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For the modern adult, nothing signifies self-confidence, 1)street credibility and 2)authenticity like one simple 3)confession: “I was such a nerd in high school.” (Emphasize “such” with a dramatic sigh. Then roll your eyes.) It’s pretty easy now to gaze upon the past with 4)rose-colored—and thick-framed—glasses. It’s popular to have been unpopular. A new world order has unfolded, with nerds 5)ascendant.
But someone forgot to post the memo in high school cafeterias and locker rooms across America, where the shift has barely 6)dented teenagers’ rigid social 7)hierarchies. The results are 8)disjunctive: while adolescent geekiness is something to 9)brag about in 10)hindsight, it’s much harder to embrace when you’re living through it, day after day, in the 11)crucible of high school.
As Alexandra Robbins writes in The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth, “There have been surprisingly few 12)trickle-down effects from the adult Age of the Nerd to the student world.” Bullying and 13)exclusion are 14)rampant. Pressure is building in schools to standardize not just testing, but students as well. When students 15)buckle under that weight, tragedies happen. Instead of inspiring redoubled efforts for tolerance and inclusion, such outcomes may narrow social norms even further, making classmates and teachers 16)hyperaware of students who are “different.”
Robbins’s mission is noble. She wants to push back against the 17)marginalization of 18)nonconformists, whom she calls the “cafeteria fringe.” She writes, “It is unacceptable that the system we rely on to develop children into well-adjusted, learned, cultured adults allows 19)drones to dominate and increasingly devalues freethinkers.”
Her fundamental argument is simple. Many of the traits that correlate with “outsider” status among high school students—originality, self-awareness, courage, 20)resilience, integrity and passion—reveal themselves as 21)assets later in life. (If you’re geeky enough to know the definition of “22)schadenfreude” as an 23)underclassman, you’ll probably get to experience that very feeling at a high school reunion one day.)
The teen-to-adult 24)turnabout theme isn’t particularly novel. One of its latest 25)incarnations is a forthcoming Warner Brothers film, Revenge of the Jocks, about middle-aged former athletes struggling under the yoke of the nerds, their onetime victims. Robbins 26)articulates the concept 27)crisply, however. She also gives a name to the phenomenon that points to the geeks’ eventual triumph: “28)quirk theory.”
Her narrative follows seven young “outsiders” at different high schools over the course of a year. They are defined by labels that could be the 29)major arcana in a 30)tarot deck of awkwardness: the Band Geek, the New Girl, the Loner, the Gamer, the Nerd; the group also includes a popular girl and a young 31)lesbian teacher, whose perspectives are an interesting addition, even if their inclusion feels somewhat 32)maladroit.
Her characters transmit often 33)heartrending 34)dispatches from the front lines of adolescence. Mark, an alienated gamer nicknamed Blue, ditches his schoolwork to build a wildly successful club for video game players, only to see his efforts 35)incinerated by ill-informed school administrators and 36)dismissive peers. Danielle, a loner and former 37)mascot of her classmates’ “I Hate Danielle Club,” ends up on her school’s summer reading committee, where she tries, and fails, to sell teachers on books more challenging than Twilight. Eli, a nerd, is worn down by pleas from his 38)haranguing mother to be more “normal.” He can’t wait to escape to a college far, far away.
Educators aren’t immune to all the social ugliness, either. Regan, a free-spirited teacher who is well loved by her students, is 39)tormented by 40)cliquish colleagues who bad-mouth her and 41)thwart her plans to form a gay-straight alliance. She’s finally driven to abandon the public school system altogether. It’s disturbing to see teachers exhibiting the same nasty, damaging habits that are so 42)endemic among high school students.
In Geeks, Robbins’s reporting seems to be largely secondhand. She writes scenes full of dialogues and details that could only have been recounted to her by the students themselves. Yet she tells these stories 43)omnisciently, as if she had witnessed each moment. Would one of Mark’s tormenters be self-aware enough to say, “Blue, I think I’m going to stop making fun of you”? Perhaps. But readers can’t know for sure. Even when sources mean well, self-¬reporting carries the risk of 44)bias. The microscope of adolescence also 45)inflicts 46)perceptual distortions. Robbins acknowledges as much, writing, “In the minds of their peers, too often students become 47)caricatures of themselves.” But it’s not clear whether she has 48)corroborated her characters’ recollections with accounts from the other people involved, and nowhere does she pull back the veil to explain her story-building process.
