The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth - Alexandra Robbins [182]
Although so many students have the same things to say, they cross signals in a maelstrom of misinterpretation, then lose sight of each other behind their stereotypes. A Nebraska sophomore, ostracized at school because of her high grades, said that one day the boy next to her was complaining about homework. Attempting to strike up a friendly conversation, she said that she was also swamped. “But you’re smart. You like doing homework,” the boy protested. The sophomore told me, “His response really got to me. Lots of students share his stereotype of smart kids. It was like he thought just because I aced a lot of tests and always remembered to do my homework, I didn’t enjoy the things that normal teenagers enjoy.”
Just because students are different doesn’t mean that they have nothing in common. Old interests can be experienced with new people; new common pursuits can develop. As Blue learned from his SCH teammates’ admiration of his room and his adventures, new friends can appreciate your interests even if, and perhaps especially if, they haven’t been exposed to them before.
As much as this book is about applauding students who dare to be different, it is also about how many of them ultimately long for the same thing. More than almost anything else, everyone I followed wanted a connection, someone to listen and to care. The gamer, the band geek, the new girl, the loner, the nerd, the popular bitch, the weird girl—to be sure, they were diverse individuals. But I hope I am not too naïve to think that had they met one another, they might have been friends.
Students, parents, teachers, and school administrators can take numerous steps toward fixing the problems detailed in this book. To begin with, here is one approach not to pursue. In an article entitled “From Nerds to Normals,” sociologist David Kinney wrote, “Adolescents who were unpopular in middle school and who became involved in high school activities and friendship groups were able to recover by becoming self-confident and reconstructing themselves as ‘normal’ within a changing school social system.” No student should be encouraged—by anyone—to change himself until he’s “normal,” a term that says everything and means nothing.
Yet this attitude is disturbingly common. Instead of revamping school policies to welcome every child, many school systems are bent on revamping the students to conform to their schools. Some systems are so horrifyingly regressive that they deliberately retool policies to make non-in-crowd students feel unwelcome and unwanted, such as the Mississippi county school board that cancelled the 2010 high school prom rather than permit a lesbian senior to wear a tuxedo and bring her girlfriend to the dance. The educational atmosphere can be so intolerant that in late 2010, five students committed suicide after being harassed because bullies believed they were gay. Two of the students were thirteen years old.
Enough of this. Too many people have lost sight of the fact that the most integral part of a school’s success is the well-being of its students. The worst aspect of the treatment of cafeteria fringe isn’t the name-calling. It isn’t the loneliness. It isn’t even the regrettable demise of attitudes and programs that are important for fostering creativity, originality, and independence. The most heartbreaking consequence of this treatment is that so many tens of thousands of students—imaginative, interesting, impressionable people—think that they have done or felt something wrong.
Here are some recommendations for students, parents, and school personnel to set things