length: 643 words 1.8 double spaced pages rating: red free i want to talk about the thing that strives many teens have to be popular in schools. The need to feel accepted by others in order to be the center of attention, and the need to be distinguished greatly from everyone else is a strong force that exposes itself to nearly all teens at school. We spend most of our years at school, and begin well known can almost seem to complete an emptyness that we feel. I do agree that we all have the need to feel wanted yet when is enough, enough? personally, i’ve seen many situations when the elevation of popularity brought upon many other issues. Popular students usally have to create a certain personality that is diverse from their own, and they must always have that particular personality all the time to keep up their prevalent focus from others. This can be usually seen as the popular athletic team captain or the optimistic cheerleader. During the process in becoming more recognized, some end up hurting others for their own means of reaching that point.

We would always hang out with eachother and we would await the day at which we were to enter high school together. When we finally reached high school, there where now a whole new group of people that were older than i. My friend was going against my other schoolmate, and before i knew it i was hurling the same insults as they were. I thought that if i could make someone look lower than i was, i would gain self confidence and become more popular. I couldn’t carry the baggage i had, knowing i had hurt someone who was close to me. There shouldn’t be a need to become popular, there may be a few benefits, but it never lasts for long. I find that the many ‘unpopular’ students in schools feel very content with how they are because they know that people are interested in them for who they really are, and they don’t have to put on a ‘face’ for anyone.

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It is better to have someone who likes you for who you are then going around pretending to be something you aren’t. The task to becoming popular should not be an act of the fake fun loving cheerleader or the strong athlete. The journey down the tree is harder since the branches you once had to lean on you had broke on the way up.

Rather it includes having faith in who you are, those that realise just how great you are, are the only people that matter. One dosen’t have to be the center of attention to be the center of few people’s hearts. 23 feb 2016 i came across a fascinating essay that starts with the question of why smart kids are, on average, low status in the high school environment.

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The short answer is that being popular in that environment is a full time job, and smart kids, even if they want to be popular, want to do other things as well. The author goes on to make quite a lot of interesting, perceptive, and disturbing points about how children are brought up. One sample: what bothers me is not that the kids are kept in prisons, but that a they aren't told about it, and b the prisons are run mostly by the inmates. Kids are sent off to spend six years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who run after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. And another: in my high school french class we were supposed to read hugo's les miserables. i don't think any of us knew french well enough to make our way through this enormous book. February 2003 when we were in junior high school, my friend rich and i made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity.

This was easy to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same popularity. E tables contained the kids with mild cases of down's syndrome, what in the language of the time we called retards. We sat at a d table, as low as you could get without looking physically different.

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Puberty finally arrived i became a decent soccer player i started a scandalous underground newspaper. 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. The mere fact is so overwhelming that it may seem strange to imagine that it could be any other way. But in a typical american secondary school, being smart is likely to make your life difficult. Why don't smart kids make themselves popular? if they're so smart, why don't they figure out how popularity works and beat the system, just as they do for standardized tests? one argument says that this would be impossible, that the smart kids are unpopular because the other kids envy them for being smart, and nothing they could do could make them popular.

If the other kids in junior high school envied me, they did a great job of concealing it. And in any case, if being smart were really an enviable quality, the girls would have broken ranks. All other things being equal, they would have preferred to be on the smart side of average rather than the dumb side, but intelligence counted far less than, say, physical appearance, charisma, or athletic ability. So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? the answer, i think, is that they don't really want to be popular. Being unpopular in school makes kids miserable, some of them so miserable that they commit suicide.

Telling me that i didn't want to be popular would have seemed like telling someone dying of thirst in a desert that he didn't want a glass of water. Not simply to do well in school, though that counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. At the time i never tried to separate my wants and weigh them against one another. If someone had offered me the chance to be the most popular kid in school, but only at the price of being of average intelligence humor me here , i wouldn't have taken it. Even for someone in the eightieth percentile assuming, as everyone seemed to then, that intelligence is a scalar , who wouldn't drop thirty points in exchange for being loved and admired by everyone? and that, i think, is the root of the problem.

And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an american secondary school. Alberti, arguably the archetype of the renaissance man, writes that no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it. I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than american school kids work at popularity. An american teenager may work at being popular every waking hour, 365 days a year. Some of them truly are little machiavellis, but what i really mean here is that teenagers are always on duty as conformists. Other kids' opinions become their definition of right, not just for clothes, but for almost everything they do, right down to the way they walk.