It’s impossible to tell what will happen to the main characters of Geeks. Will they inherit the Earth, or just 49)a lump of coal? We can hope for the best, of course, but this isn’t a 50)longitudinal study. To close this gap, Robbins relies primarily on accounts from celebrities like Nicole Kidman, Angelina Jolie and Ryan Seacrest, who have told 51)Us, People and other media outlets what outcasts they were in high school. Holding up celebrities as 52)templates for success seems to reinforce the same “magazine-celebrity worshipping, creativity-53)stifling society” that Robbins rightly 54)derides in her conclusion.
None of this, however, 55)dampens the urgency of her broader message. “Adults tell students that it gets better, that the world changes after school, that being ‘different’ will pay off sometime after graduation,” she writes. “But no one explains to them why.” Beyond the 56)bromides, she’s 57)dead on: teenagers need to hear that adolescence ends. And more than that, they need to believe it.
对于当代成年人来说，没有什么能比一句简单的自白“高中时的我就是个十足的怪人”（以一声颇具戏剧性的叹息来强调“十足”二字，然后再翻个白眼）更能展现自信、威名和真诚了。在今天看来，带着一副乐观的——并且是粗框的——眼镜来回望过去易如反掌。如今流行宣称自己过去并不受欢迎。随着怪人们的地位逐步提升，一种崭新的世界秩序在我们眼前徐徐展开。
但是有人忘记在全美国的高中餐厅和衣帽间里贴上这样的便签。在那里，这种转变几乎无法削弱青少年中间森严的社会分级。于是造就了两种结果：回想起来，青春期的怪人生活可以是日后的吹嘘谈资，但当你正日复一日地过着这种水深火热的高中生活时，可就很难熬了。
就像亚历山德拉•罗宾斯在《极客理应成为地球的传承者》一书中写道，“令人惊奇的是，成人世界的怪才年代对于学生世界几乎没有造成什么潜移默化的影响。”恃强凌弱和排除异己的现象猖獗。学校里不但要求考试标准化，对学生的要求标准化的压力也日甚一日。当学生们被这种压力压垮时，悲剧就会发生。这样的结局并不能加倍鼓励人们更加宽容和包容，反而可能会使得社会准则变得更加狭隘，使得同学和老师更加警惕那些“特立独行”的学生。
罗宾斯的任务很神圣。她希望能够抵制那些被她称之为“饭堂边缘人”的不合群者所受到的排斥。她写道：“我们所依赖的、能够将孩子们培养成适应性强、博学而有教养的成年人的体制却被懒汉所把持，而自由思想者的地位却日渐下降，这是绝不容许的。”
她的基本论点非常简单。高中生中那些“圈外人”符合以下许多特点——有创造力、有自我意识、有勇气、达观、正直且有激情——这些在他们未来的人生中都是宝贵的财富。（如果你够另类，在大学低年级就知道“schadenfreude（幸灾乐祸）”的含义，那么将来某天在高中同学聚会上你也许就能体会到那种感觉。）
这种以少年到成年的转变为主题的作品并不新奇。最近的典型作品之一就是华纳兄弟公司即将上映的新片《运动员的复仇》，讲的是一群人到中年的前运动员在一群曾经饱受他们欺负的“怪人”的压迫下挣扎的故事。不过罗宾斯很清楚地表达了这一概念。她还为极客最终获胜这一现象起了个名字：“奇逆论”。
她的阐述围绕着七个来自于不同高中的“圈外人”一年的学校生活展开。就像塔罗牌中微妙的大阿尔克纳牌一样，他们也被定义为以下几个标签：乐队极客、新新女孩、孤独者、游戏迷、书呆子；这个群体还包括一个“万人迷”女生和一位女同性恋老师，她们的观点会是一种有趣的补充，尽管她们的加入让人觉得多少有点拙劣。
她的这些处于青春期的人物常常向人们传送许多令人心酸的第一线报道。马克是一个被人疏远的游戏迷，外号“忧郁哥”，放弃学业建了一个相当成功的电子游戏玩家俱乐部，结果只能看着自己的努力被对情况一知半解的学校领导和无视他的同学毁于一旦。丹妮尔是一位孤独者，也曾是其同学建立的“我恨丹妮尔俱乐部”的吉祥物，最终退出了学校组织的夏季读书会，因为她试图向老师们推介比《暮光之城》更富有挑战性的书籍，结果失败了。书呆子伊莱，其母亲喋喋不休地要求他变得更“正常些”，他已被折磨得筋疲力尽，迫不及待地想到很远很远的地方上大学以逃离这一切。
教育者们也未能对所有这些社会丑态免疫。里根是一位无拘无束并深受学生喜爱的老师，她本来计划建立一个同性恋—异性恋联盟，却被一群爱搞帮派的同事恶意攻击并阻挠计划，她深感困扰。最终，她被迫完全放弃了公立学校系统。看到老师也显露出在高中生中盛行的破坏性恶习，实在让人不安。
在《极客》一书中，罗宾斯的报告似乎有很大部分都是二手资料。她所写的场景里充满了对话和细节，这些只可能是来自学生们的自述。然而她在讲叙这些故事时表现得无所不知，就像她亲眼目睹了一切。那些欺负马克的孩子们之中会不会有人自觉地说“忧郁哥，我以后不会再取笑你了”？也许吧。不过读者们也无法肯定。即使是消息来源可靠，这种自我报告也可能存有偏见。而对于青春期的细致观察也会造成感知的扭曲。罗宾斯在文中也承认说：“学生在他们同龄人的心目中，形象往往是夸张失实的。”但我们并不清楚她是否曾用其他有关人士的叙述去印证其书中人物的记忆，她也不可能一五一十地解释构建故事的过程。
