YACK on: Nerds
Grant Sanders

There’s been a whole lot of talk lately at www.yackon. com about kids and alcohol and drugs and parents and the police and the school. In case you missed it, there have been several alcohol and drug-related episodes on Nantucket recently that has focused the debate about how we as a community can better guide our kids so that they can still be teens, just not jailed, dead or disfigured teens.

One side feels that the parents are to blame for most of the problems we see in island teens. But while I’m sure that this is true for some kids, there are just as many with involved, attentive and intelligent parents who are dealing with these same problems. “Bad parenting” is often the scapegoat for those who have either never been parents, or who are too lazy to dig deeper to understand the real issues.

The other side feels that the reason our youth are in crisis is because there’s just not enough to keep them occupied here. They need a positive social outlet that will allow them to build positive behaviors that can push the negative behaviors aside. Still, while the saying, “idle hands are the devil’s tools” may have some truth in it, there’s only so much we can do as a community to occupy our teens. We are not, after all, cruise directors.

What’s needed here is a better analysis of the situation. Let’s take a look at these kids and see if there is a common thread. Are they all student athletes? No, but clearly some are. Are they all “popular” kids? Not really, but many are. Are they all chronic “problem” kids? No again. In fact, many are just plain regular teenagers.

The truth of the matter is there is no common theme that defines who these partying, drinking, drugtaking kids are. But I can sure as heck tell you what they aren’t:

Nerds. That’s right. The entire island population of nerds, geeks, dweebs and dorks are completely drug, alcohol and trouble free. Why is that? Several reasons. For one, nerds usually don’t get invited to parties. And when they do, they decline politely because they either have some massive community service project to complete, or they would rather be busy at home studying calculus for fun.

Nerds never use illegal drugs, or alcohol because they have studied the effects of such substances on the central nervous system by conducting detailed doubleblind studies on rats and rhesus monkeys. Nerds never stay out all night worrying their moms and dads to death unless they inadvertently get locked inside the Atheneum after hours because the librarian did not see them behind the massive stack of books needed to write a term paper on famous women lumberjacks of the Ming Dynasty and their influence on the Industrial Revolution.

In fact, it’s safe to say that if all of the kids in our schools were nerds, geeks, dweebs and dorks, every parent on this island could breathe a huge sigh of relief because there would be virtually no rowdy parties, no underage drinking, and no late-night calls from the police asking them to come down to the station.

I should know. I am a former teen nerd who never once got in trouble in high school. While all of my classmates were hanging around the woods getting stoned and racing their junk cars, I was home designing a selfcontained biosphere that could sustain over 150 people for up to 40 years in case of nuclear attack (I won second place in the local science fair for that one. Debbie Cooney beat me out for first place with her exhibit on meal worm genetic mutations. Debbie Cooney also happened to be my date for the prom, and if we had stayed together and married, the resulting offspring would likely be Nobel laureates before the age of 11.)

“So,” you ask with a skeptical look on your face, “What’s the solution to the island’s teen drug and alcohol problem? Turn all the teens into dweebs?”

You catch on fast. First we abolish all things “cool” and “popular” in the schools, starting, of course, with sports. Get rid of football and lacrosse and field hockey and basketball. (We will save a fortune right there, by the way.) And in place of these “cool” sports, we increase the size of the chess team to 50. We offer afterschool symposia on the finer points of Keynesian macroeconomics and the mating habits of the ring-tailed lemur. We make extra credit theoretical physics compulsory.

Next we establish a dress code that all girls must wear drab colors, cat’s eye glasses, baggy clothes and never comb their hair so they may wear it down over their eyes obscuring their faces. Boys will be required to wear chinos that are two inches too short and a plaid shirt with a collar, the top button of which must by buttoned at all times.

Then we cover the walls of Nantucket high with pictures of great thinkers, philosophers, mathematicians and software company founders and after a while — say three years or so — being smart will actually become cool.

Finally, we make every class offered at Nantucket High School an advanced placement or grad-studentlevel college credit course. This raising of the bar will mean most of our kids will be too busy with homework to go to parties. It will also mean skyrocketing achievement and scholarship money awarded to Nantucket students of just over $2.3 billion. In this way, all Nantucket students will be able to attend the nation’s top colleges, tuition-free, earn fabulous degrees, and get jobs that will actually allow them, in time, to amass enough money to buy a house in the town in which they grew up. Imagine that.

Also imagine a town that once went nuts over Whaler football, chartering a boat to take 700 people to the Vineyard to cheer on our team in the inter-island geography bee.

Think about it folks. It’s worth a shot. Nerds, geeks, dweebs and dorks can save the day and make Nantucket a safe and wholesome community again. Really.

I’d bet my slide rule on it.

YACK on.

Grant Sanders is the host of YACK, the Nantucket Online Community at www.yackon.com. He had had a sip of beer in high school in 1979 and didn’t like it.

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