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 good soccer player; I started a scandalous underground newspaper.
By the end of high school I was sufficiently acceptable that one of the recognized class beauties agreed to go on a date with me. 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 to make 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...
Great essay
I like the way you think. There popular kids in my grade...Alot of them are smart but the fact the made them different from the nerds are that they party and they're not lame...but the nerds...they are smart but they dont go out often...mostly spend their times at home studying...n they dont take much time into the trend or fashion unlike the popular kids..
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