我们无从预计书中的“极客”主角们将来会发生什么事情。他们将统治地球还是只有“一块小煤炭”到手？我们当然可以期盼最好的结果，但这并不是一份纵向研究。为了填补这个缺口，罗宾斯主要依赖于列举名人的故事，如妮可•基德曼、安吉丽娜•朱莉和瑞安•西克雷斯特，他们曾对《美国周刊》、《人物》和其他媒体讲述自己在高中时代是如何被人鄙弃的。把名人们搬出来作为成功的样板似乎反而更强化了罗宾斯在其结论中所嘲笑的“崇拜杂志名人、压制创新思想”的社会现象。
然而这些都不能打击她传播更广阔信息的热情。“成年人总是告诉学生们情况会好转，离开学校后世界就大不相同了，毕业后的某天‘特立独行’终会有回报，”她写道，“但是没有人向他们解释原因。”抛开这些陈词滥调，她说对了一点：孩子们需要明白青春期总会结束的。只是明白还不够，他们还需要相信这一点。
But someone forgot to post the memo in high school cafeterias and locker rooms across America, where the shift has barely 6)dented teenagers’ rigid social 7)hierarchies. The results are 8)disjunctive: while adolescent geekiness is something to 9)brag about in 10)hindsight, it’s much harder to embrace when you’re living through it, day after day, in the 11)crucible of high school.
As Alexandra Robbins writes in The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth, “There have been surprisingly few 12)trickle-down effects from the adult Age of the Nerd to the student world.” Bullying and 13)exclusion are 14)rampant. Pressure is building in schools to standardize not just testing, but students as well. When students 15)buckle under that weight, tragedies happen. Instead of inspiring redoubled efforts for tolerance and inclusion, such outcomes may narrow social norms even further, making classmates and teachers 16)hyperaware of students who are “different.”
Robbins’s mission is noble. She wants to push back against the 17)marginalization of 18)nonconformists, whom she calls the “cafeteria fringe.” She writes, “It is unacceptable that the system we rely on to develop children into well-adjusted, learned, cultured adults allows 19)drones to dominate and increasingly devalues freethinkers.”
Her fundamental argument is simple. Many of the traits that correlate with “outsider” status among high school students—originality, self-awareness, courage, 20)resilience, integrity and passion—reveal themselves as 21)assets later in life. (If you’re geeky enough to know the definition of “22)schadenfreude” as an 23)underclassman, you’ll probably get to experience that very feeling at a high school reunion one day.)
The teen-to-adult 24)turnabout theme isn’t particularly novel. One of its latest 25)incarnations is a forthcoming Warner Brothers film, Revenge of the Jocks, about middle-aged former athletes struggling under the yoke of the nerds, their onetime victims. Robbins 26)articulates the concept 27)crisply, however. She also gives a name to the phenomenon that points to the geeks’ eventual triumph: “28)quirk theory.”
