Re:I think it can be better summed up by.. (Score:5, Funny) by varith (530137) on Tuesday February 18, @02:42PM (#5329876)

I was a member of the other group mentioned in the article- a stoner. So I don't really remember many of the conversation I had. Just that they were hilarious. Actually, everything got hilarious.

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I was like, "Wow, I'm at the Oscars or something," but then I was like, "No, I'm at Macworld."
--Ellen Feiss

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Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.

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yes, i am a leftwing whiner [dyndns.org]

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Het, when I get out of college, odds are there will be jobs of 50k and up just waiting for me

Looks like you'll be doing Graduate level work at Hard Knocks U.

It's the queers. They're in it with the aliens. They're building landing strips for gay Martians, I swear to God

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The real geeks were not the extremely bright, but rather the extremely akward. The punk rockers, the goth kids, the vampires (who were usually also homosexual), the over-excited white guy that acted black but had no black friends, the "only thing I'm good at is sports" guy, the group of fat girls that tried to dress provactively, the surfer wannabes, the skater wannabes, et cetera. Most of the geeks weren't very bright at all, and certaingly weren't elitist.
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War is a racket [fas.org]

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As far as the "Why Nerds are Unpopular" link goes, I mostly agree.

On the other hand, the "stuffed into lockers" link, goofy though it is, makes a good point. In the adult world, you're liked more or you're liked less. But, if every day when you come home from work, a pack of more socially elevated adults beat you up, gave you a black eye or bloody nose, stole your money and shredded your papers, society doesn't consider that boys will be boys fun. Those people would go to prison.

It's not obvious to me why that's something a seventh grader should be expected to suck up and blamed if he can't deal with it.
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Read my journal! [slashdot.org] Comment!

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Re:Helpful? (Score:5, Insightful) by evilpenguin (18720) on Tuesday February 18, @02:52PM (#5329993) (http://www.multitool.net/)

Everybody needs to learn that the goal of society is to get the best out of every member and to make life better for every member. Every member. Society is not improved by aligning oursleves into subgroups bent on damaging or disparaging members of another group. In practice, this means the obvious: People shouldn't abuse nerds. But it does also mean the less obvious. Nerds shouldn't belittle stupid people who are bigger than they are. I actually learned this in college: "Do not get into political arguments with drunk football players." Call it Schwarz's Law. The truth is, it is easy to get along with people. We would all do better if we could just learn to shut up when we want to say or do something hurtful or angry. Yes, "jocks" can be brutes, but there is a smug and confrontational brand of "intellect" that enjoys rubbing other's ignorance in their faces. This is a kind of "nerd brutishness." You can be an intellectual brute. In the mind of the knowledgeable person, all s/he is doing is stating facts. But the superior physical strength of the brute is just a fact as well. How can the brute be blamed and the "nerd" remain blameless? I'm not saying that any assault is EVER justified. I am just saying that if the "nerd" were a truly smart person, s/he would realize that certain behaviors provoke and that those behaviors can be managed. In fact, it is possible to enlist a mass of people to your own side through the application of skills in human relations. I remember in adolescence, however, believing that this compromised my "individuality." I remained separate and I had a truly miserable experience. And it is not like my stand helped me in adulthood. In fact, it was not until I began to learn:         1) Not to correct people just because I knew they were wrong.         2) Not to criticize         3) Not to order people around         That I began to succeed. The only way to get someone to do something is to make them want to do it. Does telling people they are wrong, or telling people they are stupid, or telling people to do things make them want to do it? No. It makes them defensive, angry, and resentful.         Now, to anyone struggling with these issues in school now: Yes, you are smart. Yes, you do know things, and you are excited that you know things. I'm not telling you to change anything about yourself. However, if you will just ask yourself a few questions before you speak, I hope you may make your life easier and you might enjoy yourself more.         How would I feel if I were this person?         Is this person going to be better for what I am about to say?         Am I lifting this person up, or am I trying to raise myself by lowering this person?         The brutes should ask themselves these same questions. In fact, we would all be better off if we did. In fact, I should probably have asked myself them before I wrote this! As I said, I'm new to this way of thinking myself. But if you are young and having trouble getting along, please, I ask you to think about this now and not to wait. Of course, everyone else should be thoughtful of your feelings too, but your behavior is the ony one under your direct control. And when you begin to select what you do and say in such a way as to lift other people, you will find that they give you what you want. Will what I say or do help this person to be their best?

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"Why people with social problems lean towards academics"

Whether they excel at them or not is an entirely different matter. Enough people on the site have said it... there are plenty of people out there who were dumb and unpopular. I knew of many people who were intelligent and popular too.

I know... imagine that... academnically-smart, creative, athletic and popular people?

I've got a bunch of uber-geeks sitting near me right now. They're fully grown. Wow they're awful. I cringe when they eat their soup with their mouth open. I cringe when they loudly complain on the phone about the arrangement of books in bookstores. Their body-odour wafts over here from time to time. I feel like yelling sometimes, "if you would just stop sputtering spitballs, farting in my cubicle, talking about your superior intellect, RPG characters and fantastic technical skills, you might have a better job and more friends." Unix admins... ugh. These guys don't even like eachother.

