Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter series is considered a 'nightmare' by her classmates because she is a book-toting know it all. That is the reason why she has always been my favorite character in Harry Potter; she is basically me.

Ever since I passed the test to get into Manchester G.A.T.E. I have always been considered a nerd. And not the cute big glasses and suspenders type of nerd, but the kind that still wears old Manchester G.A.T.E. t-shirts when I'm in college. I mean Hermione is different because she doesn't click with the other kids in the romantic sense of being a book worm, she overcomes it quite quickly, her frizzy hair calms down, and she gets the guy in the end.

Now what I'm talking about is the type of nerd our society truly lacks in great quantities nowadays. I mean the people who learn everything you can about some subject because they find it interesting. When I was in the 3rd grade I learned about the Titanic, and for the next four years, I annoyed everyone I knew with my deep knowledge of the entire accident. Then the Titanic became King Henry VIII of England, and I am still annoying people with facts about him to this day.

But I am sad to say that those like me, who obsess with computer code or dinosaurs, or WWII, are vanishing, as we are replaced by the followers of Kim Kardashian, Miley Cyrus, and I can't even name a third one because I am so far out of the loop; when did subjects like history, mathematics, science, and English get replaced by tabloids, Facebook, and Twitter?

Better yet, when did we become a society where everyone "has" to go to college, yet these "students" can't spell properly when they post paragraph after paragraph of a rant on Facebook? I understand we live in a digital age where our computers do all of the spell checking for us, but is that really the best for us as individuals?

This subject really hits home for me. After spending three years at Manchester G.A.T.E., I went to Tenaya Middle School, rather than continuing on the G.A.T.E. track to Computech. I didn't want to ride the bus all the way down to Computech each day when Tenaya was right around the corner.

Tenaya was an enriching experience; there I was told to not read a book in my English class after my work was finished because "I should socialize in class, and not waste my time reading." I also learned that being a nerd is the fastest track to eating lunch in a classroom each day reading instead of conversing, and I also learned that my teachers were just as fed up with the lack of attention and care shown by my peers as I was.

My issue with my classmates in middle school and even today isn't that they are unintelligent, it's that they don't care to improve upon and expand the potential for knowledge that they all already possess. And that's the worst of it for me.

You don't have to aspire to be a doctor or a lawyer to be a smart human being, you just have to want to learn, about anything and everything really. I think true intelligence is not how much you know, but the desire to use what you know to continue to learn more.

If I could, I would instill my love for history, my journey to read anything I can get my hands on, and the wonderful feeling of closing my eyes and listening to the great works of Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky, Saint-Saens, and Mozart into everyone I meet. It's a lot easier to be a less gossip hungry person when you shift your focus from celebrity breakups to watching NOVA programs on the planets.

Everyone has something 'academic' that they love to think and talk about, and if we all worked on expanding that, our future generations would go from being "the ungrateful digital age kids who won't stop looking at their phones" to scholars, adventurers, and yes even "nerds."

I don't think our society, which prides itself on being accepting of everyone no matter how they look or think, should continue this persecution of the people who choose to put books before beers.

All this being said, I just wish things like the study of the Latin language, respect for fine art and theater, a love for calculus, and the application of physics would come back into our everyday realms of knowledge. There is something truly beautiful and nostalgic that happens inside when you learn about things of the past.

It's a deep connection to those who came before us, those who discovered gravity, those who told us about star-crossed lovers, and those who stood up for rights when standing up could have meant death. If we want to improve our society, I think our answers come from always wanting to learn more.

After all, Hermione Granger stood up for house elves and the rights of muggle-born wizards throughout the Harry Potter books, and she wouldn't have been able to do it without being smart about how to use her smarts. It's time to make smart cool again, after all, most of the characters we value in our books, movies, and plays are the ones with the brains.