The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory, and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School

by Alexandra Robbins

  Finally the moderator returned to the stage. “The winner”—he paused, “with five hundred sixty points is”—he paused again and surveyed the audience—“Frostpike!” Frostpike erupted in cheers. “In second, with five hundred fifty points . . . Strattville.”

  “What?!” Eli’s team exploded in muffled outrage. As soon as the moderator completed his remarks and presented the trophy to Frostpike, the Strattville coach marched to the judge’s table to protest the ten-point Bible question. Eli and his team remained in the now-emptied auditorium while the judges conferred. They said they had to check their “official sources” and that they would email Strattville by the end of the day. The email never came.

  On the bus ride back to school, the team members concocted excuses for their narrow loss. “People shouldn’t have been applauding; we couldn’t hear.” “We couldn’t hear anything because we were the table all the way at the end.” “Our math bonus was calculus, but everyone else got Algebra 2 or geometry questions.”

  The coach broke in. “There’s no reason to place all of the blame on anyone else,” he said. “You all had at least one question you should have answered right and you know it, and that would have made us the winners.”

  He’s right, Eli thought, recalling a few of the questions. Eli felt better. Strattville had placed second in the Academic Bowl championships, had trampled its rival, and performed well enough to deserve first place. Leading his school to its best ever season was not a bad way for Eli to end his career.

  The Strattville administration never once acknowledged the victory.

  ______

  HOW SCHOOLS MAKE THINGS WORSE

  In nine classes at a Midwestern summer-school program, researchers randomly divided elementary school-age students into yellow and blue groups and gave them corresponding T-shirts to wear. Six of the nine classrooms (three classes formed the control group) displayed posters supposedly of the prior summer’s attendees. Posters about athletic contests and a spelling bee showed that five of the six event winners wore yellow shirts. In three of those classrooms, over the course of the summer, teachers did not mention the groups. In the other three classes, teachers were instructed to make use of the color labels and organize activities using those groups, without favoring one group over another. By the end of the program, the only children who developed stereotypes and biases were the kids whose teachers referred to the yellow and blue groups. Even when surrounded by posters conveying implicit messages about color group status, the children didn’t categorize the groups unless the teacher acknowledged them.

  Students are not solely to blame for creating cafeteria fringe or for the selection of which students are treated as such. Whether intentionally or not, many administrators, teachers, and school policies or traditions foster the same results as the teachers who distinguished yellow from blue. Over the last several years, students have shared with me ways in which this discrepancy occurs at the academic level. A Massachusetts “flirt,” for instance, said that at her public school, “The honors students use their rigorous academic record as justification that they are better than the [non-honors] kids. The school encourages this distinction. My math teacher once said, ‘The same amount of energy it takes to teach all thirty-five of you guys is how much it takes to teach eighteen [non-honors] kids.’ This type of comment isn’t unusual.”

  Neither is a more controversial form of neglect. An Illinois middle school teacher described a number of instances in which students singled out English Language Learner (ELL) students and ridiculed them in front of their lunch tables. This behavior continued for months until ELL teachers notified administrators, who did nothing other than reprimand the offenders. Business as usual, perhaps—except the teacher believed the offenders were modeling teacher behavior. “Sometimes teachers and staff treat these kids differently,” she told me. “Administration is slow in reacting toward situations regarding ELL students being wronged. And I have heard [colleagues’] comments about generalizations toward certain ethnic groups. The biases and stereotypes are there, and of course that comes out in their teaching, no matter how subtle. Kids usually catch on to how teachers act toward them.”

  In this manner, teachers play a role not only in perpetuating stereotypes, but also in alerting students to them. A Texas teacher said that at his school, “The veteran teachers and administrators tend to treat students according to dress. The emo kids sometimes are kept at arm’s length or are chastised about piercings. The openly gay kids have complained that some of their teachers have stopped lessons to lecture them in front of their peers about sexual morality and not being able to ‘enter the Kingdom of God’ if they don’t change their ‘ways.’ ”

  Psychologists suggest that teachers are influenced by students’ cliques and vice versa, fueling a cycle that keeps certain groups atop the social hierarchy. One study described how this phenomenon can cause an achievement catch-22: Rather than vary student pairings, “Teachers may take the social structure of the class into account in making ability group assignments in an effort to utilize student friendships to promote learning. As a result, the presence of cliques can affect a teacher’s decision regarding the number, size, and composition of tracks and ability groups in a school. These grouping characteristics, in time, affect student achievement.”

