<p>I’m not even talking about stereotypes. I was clearly considered the top boy at my school. There was another kid whose grades were almost as good as mine, but he was pretty universally considered far inferior to me as a student, because he was a STEM nerd type who didn’t participate in a lot of ECs, didn’t engage in community politics, didn’t drink or chase girls with the boys, and didn’t expose himself to butt-kickings by his academic inferiors on the athletic fields. He was a working-class Polish scholarship kid, so it wasn’t a question of ethnic stereotypes at all. Even the math and science teachers didn’t love him – they loved his intelligence and curiosity, but not his lack of manly virtues, and also what they saw as a lack of ambition to broaden himself.</p>
<p>They were wrong about him, by the way. He was shy, socially awkward, and easily intimidated, but he had a real soul. It took him a while to get that his teachers really wanted him to pay attention to some stuff he had been disregarding because it seemed dumb to him. </p>
<p>We were never really in competition for anything. He only wanted to go to a tech school, and one closer to home than MIT. But if we had been in competition, the school would have done backflips to make certain I won, so that students in the lower grades would know to act like I did, not like he did.</p>