1. Are you sometimes so enthusiastic about your interests that you get carried away, and lose your self-consciousness in your passion for your subject?
2. Do you believe that people can be beautiful and smart at the same time?
3. Do you sometimes get interested in a book or a hobby that’s really difficult to get into, but you do it anyway because it seems like such a cool thing to learn?
4. Do you like precision or exactitude, maybe even so much that a right answer is an aesthetically pleasing experience?
5. Do you find tracking what’s fashionable just a teensy bit boring?
6. Do you admire people who are very knowledgeable even if their topic is a little arcane?
7. Don't you just love the word “arcane”?
8. Do you enjoy vivid imaginative accounts of alternatives to mundane reality?
9. Are you comfortable with the fact that Harry Potter wears big spectacles and is also a big athletic hero?
10. Do you find anti-intellectualism just a little bit….stupid?
If you answered yes to all of the above, award yourself 100 points. You win! You are a big fat cool American post-nerd. You are totally comfortable with yourself because you have finally moved beyond the ridiculous social categories of middle school! If you scored less than 100, however, or even if you did score 100 but have friends who are still living in the Dark Ages, you need to read my new book, NERDS: WHO THEY ARE AND WHY WE NEED MORE OF THEM.
NERDS came out in print on Dec 27 2007. Since then I have been doing radio interviews and book signings, answering lots of questions about my take on nerds. If you want to contact me about the new book, or wish to schedule an appearance, please go to the contact page.
COMING SOON: I will be doing a reading/signing at the famous Northshire Bookstore, Manchester, Vermont, on Thursday May 15 at 7 pm. Hope to see you there!
NERDS: WHO THEY ARE AND WHY WE NEED MORE OF THEM
A lively, thought-provoking book that zeros in on the timely issue of how anti-intellectualism is bad for our children and even worse for America.
Why are our children so terrified to be called "nerds"? And what is the cost of this rising tide of anti-intellectualism to both our children and our nation? In Nerds, family psychotherapist and psychology professor David Anderegg examines why science and engineering have become socially poisonous disciplines, why adults wink at the derision of "nerdy" kids, and what we can do to prepare our children to succeed in an increasingly high-tech world. Using education research, psychological theory, and interviews with nerdy and non-nerdy kids alike, Anderegg argues that we stand in dire need of turning around the big dumb ship of American society to prepare rising generations to compete in the global marketplace.
"In this intriguing treatise, child therapist and psychology professor Anderegg takes a wry and well-rounded look at the legacy of everyone’s (least) favorite schoolyard epithet, getting deep into the history of an idea as well as the nuts and bolts of childhood 'stereotype acquisition.' Beginning with a 'Field Guide to Nerds' ('or Why Nerds are So Gay'), Anderegg considers typical nerd traits (and includes a 'Nerd Test' copied from 'Deluxe NERD Glasses' package copy), parses out the subtle but important differences between 'nerd' (emphasizing appearance) and 'geek' (emphasizing intelligence), looks at the cultural history and rising profile of American anti-intellectualism, from Ichabod Crane and Ralph Waldo Emerson to Seinfeld and Beauty and the Geek, as well as more recent developments in nerd-related medical diagnoses like autism and Asperger’s. Knowledgeable, charming and self-deprecating throughout, Anderegg is at his best when discussing the specific cases of children he’s worked with, but readers should be happy to tag along as he occasionally wanders off point."
Washington Post, 1/1/08:
Ridicule That's Getting On Our Nerds
By Rachel Hartigan Shea, deputy editor of Book World Tuesday, January 1, 2008; Page C03
On this New Year's Day, spare a thought for the hapless nerd. Clad in too-short, too-tight pants, armed with a pocket protector, glasses firmly taped together and pimples unpopped, the nerds of this nation most likely rang in the New Year with a rousing game of World of Warcraft. They probably didn't even hear the ball drop at midnight.
That is, if there really is such a thing as a nerd. Have you ever actually seen someone wearing a pocket protector? (Where would you even buy one?) And too-short, too-tight pants are the uniform of male fashionistas, not physics majors. As for pimples, well, nobody's pores are perfect.
Nevertheless, the stereotype of the nerd persists -- dangerously so, argues David Anderegg in "Nerds." Indeed, nerds are just about the last group of people it's safe to mock in polite company, which infuriates Anderegg, a professor of psychology at Bennington College in Vermont and a practicing psychotherapist: "We act like it's all in good fun to communicate to our kids that people who are smart and do well in school and like science fiction and computers are also people who smell bad and look ugly and are so repulsive that they are not allowed to have girlfriends. And then we wonder why it's so hard to motivate kids to do well in school." In his breezy book, Anderegg deconstructs the stereotype, traces its history and makes the case that it undermines individual kids and the country as whole….
