Here's a brand new website devoted to collecting stories of peer abuse in
the public schools. It looks like a good place for ostracized/misfit
"science nerds" to do a bit of healthy venting. Or at least to discover
that they're not alone.
In the days after the Littleton, Colorado massacre, the country went
on a panicked hunt the oddballs in High School, a profoundly ignorant
and unthinking response to a tragedy that left geeks, nerds,
non-conformists and the alienated in an even worse situation than
before. Stories all over the country embarked on witchunts that
amounted to little more than Geek Profiling. All weekend, after
Friday's column here, these voiceless kids -- invisible in media and
on TV talk shows and powerless in their own schools -- have been
e-mailing me with stories of what has happened to them in the past few
days. Here are some of those stories in their own words, with
gratitude and admiration for their courage in sending them. The big
story out of Littleton isn't about violence on the Internet, or
whether or not video games are turning out kids into killers. It's
about the fact that for some of the best, brightest and most
interesting kids, high school is a nightmare of exclusion, cruelty,
warped values and anger.