Social/Emotional Needs: Nerds and Geeks: Society’s Evolving Stereotypes of Our Students With Gifts and Talents

Tracy L. Cross

Over the past 25 years, my colleagues and I have conducted research into the experiences of our students with gifts and talents, particularly those in school. We have written many papers and even a couple of books describing these students’ lives and how they live them. An obvious part of their experience can be reflected in the stereotypes used in society to describe these children. The two most common ones are nerd and geek. When we first started interviewing gifted students about these terms in 1982, we found that both terms had very negative ramifications in the gifted students’ perceptions. For example, nerds were generally considered as socially inadequate, shy or overbearing, smart, and perhaps too smart as we learned later in our studies. Nerds were also perceived as being very focused on academic endeavors, physically weak, uninteresting, unnecessary to society, and ultimately undesirable. Generally speaking, all these things might be categorized under the heading of feeling abhorrent, which was the way most of these students described their experience of being gifted.

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