Slashdot Mirror
Why Nerds Are Unpopular
AccordionGuy writes "Paul Graham, who's known for his writings on Lisp and other Lisp-like languages as well as his essays on combatting spam has taken a bit of a detour from his usual topics. His latest essay is one that's a little more personal and that we can all relate to: Why Nerds Are Unpopular . It's a lengthy but engaging writeup of that chamber of horrors we call high school and why being smarter than the average bear is more of a liability than an asset during that stage in life. It's food for thought for those of us who've already been there, done that and been stuffed into lockers by the football team and it should give some hope to those who are going through it right now."
I'm curious if this happens all over the world or only in the states.
Can anyone who grew up outside of the US comment?
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
I've been in the software engineer game for over 10 years now... almost all of my collegues have either switched fields or taken a 30-40% paycut to stay in it. (Switching fields takes a paycut too btw)
the market is FIERCE now with out of work software engineers.. What makes you think your odds are so good Mr. No-Professional-Experience?
I sadly think you're in for a rude awakening once you hit the market.
Jokes aside though - a very serious matter. Kids get bullied a lot as early as primary/secondary school and often it haunts them in high school as well. I used to do volunteer work for a charitable trust that was campaigning for teenage suicide prevention. It's pretty unbeleivable how many teens end their lives because they just can't take it anymore. And don't give me this bullshit about those that pull through and "become stronger". Some maybe do, but others still receive a pretty vicious mental trauma. Who knows how will this unnecessary abuse will reflect on their adulthood ?
I think his point in the article was pretty accurate.
Summary for those who haven't read it: American public schools tend to be little more than prisons, with large classes and indifferent teachers, where the kids are more or less left alone to create their own sub-societies (with all the "Lord of the Flies" cruelty that ensues). The nerdy types aren't totally expending their efforts on popularity (unlike most others), so they end up on the bottom of the heap.
This describes the public junior high school I went to perfectly. Education was really a joke there; the main thing was to keep us little darlings under lock and key for some hours while our parents worked, and if we learned something, so much the better (if we didn't, oh well). I got pretty badly picked on, partly for nerdiness (I was taking college-level math at the time) and partly for just being very different (I had just moved from rural Virginia to urban Minnesota).
Before my 9th grade year, I toured the public high school that I was supposed to go to, and immediately my radar told me that I would probably not make it out of that place alive (or at least with all my bones intact). Football stuff everywhere, with glassy-eyed teachers who really didn't give a damn. The other school I could have gone to had just become the first in Minnesota with metal detectors and had a rep for open gang warfare.
I begged my parents to pay for a private school. Somehow, they scraped the money together through loands and so on. (Thank God for my parents.) The first I went to, a boarding school near my parents' home, was a disaster (buncha spoiled rich kids whose parents had dumped them there and never visited them -- Lord of the Flies, Mercedes Edition).
The next year I went to a small, recently founded K-12 private school, where my class was all of 25 students, and where the teachers were all basically rebels from another private school who where determined to make a better school. The kinds of things described in the article just didn't happen there -- the teachers actually gave a sh*t about us, and we didn't feel like we were in some kind of penal colony.
A lot of the reason the school was better was the small class size (harder to have a crushing pyramid hierarchy when you've only got a small number of students) and the teachers actually got involved like *teachers* and not *wardens*.
Another reason is we didn't have jocks. We didn't have a football team, though we did have soccer. And the school's pride and joy was its Quiz Bowl team (hey! I was on it! State Champs in 1989!). Those who had high SAT, PSAT and ACH scores were also publicly praised by the school director (who, by the way, spent lunchtime serving the students corn so he could personally chat with each and every one). So knowledge and nerdiness was actually rewarded, and there was actually positive contact between staff and students.
Sadly, since then the school has grown dramatically (their reputation spread like wildfire, and soon they had huge demand for the school), and the director retired, so I tend to wonder if it has fallen to the same problems as other large schools. But it can be done -- a school in America where nerds are actually valued. I just am very grateful my parents scraped together the money for the place -- otherwise I probably would have spent more time in lockers than in classrooms...