So why is a stereotype born of the 19th century so insidious in the 21st? Anderegg lays out a few persuasive reasons. For one thing, the transformation of Emerson and Irving's effete intellectual into the socially awkward, technological whiz reflects our anxiety about how, these days, "the direction of material success as well as power is all on the side of nerds and geeks." One only need look to billionaire Bill Gates, whom Anderegg calls "Nerd Exhibit A." More troubling, though, is that "in a hypersexualized culture," kids, even young ones, denigrate anything that might be viewed as unsexy; nerds and math and science are decidedly unsexy.
Anderegg sprinkles "Nerds" with accounts of conversations he's had with some of his young patients, and it is in these snippets that readers get a sense of how empathetic he is with the children labeled as nerds and even the children doing the labeling. When an elementary school student admits that her new glasses have meant social death -- a crisis that's causing her to get physically sick -- he gently advises her mother to get contacts to help her fit in. He does the same for a middle-schooler whose habit of wearing sweat pants has given his classmates reason to torment him; Anderegg tells the kid's mother to buy the poor boy some jeans just to give him a fighting chance. And when another mother worries about her son's dropping grades in science, while proudly explaining that he's not a nerd, Anderegg delicately points out that she can't mock the kids who do well in that subject and still expect her son to get A's.
Anderegg points out that there's very little research on what effect the nerd stereotype has on how kids learn and interact… And one may quibble with his narrow definition of the subspecies, as someone who is interested just in science and math. At my middle school (in Nevada, grant you, one of the prouder bastions of anti-intellectualism) anyone who showed enthusiasm for any sort of learning was labeled (or feared being labeled) a nerd. But Anderegg's clear-eyed look at a damaging cultural truism does nerds and jocks -- all Americans, really -- a service.
And so, I say, in the spirit of the New Year, let us all make a resolution to uplift nerds, rather than cut them down. We may all have a little nerd inside us, struggling to be free.
The Economist, week of Jan. 10:
“AND then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo, and bring back an It-Kutch, a Preep, and a Proo, a Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker, too!” That typically nifty passage comes from Dr Seuss's “If I Ran the Zoo”. The book was published in 1950 and contains the first use of the word “nerd”. How very unfortunate that Dr Seuss, whose verbal pyrotechnics have given so much pleasure to so many children, should also have given them, however innocently, the ghastly label “nerd”.
The precise meaning of the word (in its post-Seuss sense) is hard to pin down, as David Anderegg, a child psychologist and academic, argues in this thoughtful and warmly sympathetic book. It denotes a bundle of different qualities: “some combination of school success, interest in precision, unselfconsciousness, closeness to adults and interest in fantasy.”
But the word is no less powerful for its vagueness. Children intuitively understand what a nerd is, with terrible clarity. The bottom line, Mr Anderegg reckons, is that American kids grow up knowing that “nerds are bad and jocks are good”. (His focus is exclusively American: in many other countries academically high-achieving children are revered by their peers.) And this matters because these stereotypes become the basis for choices that children make about their identity and future.
Boston Herald, January 27, 2008:
Once in a blue moon a book comes along that makes us want to shout from the housetops, “You’ve got to read this book!”
The book is “Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them,” by David Anderegg, a Lenox psychotherapist who teaches psychology at Bennington College in Vermont. A more moving defense of “nerds” (and “geeks”) would be hard to find.
Anderegg unloads on a confused culture: “Nerds are kids who are too goody-goody, like Boy Scouts, but they are also weird and sick, like kids with Asperger’s syndrome who murder their classmates. Nerds are too interested in details and arcane knowledge, except when those details are about something like fantasy football. It’s no wonder kids are confused.”
It should go without saying that stereotypes have little truth. For instance, Asperger’s is a well-defined, rare disorder of socialization that has almost nothing to do with kids who get labeled nerds.
Middle-school kids lashing out at some of their classmates are using themes that go back to the early 19th century in the United States (and little known elsewhere).
Anderegg finds that many parents fight heroically over inessentials. If your seventh-grader is teased for wearing sweat pants when all the other kids wear jeans, for crying out loud get the kid some jeans. An editorial can hardly do justice to the many insights of the book (for instance, “nerd vs. jock” is a bad way to think about the Bush-Gore 2000 election campaign). But one, an alleged link between nerdiness and mathematical ability, bears on the nation’s dreadful math knowledge and declining college enrollments in engineering and science.
“Why would you publicly participate in something that would get you labeled as a nerd if you can choose not to? You choose not to do well in math,” is the way Anderegg puts it.
For English majors it’s never too late to apply to law school, “but choosing to be a scientist or engineer may be more like choosing to be a performing musician. You need to start a lot earlier than college in order to succeed.” Curriculum reformers must take this into account if our students are to rise from math mediocrity.
