Paul Graham on Nerds, Popularity, and thus School

[modularblues]

Let out the complaints. They might make good discussion. At least they'll be entertaining to read.

There are two main groups and many small sub-cliques in my high school. The main groups are racial in nature (neither is black because the black population is ~5% of the students) So by default I couldn't be in one of those groups, and I was too "targeted" to be in the other one... their parents were prolly like, why can't you be more like [insert my name]? And then they might retort, but [insert my name] is a robot nerd twit. No wonder they fucking hated me, even now, and even my younger sibling too... To this day! I'll bet they wanted to bully me, but I'm above-average athletically (was even on a team) and I've had a couple of incidences of violent behavior in middle school after provocation, so...

Of course, they didn't know to what degree I had to sacrifice my sanity for "academic success". This might better fit in another thread. I have to say though I would prefer to be an iconoclast because I don't like being conventional. That was why I can count with one hand the number of kids at my school who I could have real conversations with. (about 1000 students total, in 4 grades) Just that it would be nice to be a socially-fluent and verbally-expressive iconoclast, instead of only in my own head and online.

I think architecture also has something to do with a school's culture.

My middle/high school is on a hill, where the high school is at a higher elevation (surprise!) They are joined via a circular cafeteria, which in a sense also functions as an approximately bilateral reflective plane in the floor plans. The high school's math and science departments are about 0.5 floor below ground, which would be terrific for floods after lab explosions and IRL games of Dungeons and Dragons.

[sakekasi]

I 1-upped everyone by inventing a new dick-measuring contest and dropping out of their asinine competitions.

haha nice. dude how did you pull that off?

[BurningLed]

I really was into this mindset during middle school, a very elitist nerd -- I did well academically and (looking back) was kind of a dick about it to everyone else. I had a few close friends, mostly out of school and online, but not many past that. There weren't really cliques, but there was a definite "social ladder" (Though it was really more of a strong circular gradient, with the popularity towards the middle.)

During my first couple of years of high school, I realised that I wasn't automatically smarter than the entire student body, and that people stopped talking to me quickly because I was an ass to them, not because they thought they were better than me (Which in turn caused me to think even higher of myself and worse of them.)

At that point, I had to learn proper social interaction, in a high-school student body of 1600. That sucked and I'm not quite done with it.

On the bright side though, those cliques aren't really impenetrable. It's more like a sticky clump of cliques, each of them has one or two socializing members that connect to another couple of cliques, which in turn have those members and connect to other cliques, etc. So the school is like an enormous web, difficult to navigate but entirely possible.

My judging of the school might be colored by the program I'm in though -- The people who came into it were 3 or 4 different social groups, divided amongst 20 kids, and we spend half the day with one-another for all 4 years of high school. The groups are forced to become interactive at that point.

[tastelikecoke]

My earlier post in the first page said that my school is not like what Paul Graham said, turns out it's pretty much similar to it.
Our school solidified into something like this:
1. group where most gossipiest and nosiest people go. Somehow most are male.
2. group that plays frisbee.
3. group that plays football.
4. The elitists that frequently brag about how smart they are, and how close they are to each other, also how they always have these heavy metal composite chunks called DSLRs with them everyday.
5. group distinguished by their favorite game, mafia (it was called flag football once in here)
6. group distinguished by their favorite instrument, guitars.
7. me, and other lone wanderers venturing the capital wasteland.
Not to mention our required military training class created a backbone for the school hierarchy.

Glad it's okay since it's all over now and I graduated. But I still bear a ball of hatred to the 4 group.

[slightlydead]

Very interesting article, I wish I could have read it maybe a decade ago lol, then again I might not have appreciated the depth of his words or related as well.

In any case, a good way to get people to stop bothering you is a fight. I was an angry violent nerd lol and I've gotta say, the loneliness of being ignored is even worse than the bullying. Bullying is some social interaction right? When you get your wish and get left alone, it's not that fun.

[harpyblues]

I'm at a public high school, but I won't agree with the assessment that the nerds/smarter kids here are social outcasts at all. My school's huge, with something like over a thousand students per grade level/year, so it's too big for any one clique to have considerable influence over the entire school body.

It also helps that being a nerd here is kinda the norm, rather than the exception (or maybe that's because I'm in the AP classes, which are also ridiculously huge in number). A lot of the 'jockier' types tend to be pretty nerdy as well, so there's less of the statification. Not that there isn't bullying/clique stuff going on, but it's mostly between the more normal nerds and the creepy, trenchcoat mafia, wannabe Columbine shooter kids who are mostly harmless (some of them are legitimately crazy, though: we've got at least one guy in that group with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder that threatened to kill his gf's family).

I think the article writer is painting with a too broad brush, in this case. Not all highschools pan out to Hollywood stereotypes.

[RebeccaRGB]

I was an angry violent nerd lol and I've gotta say, the loneliness of being ignored is even worse than the bullying. Bullying is some social interaction right? When you get your wish and get left alone, it's not that fun.

I disagree. Hard.

[slightlydead]

I was an angry violent nerd lol and I've gotta say, the loneliness of being ignored is even worse than the bullying. Bullying is some social interaction right? When you get your wish and get left alone, it's not that fun.

I disagree. Hard.

How do you disagree with a personal experience? Anyways I meant i was addicted to the anger. It's was a rush.

[Mokele]

It's interesting to see the divide between the experiences of those in small vs large schools.

IME, little schools can have less anti-intellectualism (largely because such schools are usually private and/or selective), but you can wind up being the *only* nerd, as I was, which is terribly isolating.

Big schools, IME, tend to have more cliques, more rigid cliques, and more social stratification, but at least there's the possibility of a "nerd" clique of some sort. Lack of mixing can ameliorate bullying, and having other nerds was, for me, the most important thing.