smart or popular?
I know there are lot of people who are nerds in school, and they are tell the same story,
there is a strong correlation between being nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular.
Why? For someone who is still studying, that may seem like an odd question to ask. The key to this mystery is to rephrase the question: 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 the standardized tests?
So if intelligence doesn’t boost one’s popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer I believe, is that they don’t really want to be popular.
But if someone told me that earlier, I would have laughed at him. Being unpopular makes kids school life’s miserable. Some of the kids felt so miserable that they dropped out or worse, hurt themselves. Telling me that I didn’t want to be popular would have seemed like telling someone to dying of thirst in the desert that he didn’t want a glass of water. Of course I wanted to be popular.
In fact, I didn’t, or I didn’t want it badly enough. There was something else I wanted more, which was to be smart. And that meant not just doing well in school, though that counted for something, but also designing powerful rockets, or writing well, or knowing how to program computers. In general, making great things.
I never tried to separate my wants and to weigh them against each other. If I had, I would have seen that being smart was very important if someone had offered me the chance to be most popular kid in school but at the price of having below- average intelligence, I wouldn’t have taken it.
Much as they suffer from unpopularity, I don’t think many nerds would either. But most kids would take that deal. For would many of them, it would be a step up.
And that, I think is the root of the problem. Nerds serve two masters: they want to be popular, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of the secondary school.
The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about. Their attention is drawn to books of the natural world, not fashion and parties. While nerds are being trained to get the best answers, popular kids are trained to please.
Few smart kids can spare the time that popularity requires. Unless they also happen to be good looking, natural athletes, or siblings of popular kids, they tend to be nerds. And that’s y smart people are most miserable between the ages of 11- to 17. at that age popularity seems to be – all important. No wonder, smart kids are most unhappy in intermediate school and high school. Their other interests leave them with little time to work on their popularity, and since it is zero- sum game, these make them targets for the whole school.
Nerds who are still in school should not hold their breath, but maybe one day a heavily armed force of adults might rescue them. But they probably won’t be coming this month. Any immediate improvement in the nerds lives is probably going to have to come from the nerds themselves.
Merely understanding the situation they’re in should make it less painful. Nerds aren’t losers. They’re just paying a different game, a game that is much closer to the one played in the real world. Adults know this. Its hard to find successful adults who don’t claim to have been nerds in school.
It’s important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life. School is strange, artificial thing, half sterile, and half feral, but it isn’t the real thing. It’s only temporary, and if they look, they can see beyond it even while they’re still in it.
Why? For someone who is still studying, that may seem like an odd question to ask. The key to this mystery is to rephrase the question: 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 the standardized tests?
So if intelligence doesn’t boost one’s popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer I believe, is that they don’t really want to be popular.
But if someone told me that earlier, I would have laughed at him. Being unpopular makes kids school life’s miserable. Some of the kids felt so miserable that they dropped out or worse, hurt themselves. Telling me that I didn’t want to be popular would have seemed like telling someone to dying of thirst in the desert that he didn’t want a glass of water. Of course I wanted to be popular.
In fact, I didn’t, or I didn’t want it badly enough. There was something else I wanted more, which was to be smart. And that meant not just doing well in school, though that counted for something, but also designing powerful rockets, or writing well, or knowing how to program computers. In general, making great things.
I never tried to separate my wants and to weigh them against each other. If I had, I would have seen that being smart was very important if someone had offered me the chance to be most popular kid in school but at the price of having below- average intelligence, I wouldn’t have taken it.
Much as they suffer from unpopularity, I don’t think many nerds would either. But most kids would take that deal. For would many of them, it would be a step up.
And that, I think is the root of the problem. Nerds serve two masters: they want to be popular, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of the secondary school.
The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about. Their attention is drawn to books of the natural world, not fashion and parties. While nerds are being trained to get the best answers, popular kids are trained to please.
Few smart kids can spare the time that popularity requires. Unless they also happen to be good looking, natural athletes, or siblings of popular kids, they tend to be nerds. And that’s y smart people are most miserable between the ages of 11- to 17. at that age popularity seems to be – all important. No wonder, smart kids are most unhappy in intermediate school and high school. Their other interests leave them with little time to work on their popularity, and since it is zero- sum game, these make them targets for the whole school.
Nerds who are still in school should not hold their breath, but maybe one day a heavily armed force of adults might rescue them. But they probably won’t be coming this month. Any immediate improvement in the nerds lives is probably going to have to come from the nerds themselves.
Merely understanding the situation they’re in should make it less painful. Nerds aren’t losers. They’re just paying a different game, a game that is much closer to the one played in the real world. Adults know this. Its hard to find successful adults who don’t claim to have been nerds in school.
It’s important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life. School is strange, artificial thing, half sterile, and half feral, but it isn’t the real thing. It’s only temporary, and if they look, they can see beyond it even while they’re still in it.
posted by peanut at 5:43 AM
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