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Comment by the_only_law | Hacker News Reader

I’ve always wondered how true those 80s coming of age movies where there’s a stark divide, between the nerds and jocks were. In my experience, school was never such a simple dichotomy, particularly in high school. On the other hand, I’ve heard a lot of crazy stories from people who were in school at the time, so I wouldn’t be particularly shocked.

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It feels that way to the nerds! But in fact most of the jocks are nearly as smart as the nerds, they just also play sports.

True, there’s a number of top athletes that are also top students. The level of discipline for some of them is remarkable.

I always found the class clowns to be surprisingly smart. I knew this one guy who was a total goof off who always came to class high as shit. I remember one time talking with him in the computer lab only to be surprised he wanted to talk about programming as he had been playing around with game engines for a little while.

There was another guy who was admittedly pretty funny, but I never heard him say anything serious in the entire years I knew him. Until one day, when I had started doing some freelancing work and he stopped by and talked to me about his own pursuits.

In my school, the football and basketball teams acted like those 80s movies, and I think they were essentially playing out the roles they saw portrayed in media. But swimming and track were very supportive, with nerds and jocks getting along well and some of the best performers being both the smartest and the fittest (more than myself in both regards tbqh.) What it taught me is that people can be strong, smart and compassionate all at the same time; life isn't like an RPG where you have to spec into one at the expense of the others.

For me, middle school was a bit more stratified, but particularly later in high school, I never felt much vitriol or division across such simple categories. I was mostly cool with everyone, without ever belonging to a particular group. I learned to adapt and “code switch” among different people pretty very well, which has also carried over to adulthood. Though I do admit it’s been pretty isolating.

Not being American, I always wondered if those movies were actually representative of American schools, because it wasn't at all like any school I had been to.

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