Why nerds are unpopular

when we were in junior high school, my friend RICH And I

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 mayu semm strange tom imagine that it could be any other way. But it could. Being smart doesn’t make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor, as far as I can tell ,is the problem so bad in most other countries. But in a typical American secondary school,being smart is likely to make your life difficult. Why?

The key to this mystery is to rephrase the question slightly . why don’t smart kids make themselves popular?

so far I’ve been finessing the relationship between smart and nerd, using them as if they were interchangeable.

In fact it’s only the context that makes them so.

A nerd is someone who isn’t socially adept enough.

few smart kids can spare the attention that popularity requires.

unless they also happen to be good looking,natural athletes, or siblings of popular kids, they’ll tend to become nerds.