The school, by the way, was Mounds Park Academy, if anyone's interested.
At any rate, even though I tend to be leftish politically, I think the above is a pretty good argument for school vouchers. The public school system in America is so screwed that the only solution is to nuke it flat with vouchers, and let the parents and students sort it out through the market.
Cheers,
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
It's a hard concept to communicate, too - that you don't want to be popular, because you don't see "popularity" as anything worth having.
I was a nerd/geek at the "D" table. My most fucked-up high school memory was when a girl from the "C" table who demonstrated she was deliberately faking wrong answers on the tests to lower her grades, lest she end up at the "D" table) confided suicidal thoughts to me.
As I recall, my response (what the fuck, any statute of limitations has long since past, it was long ago that it probably was legally OK for students to just deal with shit like this amongst themselves, and hey, I was a minor and therefore too dumb to know what I was doing :) was something like this:
I have no idea what happened to her; other than that she kept her end of the bargain. I didn't know her that well to begin with and we never really spoke after that; all I know is that she didn't off herself in the remaining four years of high school and graduated with "B+" grades just sufficient to get her into university, though she was probably capable of "A"s.
On my darker days, I like to think I did something good. It's reasonable to presume that if she survived high school, she survived university, and found her way to cubicle-bound conformity along with the rest of us.
On my lighter days, I reflect back on the "better" part of the rant and realize that that going to university is a wonderful cure for nerd megalomania. Nothing like sitting in a room with 130 people and being told "Most of you were A+ students in high school. That ends here. You're still just as smart as you were six months ago, but you're in a room of people, all of whom who are also just as smart as you were six months ago, or they wouldn't be here." in your first Calculus class, and then having the prof prove it to (all of) you, over and over and over and over again :)
There are two versions of "popular". The first is the one you are talking about: You are liked and respected by your peers, and vice versa. People desire interaction with you and vice versa. Nothing wrong with that, we all want that.
The other kind of popular is what you get in high school, which is exemplified by the other 5-rated comment in this thread. The one where social interaction is turned into some sort of twisted game whose players value "winning" higher than their self-esteem, their health, and their future. That is what geeks refuse to be part of, and I don't blame them at all.
I went to a very mixed high school, so I had the wannabe thugs and the snobby high class kids to deal with. I came from a middle-high class family in the middle of the town making friends with the A, B, C, and D table (I think I was C freshman and sophmore year, and B my junior and senior year).
I was a geek, I spent from 2:30pm until 12am on my computer doing stupid shit everyday. I was in the honors classes because the standard classes were too easy, however I never did my homework because of the computer and my grades suffered. In high school I wrote various Windows programs, became a consultant for a reputable web hosting company, and had more friends than my older sister had when she was in HS. She was head of the cheerleading squad, student body president, all AP courses girl that everyone wanted to get with. I never used the 'I am her brother' method to gain popularity.
The fact that I was a geek was what made me popular in my school. Freshman year, yea I used to get teased (but held my own if anyone tried to bully me). Sophomore year I bought a blazing fast 2x CD burner right after we got our trial cable modem (I was able to pull 10mbit with that thing.. those were the days) and proceeded to hit IRC for the latest music albums. I figured I didn't get to go to the mall often enough to buy music so I'd download the CD off of IRC and make my own cover using cdnow.com's cd cover and various artist images on the internet. The next day I walked in with Mase's new cd a day before it was supposed to come out. Everyone was shocked when I said I made the cd myself. For my sophomore and junior year of high school I sold bootleg cds to e-v-e-r-y-o-n-e.. even my principal. When Nas came out with I Am, I had a bookbag full of 40 bootlegged copies and sold them all in one day... in essence I bought my friends.
Senior year I realized how stupid it was to steal music (I was the only kid in my school that argued against napster) and used my free time to write games and programs. I didn't expect to really talk to many people that year, but everyone still hung out and partied with me. Everyone, including the high class snobs and thugged out football players told me that they expect me to do something or be somewhere big after college.
The day I left high school will probably be the saddest day of my life because so many people liked me for who I was. A geek.
-dk