Geek Status

There are four weeks left of school and my students are finally starting to appreciate me.

Honestly, it doesn’t usually take this long. Usually my charm is recognized by February…and here we are in mid-May.

Some of the girls are hovering near me saying that I don’t look like I’m in my fifties. This is their version of high praise..

..which I lap up readily.

I tell them my youthfulness comes from being around young people.

I also added that being around youth is why I’m so hip..

..and then I started flossing.

(Flossing as in the dance move, not dental hygiene my dear, unhip reader.)

I know it’s cliche for adults to do things to embarrass teenagers, but I have this innate desire to shatter unhelpful social norms. I like to model that being willing to look silly is a form of empowerment. One’s value does not hinge upon the perceptions of others.

There is this one dance move from a few years ago that I always wanted to master. I tried to show it to these girls and asked them to teach me. Now they were properly horrified. They knew the move. They call it Orange justice.

All day I tried to find a student who would teach me how to do the Orange justice move. Many knew how to do it. All of them refused.

‘I have taught you so many things this year and you can’t teach me this one thing?!’ I exclaimed.

They shook their heads apologetically. It was no longer on trend, they said.

It wasn’t that they were resistant to helping their teacher look even less cool by showing me an out-of-trend Fortnite dance; rather it was because it would involve them also being caught off-trend.

This is nuts.

I’ve found that being off-trend is liberating because you can’t be out if you were never in. I told the girls this but they looked at me dubiously.

Even when I was in fifth grade I grasped the concept that aspiring to be cool was a huge trap. Should you achieve the goal of coolness, you must now maintain being cool for the rest of your school days. You can’t snort when you laugh, walk into furniture, not know the answer, laugh milk out of your nose, fart or get turned down. Ever again.

It’s just too much pressure.

So in fifth grade I drew a band of creatures and named them ‘The Geeks’ and the irony was that the Geeks became on trend.

Dina and Rina were dating those twin brothers…Deeter & Skeeter?

Fifth grade was so cool because I could pretty much get away with just being myself. I colored some paper dog ears and taped them to my hair-band and went to school. Someone asked what I was and I said ‘Scooby Doo’ and they nodded their head in acceptance of this.

I was an original furry.

This also does not impress my students.

In eighth grade, a peer said to me ‘I used to think you were popular before we became friends.’

I knew exactly what she meant, having experienced this phenomenon myself.

I had an epiphany and said to my friends ‘Popularity is when we think someone is better than us because we haven’t gotten to know them yet! We’re actually all equal! There is no popular!’

There was a silent moment where my friends looked at me and then they resumed talking about ‘the popular girls’.

Ahead of my time, I guess.

Students and Staff tend to use the term ‘popular’ when they really mean ‘socially powerful’. Oftentimes, the kids with the most social power are the least liked kids in the school, which is literally the opposite of what the word popular means.

One of the best things that ever happened to my school was when my friend Lucas started our school’s weekly news program. He chooses an upstanding group of students to be the anchors, tells them to ‘embrace the cringe’ and be their wacky selves in front of the camera. And they do. It totally resets the notion of what is cool- away from expensive clothes and snotty attitudes and towards creativity, playfulness and inclusivity.

And now I realize..I bet someone on the news crew will teach me Orange justice.