Her narrative follows seven young “outsiders” at different high schools over the course of a year. They are defined by labels that could be the 29)major arcana in a 30)tarot deck of awkwardness: the Band Geek, the New Girl, the Loner, the Gamer, the Nerd; the group also includes a popular girl and a young 31)lesbian teacher, whose perspectives are an interesting addition, even if their inclusion feels somewhat 32)maladroit.
Her characters transmit often 33)heartrending 34)dispatches from the front lines of adolescence. Mark, an alienated gamer nicknamed Blue, ditches his schoolwork to build a wildly successful club for video game players, only to see his efforts 35)incinerated by ill-informed school administrators and 36)dismissive peers. Danielle, a loner and former 37)mascot of her classmates’ “I Hate Danielle Club,” ends up on her school’s summer reading committee, where she tries, and fails, to sell teachers on books more challenging than Twilight. Eli, a nerd, is worn down by pleas from his 38)haranguing mother to be more “normal.” He can’t wait to escape to a college far, far away.
Educators aren’t immune to all the social ugliness, either. Regan, a free-spirited teacher who is well loved by her students, is 39)tormented by 40)cliquish colleagues who bad-mouth her and 41)thwart her plans to form a gay-straight alliance. She’s finally driven to abandon the public school system altogether. It’s disturbing to see teachers exhibiting the same nasty, damaging habits that are so 42)endemic among high school students.
In Geeks, Robbins’s reporting seems to be largely secondhand. She writes scenes full of dialogues and details that could only have been recounted to her by the students themselves. Yet she tells these stories 43)omnisciently, as if she had witnessed each moment. Would one of Mark’s tormenters be self-aware enough to say, “Blue, I think I’m going to stop making fun of you”? Perhaps. But readers can’t know for sure. Even when sources mean well, self-¬reporting carries the risk of 44)bias. The microscope of adolescence also 45)inflicts 46)perceptual distortions. Robbins acknowledges as much, writing, “In the minds of their peers, too often students become 47)caricatures of themselves.” But it’s not clear whether she has 48)corroborated her characters’ recollections with accounts from the other people involved, and nowhere does she pull back the veil to explain her story-building process.
It’s impossible to tell what will happen to the main characters of Geeks. Will they inherit the Earth, or just 49)a lump of coal? We can hope for the best, of course, but this isn’t a 50)longitudinal study. To close this gap, Robbins relies primarily on accounts from celebrities like Nicole Kidman, Angelina Jolie and Ryan Seacrest, who have told 51)Us, People and other media outlets what outcasts they were in high school. Holding up celebrities as 52)templates for success seems to reinforce the same “magazine-celebrity worshipping, creativity-53)stifling society” that Robbins rightly 54)derides in her conclusion.
