nerdy lady engineers.
We are expecting third generation nerds someday.
But, but...even if one of them has an A list kid at some point, we will still love it.
I sat at what was referred to as the “’head” table. Funny thing is, most of us weren’t potheads (although a few were).
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