Read this essay
Paul Graham, Arc language designer, Lisp guy, and Ph.D. from that silly school next to MIT in Cambridge, has an excellent essay entitled Why Nerds are Unpopular available at his Web site. I normally don’t speak up about essays this quickly, but this one is definitely worth a read for anyone who’s survived high school, any geek/nerd, or anyone currently enduring the ritual that happens between ages 14 and 18.
Graham’s essay raises some interesting and important points; in my opinion, he hits the nail on the head on almost every instance. I’ve gone through the torture of sitting at a “D table”, and it wasn’t until senior year that I realized it didn’t really matter and I should just do what I wanted to do. Some kids aren’t that lucky.
HA was a good place. I loved the teachers, I had some great friends, and I felt like I could really get involved. Unfortunately, I was involved first-hand in the desire that Graham talks about in both middle school at RBMS and high school at HA: the goal of being popular. That was my primary goal for the first two years of high school. He’s not afraid to venture into the dark sides of the high school experience; he even remarks that being smart (and therefore unpopular in most cases) may have lead to an increased mindset that suicide was a good option. I myself didn’t ever really consider it to any great extent. Reading through the essay brought back some vivid and, at times, painful memories of how I lived for those seven years.
One of the main points Graham raises is whether smart kids want to be popular. While my gut reaction was definitely “of course I wanted to be popular!”, his reasoning to his arguments made perfect sense. Would I rather have spent time trying to be popular or working in the Faculty Technology Center for an hour after school each day for my senior year? The answer’s clear for me.
I have to say that I think the personality type of a person has an effect, though. I’ve often thought that I’m not a social person – I don’t like spending time with other people and prefer being solitary – but that’s not always true. When I’m with a geek, I can talk for hours. Someone who likes Monty Python. Someone who isn’t afraid to joke around about anything. That’s what I found in the group of friends I had during my senior year, and I’m eternally grateful for it. On top of all that, I found a girlfriend who did incredible amount for me in a lot of different ways. I’d be a completely different person now without her.
People told me in high school that the situation would improve in college. I think it has. First of all, in college there’s not the proximity that’s involved within a one-building high school; you just simply don’t see the same people every day, and the ones that don’t share your interests really just don’t talk with you. That’s the beauty of specialized classes.
On the topic of specialized classes, I think that definitely plays a role in both the success and downfall of parts of the high school experience. The AP track (I’ll call it that, seeing as how basically my entire senior year was spent with the same 20 or so people, give or take) gave the “popular” kids an easy target, but it made the relationships within that group stronger. I’m not sure which is better.
Then there’s the solution… if there is one. High school sucks in some way for probably about 80% of the people who attend it. Graham paints a really dark yet mostly accurate picture of how things are run (only when it came to APs was I able to escape the dreaded “designed mainly for testability” types of questions), but there’s most likely an escape. The courses I remember most and remember enjoying most were those that took a non-traditional approach to education; in other words, there had to be more to learning than just “read the book, test next week”. Mr. Merrithew, Mrs. Leithiser, Mr. Balentine, Mr. Hills, Madame Achey, and others all really made classes interesting and, in turn, had a big effect on my life. That is, at least, the first step. I think the second step is to have more programs like the Leadership Lock-In we had. That was simply an ingenious idea. People from the math team talked to people from football. People from baseball talked to mock trial. Those who didn’t care and were just in high school mainly to make others’ lives miserable weren’t there. It broke down stereotypes and allowed everyone to see that we had more in common than we had differences. And, surprisingly to almost all, we wanted the same things for the school.
I’ve also always been a huge proponent of the fact that family plays a large role in how kids act; they’re the ultimate role model. I’ve been fortunate enough to have an outstanding, supportive family. Many of the kids who fit into some of the “antagonistic” groups in Graham’s writings didn’t have that (but thankfully, I’ve seen that some of every group in high school have matured into very responsible adults). In a world of ever-changing family types and a growing number of split, single-parent families, I think the priorities have to be revisited. How is a child going to treat his peers when he doesn’t have a firm backing of values from the people with whom he’s spent his life?
With a combination of awesome parents and an awesome set of teachers, I like to think that I became a very successful student. I’m not talking about class rank or SAT scores. I’m talking about how much I learned in life from high school. I think that’s just as important as learning stupid facts from books that you’ll never use (not all of high school was that, but a large portion was); maybe the focus in high school has to be shifted in part from material to relationships in some way. Only with a combination of those two factors will high school thrive. Again, I’m not blaming teachers or parents for what happens; I think it just needs to be evaluated again in some ways.
Graham’s essay made me really ponder some of the things that had been sitting in my mind for a couple years. In my opinion, he summarized everything beautifully. If you disagree, I’d encourage you to leave a comment. I’d love to hear your opinions.
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