Geek Salvation

 

For the first few days of student teaching, I was routinely shocked by how student-like the teachers were. When no one below the age of eighteen is in the room, they swear and call each other by their first names and gossip and procrastinate. Maybe those aren’t distinctly student-like behaviors, though; they’re traits so common you’d find them in nearly any profession. Aside from my parents, teachers were the only grown-ups I interacted with daily, so I grew up subconsciously expecting that everyone grew into the kind of baseline formality that even the most open teacher has around students. Now that I’m grown up enough, I’m constantly surprised to see that it was an act all along. I’d heard that adults were human from countless sources, but I’d never really believed it.

With all these thoughts of teachers and high school and growing up, I keep returning to this one scene in the last episode of Freaks and Geeks, where the AV club teacher breaks down how growing up works to all the nerds. First he graphs the lives of their popular classmates with his hand: sports heroism and friends build to a high point around senior year, then wobble and crash once their charisma and strength can’t cover up their bad work ethics any longer. Next he graphs the years of isolation and sadness that the geeks will endure, all turning around in college where their intelligence wins them wealth and admiration. The dialogue, the score, and the subtle choreography of the teacher’s mimed graphs all make the scene intensely satisfying and hard to disbelieve.

Because it was set in the place and era when they went to high school, my parents waived their usual censorship and let my sister and I watch Freaks and Geeks in elementary school. I don’t remember much of that first watch-through and probably didn’t understand much to begin with, since I quickly gave up trying to decipher all the innuendos and archaic references embedded in the dialogue. But I understood every word of that scene one scene with the AV club, and took it as creed, because it put something to words that I’d been noticing throughout all sorts of my favorite stories: that the heroes were always despised and forgotten, and they always won everything in the end. Ergo, if I wanted to be the hero or win anything, the best place to start out was to be as miserable as possible.

I had a great childhood, but if you’d asked me about it at the time, I would’ve responded with loads of self-pity. Sometimes I passed the time just mentally repeating all the unfairnesses of my life: being the least popular kid in my class (not that it says much in a class of seven), being a weak and skinny boy (not that I had any interest in sports outside running), being bullied (which mostly meant being excluded from activities I didn’t really want to do anyway). And I would feel so joyful thinking this, because to me all this misery was proof that I’d have anything I ever wanted someday.

There’s an oddly religious tone to this idea of childhood suffering equaling adult happiness, a lot of it likely inspired by misinterpretations of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. What’s meant to be a comfort to sufferers becomes a celebration of suffering in this warped perspective, and salvation becomes adulthood. Which is stupid, both because adulthood is never certain and because the people who follow this train of logic usually don’t suffer much to begin with. Your stereotypical nerd is unpopular and unattractive, maybe, but also male, white, and either wealthy or well-educated enough to be wealthy soon. Despite all my self-pity, I had a loving family, a stable home, and more opportunities than I’d ever appreciate. From what I’ve seen, people who really suffer have either more dismal outlooks on the future or more active plans than just waiting for fate to take its course and even the scales.

The real irony is that I’m pretty sure the Freaks and Geeks scene that started it all is meant to be ironic. The teacher who tells them all this isn’t the fortune-five-hundred CEO that he guarantees they’ll all be. All we know about him, actually, is that he has a serious smoking addiction. The entire episode is actually about them learning to sympathize with burnout Daniel Disario, who believes he has no future to look forward to.

All this is to say that I’m starting to take a bit of a longer view on life. The freshmen I teach talk about college in hushed and awed tones. Maybe, if I find a chance to bring it up, I’ll point out that life continues well into college, and past it eventually, though I’m not sure they’ll listen. I sure didn’t.