Hey, give the guy some credit; it was a 1502.
You leave your retro-canon out of this. The saddest SBTB moments where when the show would start and it was Zach sitting on a desk and starting his monologue about the time… blah blah blah and you knew it was a failed Miss Bliss episode being thrown back at you.
When I was in high school, I was annoyed by TV nerds for a rather different reason. It always seemed like they ended up with a token girlfriend sooner or later (after the producers started feeling guilty about always using the same character as a punching bag, presumably). That didn’t match my high school nerd experience!
Did heeee do that?
What seperates nerds from other kids is not their intelligence, but their social awkwardness. Thinking people don’t like you because of your intelligence is just self justification. No one likes to interact with awkward people, so people avoid interactions. People experience this as shunning and being mean to nerds but in actuality high school is a socially difficult time for alot of people and why would a person choose to hang out with an awkward person over someone with social skills?
I was not a fan of SBTB but Screech did not seem to have it so bad from what I did see. He got to hang out with cool kids and beautiful girls and even got to have a reasonably attractive girlfriend. I would have traded my high school experience for his in a new york minute.
It’s not quite correct to say that nerds are socially awkward, though I understand how most people could get that impression. Rather, nerds socialize differently from most folks. Put a bunch of nerds together, and we’ll socialize just fine with each other. Put one nerd in with a bunch of non-nerds, and he’ll have a hard time socializing with them. But then again, put one non-nerd in with a bunch of nerds, and the non-nerd will have a similarly hard time.
To the OP, another offender (and a personal pet peeve of mine) was The Breakfast Club. Everyone else ends the movie with a hot boyfriend or girlfriend. The nerd ends the movie with the privilege of doing everyone else’s homework for them. Worse, the homework he’s doing is talking about how much the group has bonded, even while he himself is shunned from the bonding.
I don’t fully agree. I think if you put a non nerd in a room with a bunch of nerds, the non nerd will do just fine. Because there is an art to socializing, and the cool cat is just good at it. Even with nerds, he knows how to get in there and really grease the wheels up and slide. I have seen it quite often. Where I used to work, it was divided…the tech side (nerds) and the sales side (cool cats).
The techies had a hard time coming over to the sales side and fitting in, but the sales side would go over and mess around with the techies sometimes with no problem.
I do agree, though, that when nerds get together, they do just fine. Like I said, my daughter learned the power of finding her “people” as she calls it, and it busts my freakin’ heart to see how she just seems so thrilled with her social life now.
I have always thought it was wack how the nerd in Breakfast Club didn’t get a romantic story line. He did write a kick ass paper though. They had to go with the man for the job.
Yeah, it’s not intelligence that gets you mocked and picked on, it’s what you do with it. Being nerdy can mark you as uncool though.
If you go around correcting people, pontificating and playing generally smarter-than-thou when you’re in middle school or high school, odds are that you will be a misfit and lonely.
I was actually lucky enough to be pretty athletic when I was younger, so I was thought of as a jock and not a nerd, even though I was absolutely as nerdy as they come… just a 6’1" 240 lb one who was the starting center on the football team.
It’s always fascinated me how I was treated differently than a lot of my friends- we all got together and played D&D and video games, etc… yet because I played sports, I was ok, but they were considered huge dorks. They weren’t picked on or anything, just considered uncool.
Sure, a “cool cat” can fit in with any group, and some folks are just naturally good at social skills. But I think that “nerd” vs. “cool cat” is a false dichotomy. Most non-nerds are not slick cool cats who can make themselves at home in any social circle. Most folks are just, well, normal. And heck, there are even a few folks who are both cool cats and nerds.
I think for a lot of people it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nerds aren’t good at social skills, they’re a nerd, therefore they’re no good at social skills. And once you ‘know’ that, all it takes is a fall off the horse to prove it to yourself.
I guess I just have a different idea of what ‘nerd’ means. In my opinion, cool cats aren’t nerds, by definition.
And ‘normal people’ aren’t necessarily cool, but they still seem to have a handle on the whole social interaction thing, so I do think I have noticed that they seem to be able to fit in with a gang of nerds better than a gang of nerds fit in with…well, anyone but nerds.
I have always wanted to be a nerd, though. I just never met the requirements. I will always envy them their grasp on math and physics and such.
For me? Because slumming is hard. Those guys are fun, but you can’t really have an in-depth conversation with most of them. That’s true even for people like me who were able to move between social groups fairly easily. My real friends were always nerds because I didn’t have to dumb down the way I that to talk to them. I didn’t have to talk about the banal or uninteresting topics just to act as a social lubricant. I can just skip to the interesting stuff
I think it is erroneous to think that nerds are lacking in social skills in general. They are just lacking in the ones that are necessary to talk to people who aren’t like them. And I have actually seen the opposite: “normal” people who couldn’t talk to nerds. You’ve probably seen it, too, but you just don’t think of it the same way. One really important social skill is the ability to talk to someone who is awkward or uncomfortable. I know many guys who can only assume everyone is comfortable and hope that the assumption puts the other party at ease. Really good socializers will do what they can to put the other person at ease.
Those are the people that are “cool” as opposed to the people who are “normal.” Sure, “normal” people get along better with nerds than nerds do with them, but I think that’s more because nerds are more accepting than average, probably because they know what it’s like to feel shunned.
Disagree. Or at least I don’t completely agree. I’ll concede that there can be a different kind of socialization amongst nerds, but there’s no guarantee a bunch of nerds thrown together will get along just fine. In my experience, there can be a LOT of social friction between nerds; the big thing, though, is that non-confrontation is the name of the game.
I’ve seen nerd groups where one person has PISSED EVERYONE ELSE OFF repeatedly, everyone else will bitch about them behind their back… But no one will actually confront them or call them on their shit. Passive aggressiveness reigns.
I disagree with this somewhat. Most people have certain subjects they can talk pretty in-depth about - it’s just that your topics of interest may not align with theirs. The nerd/non-nerd divide centers around what those topics are, it seems.
Yeah, I really envy those rare true social butterflies, who can flit in and out between different social groups and talk to them at their level, and at least give the impression that they’re enjoying doing so (and maybe actually are!). They’ll put the awkward at ease, bridge gaps between disparate personalities, and steer the conversation in a direction that’s comfortable for all involved. If someone is feeling left out, they’ll notice and find a way to include them. I think the key thing that separates the true butterflies from your run-of-the-mill “cool” or “popular” people is a genuine empathetic listening for what other people are communicating (not necessarily saying). I can probably count the number of people like this I’ve met in my life on one hand, and they’re all extraordinary human beings.
Oh, certainly, and I should have phrased my post better. I meant that the nerdiness is not itself an obstacle to socialization. But like any people, other things can certainly throw up a barrier.
Thank you for putting up with my whining.
I’m not quite sure where I was going with this thread. Maybe to see if my view of the show was justified? That’s why I wanted it in The Pit instead of Cafe Society.
But I do recognize that the problem is not the show, it’s me. I’m not trying to “blame” SBTB for having a bad childhood. From what I could see, there was no rule in the Pit that said that the things you pit have to be reasonable.
I don’t think I was unfairly bullied because I was “smarter” than my tormentors; far from it. My “nerd” experiences were more like Dawn Wiener from Welcome to the Dollhouse than SBTB. I didn’t have the benefit of being grade-point-average smart. Dawn wasn’t very smart either, and she “contributed” some to her alienation by lashing out at the few people she was able to connect with. I find myself in that same position. Screech, at least, didn’t seem to have any emotional scars that prevented him from connecting with people.
Thanks again.