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.
My stock gradually rose during high school. Puberty finally arrived; I became a decent soccer player; I started a scandalous underground newspaper. So I've seen a good part of the popularity landscape.
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 tomake 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?
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4 comments:
My intelligence is lopsided.I can do one particular thing as good as anyone who ever existed but I have to hire out any work around the house.My father became impatient with me when I was unable to perform even the most simple tasks.
All students are now dumb as bricks in public schools , they have dumb downed the education system to fit the minorities , look at spot , see Jane play , 12 grade reading . yo mamma at da stooo to by stuff ?
"Normal" people, of normal intelligence (even children) are intimidated being around smart people, and tend to try and castigate and diminish smart people's accomplishments.
It is "normal" people's insecurities that make them ostracize smart people from their social groups. I was "warned," as I was obtaining my college degree, that I would lose many of my former friends who were not as educated as I was, as they would feel "threatened" by people smarter than them. Looking back, it is apparent that the advice and warning was accurate.
This artificially created ghetto culture is the one getting the attention because it displays misdirected outrage and violence, while the majority of black people just want to succeed to the best of their ability and ignore the fools who stand in the way.
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