picture from the Kindle Version
I finished the first book I started for our brain professional learning community (PLC), and will use it for grad school. The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth by Alexandra Robbins is a fascinating, scary, and real study on what marginalizing teens can do to their esteem, creativity, and innovation.
Robbins explains quirk theory as: the values and traits that cause a student to be excluded are the exact traits that others, outside the school setting and into adulthood, will love and respect.
She explores the motivation behind eight different students caught in the cafeteria fringe as they muster their way through high school. It is both horrifying and gratifying to watch these students battle, daily, to stand what Brene Brown calls their sacred ground.
The goal, clearly, is to start to break down the social stigma and recognize that cliques are cliques are cliques, but truth lies in the uniqueness of each individual. The best group dynamics are built with people who do not think the same and have different values because then they can creative and invent models that are the combination of their best – which in the land of industry, we are now calling that innovation.
We fall privy to it all the time, our comfort zones, our places of safety. We gravitate to those who DO think like us for validation, for love, and for respect. However, staying in this safety zone and allowing the differences between us and them to grow, actually stifles that which motivates our greatest self.
Robbins offers suggestions for students, parents, and administrators about how to support the cafeteria fringe and allow them to be who they are in a safe and welcoming environment. Mainly, we need to see our individuals as the person he or she is, and help him or her develop as their most authentic self.
Big task.
But an important one.
It is worth a read and a reread, for sure.
