Last night I was at a party for a good friend who had moved to California six years ago. I spent a fair amount of time talking to my friend's sixteen year old daughter - a beautiful, bubbly, musically talented blond. She was telling me how glad she was that she moved to California. I could tell she was popular at her high school. She said, ``I used to get teased so badly here.'' When I asked her why, she explained, ``I don't know. I was just a nerd.''
I looked at her and said, ``Julie, you weren't a nerd. You were ten! You were a darling, friendly, fun kid - always smiling, always happy to see you.'' I could tell my comments surprised her. She countered, ``Oh, I was such a nerd.'' I continued, ``No! I don't have that recollection of you. I didn't see you that way. You were so fun. You were a doll!''
I've been at USU almost eleven years - and have taught literally hundreds of students. In all of those students, I can only think of three that I didn't genuinely like. Even those three I probably could have found something to like. There is really a lot of good in people.
Sometimes I don't think we see ourselves clearly. This educational process tends to emphasize the points we have missed, the words we misspelled, the times the program didn't work. We tend to focus on the attributes we don't have, rather than what we do have. A good friend of mine says, ``Whenever you are complaining about all the things you don't have, take a minute to think of all the things you don't have that you don't want.'' Try it! It seems to help.
Whenever you are feeling like you are a nerd, find someone whom you trust and ask them how they see you. Tell them your adviser has asked that you create a file of impressions. Ask your mother, father, sister, best friend, high school teacher, and scout leader to take a few minutes and write down what your good attributes are, how they see you, what your potential is. I'll bet you will be surprised at what they tell you! We all have talents we don't know we have.
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye."
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
This document was generated using the LaTeX2HTML translator Version 96.1-h (September 30, 1996) Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, Nikos Drakos, Computer Based Learning Unit, University of Leeds.
The command line arguments were:
latex2html -split 0 nerd.
The translation was initiated by Vicki Allan on Sat Mar 14 08:17:01 MST 1998