None of this, however, 55)dampens the urgency of her broader message. “Adults tell students that it gets better, that the world changes after school, that being ‘different’ will pay off sometime after graduation,” she writes. “But no one explains to them why.” Beyond the 56)bromides, she’s 57)dead on: teenagers need to hear that adolescence ends. And more than that, they need to believe it.
对于当代成年人来说，没有什么能比一句简单的自白“高中时的我就是个十足的怪人”（以一声颇具戏剧性的叹息来强调“十足”二字，然后再翻个白眼）更能展现自信、威名和真诚了。在今天看来，带着一副乐观的——并且是粗框的——眼镜来回望过去易如反掌。如今流行宣称自己过去并不受欢迎。随着怪人们的地位逐步提升，一种崭新的世界秩序在我们眼前徐徐展开。
但是有人忘记在全美国的高中餐厅和衣帽间里贴上这样的便签。在那里，这种转变几乎无法削弱青少年中间森严的社会分级。于是造就了两种结果：回想起来，青春期的怪人生活可以是日后的吹嘘谈资，但当你正日复一日地过着这种水深火热的高中生活时，可就很难熬了。
就像亚历山德拉•罗宾斯在《极客理应成为地球的传承者》一书中写道，“令人惊奇的是，成人世界的怪才年代对于学生世界几乎没有造成什么潜移默化的影响。”恃强凌弱和排除异己的现象猖獗。学校里不但要求考试标准化，对学生的要求标准化的压力也日甚一日。当学生们被这种压力压垮时，悲剧就会发生。这样的结局并不能加倍鼓励人们更加宽容和包容，反而可能会使得社会准则变得更加狭隘，使得同学和老师更加警惕那些“特立独行”的学生。
罗宾斯的任务很神圣。她希望能够抵制那些被她称之为“饭堂边缘人”的不合群者所受到的排斥。她写道：“我们所依赖的、能够将孩子们培养成适应性强、博学而有教养的成年人的体制却被懒汉所把持，而自由思想者的地位却日渐下降，这是绝不容许的。”
她的基本论点非常简单。高中生中那些“圈外人”符合以下许多特点——有创造力、有自我意识、有勇气、达观、正直且有激情——这些在他们未来的人生中都是宝贵的财富。（如果你够另类，在大学低年级就知道“schadenfreude（幸灾乐祸）”的含义，那么将来某天在高中同学聚会上你也许就能体会到那种感觉。）
这种以少年到成年的转变为主题的作品并不新奇。最近的典型作品之一就是华纳兄弟公司即将上映的新片《运动员的复仇》，讲的是一群人到中年的前运动员在一群曾经饱受他们欺负的“怪人”的压迫下挣扎的故事。不过罗宾斯很清楚地表达了这一概念。她还为极客最终获胜这一现象起了个名字：“奇逆论”。
她的阐述围绕着七个来自于不同高中的“圈外人”一年的学校生活展开。就像塔罗牌中微妙的大阿尔克纳牌一样，他们也被定义为以下几个标签：乐队极客、新新女孩、孤独者、游戏迷、书呆子；这个群体还包括一个“万人迷”女生和一位女同性恋老师，她们的观点会是一种有趣的补充，尽管她们的加入让人觉得多少有点拙劣。
她的这些处于青春期的人物常常向人们传送许多令人心酸的第一线报道。马克是一个被人疏远的游戏迷，外号“忧郁哥”，放弃学业建了一个相当成功的电子游戏玩家俱乐部，结果只能看着自己的努力被对情况一知半解的学校领导和无视他的同学毁于一旦。丹妮尔是一位孤独者，也曾是其同学建立的“我恨丹妮尔俱乐部”的吉祥物，最终退出了学校组织的夏季读书会，因为她试图向老师们推介比《暮光之城》更富有挑战性的书籍，结果失败了。书呆子伊莱，其母亲喋喋不休地要求他变得更“正常些”，他已被折磨得筋疲力尽，迫不及待地想到很远很远的地方上大学以逃离这一切。
教育者们也未能对所有这些社会丑态免疫。里根是一位无拘无束并深受学生喜爱的老师，她本来计划建立一个同性恋—异性恋联盟，却被一群爱搞帮派的同事恶意攻击并阻挠计划，她深感困扰。最终，她被迫完全放弃了公立学校系统。看到老师也显露出在高中生中盛行的破坏性恶习，实在让人不安。
在《极客》一书中，罗宾斯的报告似乎有很大部分都是二手资料。她所写的场景里充满了对话和细节，这些只可能是来自学生们的自述。然而她在讲叙这些故事时表现得无所不知，就像她亲眼目睹了一切。那些欺负马克的孩子们之中会不会有人自觉地说“忧郁哥，我以后不会再取笑你了”？也许吧。不过读者们也无法肯定。即使是消息来源可靠，这种自我报告也可能存有偏见。而对于青春期的细致观察也会造成感知的扭曲。罗宾斯在文中也承认说：“学生在他们同龄人的心目中，形象往往是夸张失实的。”但我们并不清楚她是否曾用其他有关人士的叙述去印证其书中人物的记忆，她也不可能一五一十地解释构建故事的过程。
我们无从预计书中的“极客”主角们将来会发生什么事情。他们将统治地球还是只有“一块小煤炭”到手？我们当然可以期盼最好的结果，但这并不是一份纵向研究。为了填补这个缺口，罗宾斯主要依赖于列举名人的故事，如妮可•基德曼、安吉丽娜•朱莉和瑞安•西克雷斯特，他们曾对《美国周刊》、《人物》和其他媒体讲述自己在高中时代是如何被人鄙弃的。把名人们搬出来作为成功的样板似乎反而更强化了罗宾斯在其结论中所嘲笑的“崇拜杂志名人、压制创新思想”的社会现象。
然而这些都不能打击她传播更广阔信息的热情。“成年人总是告诉学生们情况会好转，离开学校后世界就大不相同了，毕业后的某天‘特立独行’终会有回报，”她写道，“但是没有人向他们解释原因。”抛开这些陈词滥调，她说对了一点：孩子们需要明白青春期总会结束的。只是明白还不够，他们还需要相信这一点。