  Educators can be just as guilty as students of affixing labels and then refusing to look beyond them. Teachers across the country discussed colleagues who treated students poorly for this reason. An Iowa teacher reported that a coworker gave some students “the same grade all four years she had them because she didn’t believe they could change after freshman year.” At this school, a few days before classes started, the administration briefed new teachers on the “troubled” students. “We were told horror stories about attitudes and that these kids should be thrown out of class and sent to the office immediately if needed,” the teacher said. “Since they are labeled the troublemakers of the school by the administration, a lot of the faculty has bought into that and will automatically send them to the office. Those students are immediately suspected to be guilty of anything. Sometimes they deserve it, but a lot of times the teacher could handle it without intervention.”

  One of the students labeled “troubled” by the administration was simply a quirky girl who liked anime. “I have never had a problem with her in my class. She’s a good kid who just got an unfortunate label. Other faculty talk about her like she’s the worst troublemaker they’ve ever met and I wonder if they’ve actually ever paid attention to her or know anything about her, because I just don’t see it,” the teacher told me. “I was taken aback that we were warned about these particular students and weren’t given the chance to make up our own minds. The students don’t really put a label on the ‘troubled’ students. That’s the label the administration puts on them. They seem to be targeted for bad behavior that other students mostly get away with.”

  Several students told me they have experienced this treatment firsthand. Dawn, a freshman in Florida, was in class when a cheerleader sniped to a teacher about her, “I think you should write her up for being ugly.” Dawn retorted, “I think you should be written up for being stupid.” The teacher kicked Dawn out of his class and gave her an in-school suspension, while the cheerleader got off scot-free. “Because I’m known as a crazy and emo kid, I was the only one who got in trouble,” Dawn said. “Because she was a cheerleader, she couldn’t get in trouble.”

  Teachers blame their colleagues for wedging students so tightly into categories that they get stuck there. “Very often, a teacher will think that once a kid is a troublemaker, he is always the one on the wrong side of a problem. This keeps the kid from learning to make the right choices (what’s the use?) and to trust adults for advice,” said a Connecticut teacher. “Colleagues make a borderline-negative kid a confirmed troublemaker when they treat him with a lack of respect. Those kids will go out of their way to be ‘good’ for me because I tell them they have it in them. The best wa
y to get a kid to be a leader is to give him something to lead.” Or at least to believe that he has potential. Studies have shown that teachers’ and coaches’ subjective views about a student can affect the way they grade him or her. Regardless of actual performance, some teachers give higher grades to students whom they expect will do well than to the students for whom they don’t have high expectations.

  Teachers and students nationwide told me that educators give popular students preferential treatment, much like Whitney and her fellow preps experienced at Riverland. An Arkansas teacher has seen coworkers “let the in-crowd get away with more.” Her coworker, for example, has a reputation for “paying a lot of attention to the popular crowd,” she said. “It’s widely known that she writes these kids passes to skip their regular classes to come sit in her class. She has even texted a student while the student was in my class.” A teacher at a school for juvenile offenders told me about administrators and teachers favoring popular, typically wealthy kids, “not expecting them to follow the same rules as the general population and allowing them off-periods to socialize and schmooze with the adults.” A counselor in Tennessee said that some of her colleagues joke around more with the “cool kids.”

  Some teachers apparently take the jokes too far. Pennsylvania high school junior Beth Anne observed, “I see teachers participate in this social conformity as heavily as students do. In class, teachers are as merciless towards the unpopular kids as their peers are. In elementary school, teachers offered protection. If someone hurt you, made fun of you, the teacher was there to protect you. Now I see them participate in the demeaning of self-esteem.”

  On a broader level, school practices can exacerbate social issues among students. Many schools tend to give honors and awards to the same groups of students every year. An Oklahoma teacher said, “Administrators favor the families who are big-money donors or board members. Those are the students who win the year-end awards and are often warned of Facebook pictures or behavior that could hurt their chances at recognition. The outcasts are just suspended.” Students said that members of the in crowd are handed student government positions, leads in plays, team captainships, and other distinctions that are selected by teachers rather than students.

  The ways in which schools attempt to address problems among cliques can end up bolstering the same stereotypes they are trying to eradicate. Several students pointed out that many of the programs that schools implement for this purpose limit the number of participants. “It disgusts me to think that the school has spent thousands of dollars so we can go through these school-bonding lectures and nothing comes out of it,” said the Massachusetts flirt. “[One] program is supposed to create a more welcoming school environment. To be in the program, students have to be recommended by their teachers and take a Friday off every other month to play bonding games all day. Students not invited to participate become frustrated when their friends don’t have to take tests or attend class and they do. The students were asked to make a list of new people to invite in. It’s a type of invitation-only club.”