They only bug me so much because I don't tell them to f-off and let me get my work done. People in that state get lonely and just want somebody to talk to... so they cling.

It's inhuman for me to tell them go get lost, and it is in poor taste. So I put up with them. Some of them are not too bad, they're just not used to the local culture... others are born-and-raised locals, dumb as bricks, no matter how smart they tell me they are.

What kind of idiot walks into your cubicle, reads your screen, tells you about the latest miniatures they painted, farts, and just stands there?

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I seem to recall that the people who took the most shit in high school were always the whiny, elitist, "I'm-smarter-than-you" types.

You are really a piece of work.

First, you prejudge the article without reading it [slashdot.org].

You know, where you say:

And I'm sure its going to do nothing but reinforce lots of negative stereotypes and Katz-style whining.

Now, you blame the victims for being whiny, elitist, "smarter-than-you" types.

I don't know, maybe my experience was odd. When I was in High School, the nerds stayed as far away from the types who might pick on them as possible, but were accosted anyway.

What I seem to recall is that those who inflicted violence on nerds were also those who told sexist jokes, treated women as objects and had the least tolerance for the mentally handicapped. How's that for a generalization? I think it's an honest portrayal, though.

In any case, I fail to see how someone's whiny, elitist, "smarter-than-you" attitude could ever justify physical abuse.

Provoking a bear twice my size by poking it with a stick doesn't make me a victim when it mauls me. It makes me a fool who should have watched what he was doing.

We're not talking about bears or other wild animals here. We're talking about physically abusive people.

In the adult world, someone who responds to perceived slights with violence is not excused away.

Give us an example of what these abusive nerds were doing to provoke these poor jocks? Oh my gosh, did they whine? Did they act smart in Science class? Well then, they had it coming to them!

No wonder we have such trouble with education these days. Anyone who acts 'elite' is targetted for violence.

I suppose when a woman gets beaten by her husband, you would want to check the wife to make sure she wasn't being whiny. She might have it coming to her, right? At least, that's how you remember it? The wives who got beaten usually are asking for it?
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Careful! Don't mod me up because you think I'm Jordan Hubbard [slashdot.org]. I'm not he!

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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 [moundsparkacademy.org], 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 [grantham.de]
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Although the Senator insisted he was not drunk, he could not explain his nudity.

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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:

"You went through the trouble of making two sets of answers - one for me to read, and the ones you ansewred on the multiple choice test - so I could know you weren't bullshitting me. Fine - we'll compare answers when we get the tests back, and then talk."

(After the marks came back, and her "real" answers were almost 100% right, and her actual score was in the 70% range)

"OK, you weren't bullshitting. You told me you were thinking of wasting yourself because nobody liked you when you were smarter than they were, and you asked me how I put up with it. Well, OK, no bullshit - I don't care who likes me and who doesn't. I stopped giving a shit what the rest of 'em think back in public school, because every time they insult me for showing 'em up in class, it just proves I'm better than they are. "

"Not different, BETTER. I don't wanna be like them. If being what they are means being like them, I wanna be as much unlike them as I can be."

"Now finally, this suicide stuff. Life sucks for me, too. So I'll see your test answers, and if you're not bullshitting me, I'm gonna do what I think is 'wrong' thing - I'm not gonna rat you out like our parents and guidance idiots have all told us to. If you wanted to get ratted out, you picked the wrong nerd, and you'll have to find someone else. But in return, you're going to do what you think is 'wrong' -- you're not gonna off yourself for the crime of being smarter than the rest of the fucking morons in this class, no matter how badly you want to - because IT'S WHAT THEY WANT YOU TO DO."

"You wanted to know how I dealt with it, there it is - you're the one who's gonna have to choose whether to live or not. I can't stop you either way, but I choose to live because I don't wanna give them the satisfaction of knowing they beat me."

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 t

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Re:Ill tell you. (Score:5, Insightful) by octalgirl (580949) on Tuesday February 18, @04:41PM (#5330988)

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 This has always been far too common in young girls – it is un-cool to be smart/look smart/act smart. Schools have struggled with this for years, and have improved greatly in some areas like more sports for girls, and special programs to get them involved in technology. Unfortunately a lot of parents still don’t get it though, and the trend for the most part continues. I don't care who likes me and who doesn't. It seems everybody says that in high school. But as much as the need to talk themselves out of caring what others think, deep down they always do. It’s possible your family support was much greater than hers. All too often, the parents again, it is not too important that the girl gets educated properly, hey she’s just going to marry someone who is. If being what they are means being like them, I wanna be as much unlike them as I can be. Good for you, to think that way in high school. I myself tried, but I think I was 25 before I actually got it.. On a side note, I raised a daughter, and watched her tank through high school, even though I knew better. But I spent a lot of time reminding her of her strengths, and that she would leave all of these so-called friends in the dust. It does help – the family support. She is all A’s now, and very career driven. She is indeed, leaving her friends in the dust. I like to think I did something good. I’m thinking you did something very good. If only every high school girl – and boy for that matter – could be given that lecture by a peer – there would be a lot less confused teenagers mulling about.

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