Coping with cleverness

Homily preached at Eltham College on 9th May 2008 based on Ecclesiasticus xxxvii.21-30

What could possibly be worse
than getting
nought out of a hundred in a test?

There you are,
in your favourite lesson as your teacher
with all the venom of a king cobra
suffering from a liver problem
dishes out the test results.

Around you, your classmates groan,
“42 percent.”
“36 percent, my mum’ll kill me”
“27 percent, that’s not fair,
I worked really hard for that!”

Finally the fatal moment
as your test result is revealed.

Trembling slightly,
you brace yourself for the revelation.

It only takes a single fatal moment
before the grim reality hits you.

Sweating profusely, you groan audibly.

“100% Well done!”

[PAUSE]
Why should a 100% test result
produce such a reaction?

Well the answer’s obvious, isn’t it?

You got 100%
when everyone else struggled to get 50.

Worse than getting 0% in a test
is getting 100% a clear head and shoulders
above everyone else.

Now you have to hang your head in shame
as the word “boffin” is whispered
around the class.

You know that out on the field
your break-time is going to be turned
into a living hell
as you try to persuade your classmates
that you are one of them really,
and not the teacher’s pet.

It seems that you have a clear choice in life
—be clever or be popular.
Why does everyone hate clever people?

[PAUSE]

It’s true.

Look at how the clever people
are portrayed in films.

They’re either the mad professor
concocting a way to rule the world
using an army of killer underpants.

Or they are the reluctant ugly side-kick
with bad dress-sense,
thick glasses and bad teeth
helping out the hero and heroine
to solve a difficult problem that
they are just too popular to solve.

It’s the boffin who delivers
the solution to Spiderman
and immediately gets blown up just
after serving his purpose,
whilst Spiderman is hailed as a hero
and gets to snog Kirsten Dunst.

The boffin
never makes the end of the film,
never gets hailed as a hero
by the group of grateful villagers,
never gets the girl.

There’s The Big Bang Theory on Channel 4,
all about a group of men with more degrees
than the lads in Hollyoaks have girlfriends,
and fewer girlfriends
than the lads in Hollyoaks have degrees.
Most of you should know that this is called inverse proportion!

The number of girlfriends
is inversely proportional to the number
of brain-cells that you use!

This doesn’t answer the question:
why are brainy folk unpopular?

[PAUSE]

It’s fine to put up your hand
to answer a question in class.

You know the answer to a question,
and it gives you confidence that
you’re learning well.

However,
there is something vaguely disgusting
about the boy who,
upon hearing the question asked,
throws his arm up in the air
as if it has suddenly become
magnetically drawn
to the light bulb
and squeaks repeatedly
“me, me, me, ask me, sir”
like a newly emasculated parrot.

It’s often good to let this sort
hang like this for a while,
just on the off-chance that their arm comes off,
or they explode.


There’s also the suspicion about clever people.

After all, they use long words like “synecdoche”
and complicated rambling metaphors
that just pass over your head.

They make you feel small
for not knowing enough
about information that
you’re not interested in.

There’s that dreadful air of superiority as
if knowledge were the only thing that matters.

There’s something about a swot
that can make you feel small and uncomfortable.

They’re creepy.


Who in their right mind
would take pleasure in knowing that
the Earth is 150,000,000 kilometres
from the Sun?

Who cares that the word polygon
literally means many angles,
not many sides?
Who would want to know the difference
between a troll and an ogre?

It’s this obsession with pointless details
that make clever people irritating, isn’t it?

It’s best to avoid them as far as possible.

Let them alone with their equations,
and their sums and their 100%s in tests.


Wait!

Didn’t you just get 100% in a test
in your favourite subject?

You’re one of them aren’t you?

A swot!

[PAUSE]

It’s very clear that if you are at this school,
then you happen to have a great deal of potential.

You are clever,
whether you like it or not.

The issue is how you deal with that cleverness,
how you make the most of it.

You can indulge it by isolating yourself
with books and the internet
so that you become the insufferable class swot.

You can suppress it
so that you’ll have an easier time
with friends and “a life” but
you fail to do justice to your own ability
you fail to take pride in who you really are.


Or you can balance your life between learning.

The danger for the class swot
is that he becomes a show off,
who broadcasts his answers to the class
and unintentionally deprives people
of opportunities to show
how good they are at
solving a problem.

It’s the intellectual equivalence of becoming obese.

The danger for those
who want to be popular is that
they view learning as something
to run away from
and lose the opportunity
to become more skilful.

This is the intellectual equivalent of anorexia,
and it’s just as harmful.


The wise person realises
that cleverness is not something to be used
to bash people over the head
or force down their throats
but to contribute to society.
A wise person knows
when to shut up
so to let someone else have a go
at answering the difficult questions.

A wise person knows that
when someone gets 100% in a test
then it’s a sign that
they have the potential within them
to work hard, grow
and perhaps even
change the world for the better.

It isn’t the knowledge that’s important.

It’s what you do with it.

So how are you going to do justice
to your own intellectual brilliance
and allow others to do the same?

Is that a problem
you are clever enough to solve?