Reply #51: I had a high school friend who was capable of making straight A's [View All]

[Lydia Leftcoast]

but who in ninth grade suddenly turned into a C student.

She advised me to do the same, saying that if I just weren't such a bookworm, I could get any boy I wanted.

I thought that was crazy and told her so. I didn't want any boys who didn't want me the way I was. Frankly, I thought that the boys that everyone else lusted after were dull and crude, and I preferred the junior mad scientist types.

Fortunately for my friend, her parents raised hell with her and told that she definitely wouldn't have any social life of any sort until she got her grades back up to the level she was capable of.

For the most part, I found that being smart in high school was just one step on the social scale above having a pungent unwashed body odor.

The mass media don't help. Even back in the 1950s and 1960s, the message in TV comedies and dramas was that intellectualism was something that had to be "fixed" so that the person could be normal. To the extent that outright nerds tend not to have a lot of friends, there is some truth in that. But it made me angry to see socially well-adjusted students who felt that they had to hide their interest in reading and other intellectual matters, or at least join a sports team or the cheerleading squad, not because they were interested, but to avoid social ostracism.