  Even administrators with the best intentions can unwittingly contribute to students’ perceptions that some kids should be elevated while others should be shunned or ignored. Many students and teachers mentioned their schools’ emphasis on athletics, and within that group, a prioritization of specific sports. Some schools let certain athletes (like Giselle) out of detentions for practices or games, whereas nonathletes can’t escape detention for any reason. Schools might issue a no-homework night for the boys’ basketball championships so that students are free to attend the game, but then don’t offer the same privilege for the girls’ soccer championships. Cheerleaders or poms perform only for certain teams. Just as Noah’s band, which was talented enough to represent the state in the Macy’s Parade, had to practice in the school parking lot so as not to damage the football field, a Texas middle school band had to step aside for what the band teacher called “preferential treatment of the athletic program.” The teacher said, “One of our concerts, scheduled eight months in advance, was moved with two weeks’ notice because an athletics banquet was scheduled on top of our performance. Three weeks ago, our classroom was taken over, and my principal did not provide our classes with an alternative space in which to hold class. We performed outside.”

  Students with even less common interests are out of luck. At a New England technical school, students in the environmental technology shop said that administrators discriminate against their program, which helps solidify their status as “the reject shop.” And over the last several years, schools across the country have eliminated or drastically reduced music, art, and science programs in order to devote more time to preparation for standardized tests in reading and math.

  Meanwhile politicians bemoan the comparative lack of North American–produced scientists. The most recent Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study reveals that U.S. students have shown no gain in science scores since 1995. As a result, government officials are scrambling to find solutions that will encourage students to become scientists and engineers. But has anyone bothered to consult students about how their school culture leads them to think about these career paths?

  Those hoping to analyze the age-old rift between jocks and nerds cannot overlook the ways in which schools themselves signify whose endeavors are more meaningful. It’s no wonder that interest in the sciences can carry a stigma for many students. If schools celebrated student scientists the same way they celebrate student athletes, more students would be encouraged to pursue the subject. Instead, science is considered nerdy because schools help students to paint it that way.

  Similarly, if Eli’s school gave the same attention to his Academic Bowl triumphs that it gave to athletic victories, perhaps his classmates would have been more likely to admire his wealth of knowledge rather than make fun of it. Few, if any, administrations throw schoolwide pep rallies that give equal billing to athletes and mathletes. Simply stated, schools effectively control which students are eligible to achieve the visibility and recognition that pave the path to perceived popularity. Too often they glorify the wrong people. A Hawaii middle school teacher said, “I have seen adults treating non-in kids differently. I’ve seen it with teachers and coaches. It kills me because they should know better—that we all are different somehow and if we didn’t have kids who thought apart from the crowd, then we’d never have innovators and people willing to take risks.”

  Another distressing aspect of schools’ elimination of programs, classes, and attitudes that would encourage imaginativeness is their timing. Studies have found that the dopamine system, which plays a large role in developing the ability to innovate, reaches its peak in activity during the teenage years. In addition, gray matter density in the posterior temporal and inferior parietal lobes of the brain increases until approximately age thirty. These areas of the brain are related to perception, which is “the most plastic and adaptable of all cognitive functions,” according to the book Iconoclast. “This may explain why so many of the early adopters [of new ideas] tend to be young adults. In addition to a robust dopamine system, their perceptual processes are more open to seeing the world in new ways.” From a biological perspective, the schooling years are the most important years in which to foster creativity, individuality, and open-mindedness. And what that means is, our schools are dissuading teens and young adults from pursuing critical educational paths at precisely the best time for students to do so.

  Chapter 11

  TWO STEPS FORWARD, ONE STEP BACK

  JOY, CALIFORNIA | THE NEW GIRL

  In PE, Joy’s class was running the mile when Joy passed Lupe, one of the Mexican girls who had harassed her. She was alone and looked upset. Joy slowed down. “Are you okay?” Joy asked, jogging in place.

  Lupe looked surprised, then smiled. “Yes,” she said.

  Joy smiled back and ran on. Lately Joy had made a valiant effort to befriend students of various cultures. She talked to D’Arnell, th
e sophomore, between classes sometimes. She had resumed chatting with Natalie, who even sought Joy out occasionally, despite her friends’ disapproval. She also had become close friends with Christine, the Filipino girl in two of her classes.

  A few days later, Mia approached Joy in PE. “What up with it? How you kicking it, mami?” Mia asked.

  Joy raised an eyebrow. “What does that mean?!”

  Mia laughed. “It’s what’s up, or what’s up with you.”

  “That’s funny,” Joy said.

  “You’re funny!” Mia said. “It’s cool, though. You don’t speak Spanish, right?”

  “No, I don’t, but I’m trying to learn. I’m terrible at it!” Joy said. “I’ve been doing it since grade two.”

  “Wow,” Mia said. “So how do you say what’s up in Jamaica?”

  “Wah gwan,” Joy replied.

  “¡¿Qué?!”

  Joy laughed. “Wah gwan. It’s really dialect.”

  “Oh. Jamaican isn’t a language?”

  “It’s a language—I mean, we speak it—but we call it a dialect because it isn’t recorded as a language. The real name is patois.”